European Space Agency engineer Michaela Benthaus is carried from the capsule door of a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket after landing in Texas. PHOTO: VIA REUTERS
The flight took off about 9.15am ET and the capsule landed roughly 11 minutes later in West Texas.
The launch marked the 16th human spaceflight for Bezos’ tourism company using New Shepard, a small craft built to send people on short trips to the edge of space, as well as to conduct research missions.
The passengers included Michaela Benthaus, an aerospace engineer at the European Space Agency who was injured in a mountain-biking accident in 2018, and Hans Koenigsmann, who worked at SpaceX for two decades, most recently as the company’s vice-president of avionics.
Blue Origin does not disclose its price for tourism flights but Virgin Galactic charges about $US600,000 ($NZ1.02 million) for a similar experience. — Bloomberg News
