PARIS – Blue Origin launched its third manned New Shepard suborbital mission on December 11, carrying six people on a brief flight to the edge of space.

The vehicle took off from NS-19 at 10:01 a.m. EST from the company’s Launch Site 1 in West Texas after winds delayed the launch by two days. The vehicle reached a maximum altitude of about 107 kilometers before landing just over 10 minutes after takeoff.

“We had a great flight today. This was our sixth flight in what has been a great year for the New Shepard program. We sent 14 astronauts into space, performed a NASA payload flight that tested moon landing sensors and performed our certification test flights, ”said Bob Smith, CEO of New Shepard, in a statement. The company said it was planning “several” New Shepard flights in 2022 carrying payloads and people.

The flight was New Shepard’s first to carry six people, the vehicle’s expected capacity. The first two crewed flights, NS-16 in July and NS-18 in October, carried four each. All six will be eligible for the Federal Aviation Administration’s astronaut wings, the last to be awarded by the agency after announcing on December 10 that it would withdraw the initiative at the end of the year.

Two of the six were guests of Blue Origin. Laura Shepard Churchley is the eldest daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American in space and in whose honor New Shepard is named. Michael Strahan is a former professional football player and currently television host. He provided updates on his flight training for ABC’s “Good Morning America”.

The other four were customers, paying undisclosed money to steal from the vehicle. Lane Bess is director and founder of Bess Ventures and Advisory, a family fund investing in technology companies. He previously helped start two cybersecurity companies, Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks. He is the father of Cameron Bess, a content creator, who will also be on the flight. The two are the first parent-child combination to go into space together.

Evan Dick is an investor and engineer who previously worked for DE Shaw – the same company Jeff Bezos had before he left to found Amazon.com – and Highbridge Capital Management. Dylan Taylor is Chairman and CEO of Voyager Space, which has acquired several space companies. He founded Space for Humanity, a non-profit organization that raises funds to sponsor flights to space for those who cannot afford to travel on their own.

Taylor said he would donate an amount of what he paid for the flight to other organizations, a move he called “buy one, give one” that he encouraged other private astronauts to adopt. These organizations include Space for Humanity as well as AstroAccess, an organization that deals with the inclusion of people with disabilities in space exploration; Edesia Nutrition, dedicated to solving malnutrition; and the Brooke Owens and Patti Grace Smith Fellowships.

“Commercial astronauts are expected to spend several hundred millions of dollars over the next five years and if they were all to help support an initiative on Earth, their impact could create accessible and diverse space exploration opportunities and advancements for it. ‘humanity here on Earth,’ said Taylor. wrote in a blog post.

The perception that commercial manned space flights only benefit the wealthy led a member of Congress to propose a tax on such flights. Immediately after New Shepard’s first crewed flight in July, Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) Announced plans to introduce the Carbon Emissions Protection Tax Act (SPACE), which would tax commercial flights human orbitals and suborbital.

“Space exploration is not a tax-free holiday for the rich. Just as normal Americans pay taxes when they buy plane tickets, billionaires who fly in space to produce nothing of scientific value should do the same, and then some, ”he said in a July 20 press release announcing his bill.

At the time, a spokesperson for Blumenauer said he planned to introduce the bill in the “coming weeks” after consulting with experts on how it should be structured. As of December 11, he had not introduced the bill and his office did not respond to a request for comment on the status of the bill on December 10.