Blue Origin’s fifth space tourism flight, which was scheduled to take place on Friday with six passengers on board, will be postponed after final checks on the New Shepard rocket revealed an anomaly, the company announced on Wednesday.
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“During our final checks of the vehicle, we observed that one of New Shepard’s redundant systems did not perform as expected,” billionaire Jeff Bezos’ company said, without giving further details. “As a precaution, we will postpone the takeoff.”
No new date has yet been announced.
Take-off must be from West Texas.
The crew must notably include the first woman born in Mexico to go into space, Katya Echazarreta, who at 26 will become the youngest American to cross the final frontier. This engineer was commissioned by a program aimed at democratizing space, “Space for Humanity”.
The price paid by space tourists for the trip, which only lasts about ten minutes in total, is not known.
Jeff Bezos had himself participated in the first manned flight of the New Shepard rocket in July 2021. Since then, the machine has also transported the actor playing the iconic Captain Kirk of the Star Trek series, William Shatner.
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