Six civilians just rode a 60-foot rocket 62 miles high, floated weightless, and came home in eleven minutes—opening another page in Bezos’s plan to make space normal.
At 9:30 a.m. ET on Jan. 22, Blue Origin’s NS-38 lifted off from Launch Site One in the West Texas desert, punching through clear skies with six paying customers tucked inside the gum-drop-shaped crew capsule. The flight lasted roughly 11 minutes, crossed the internationally recognized Kármán line at 62 miles, and ended under three red-and-white parachutes in a cloud of dust a couple of miles from the pad.
The successful hop brings the company’s human tally to 92 individuals on 17 crewed flights since Jeff Bezos himself inaugurated the program in July 2021. It also keeps Blue Origin on a cadence of quarterly tourist launches as it refines procedures for the much larger New Glenn orbital rocket waiting in Florida.
Who Flew on NS-38?
- Tim Drexler – former CEO of Ace Asphalt and a private pilot
- Linda Edwards – retired OB-GYN and breast-cancer survivor
- Alain Fernandez – international real-estate investor
- Alberto Gutiérrez – founder of global tour-guide platform Civitatis
- Jim Hendren – ex-U.S. Air Force colonel, F-15 pilot, former Arkansas state senator
- Laura Stiles – Blue Origin’s own director of New Shepard launch operations
Original passenger Andrew Yaffe, an Oklahoma businessman, withdrew two days before liftoff because of illness; the company says he will be reassigned to a future mission.
Ele Minutes of Pure Microgravity
Like every New Shepard outing, the mission was fully automated. After main-engine cutoff, the capsule separated and arced to an apogee of 351,000 ft—roughly 66 miles—giving the sextet three to four minutes to unstrap, tumble, and press smartphones against 3.5-ft-tall windows while Earth curved beneath them.
Below, the BE-3 booster reignited to slow its descent, deployed fins, and landed upright two miles north of the pad—re-use number nine for this particular first stage. Up high, drogue and main chutes spooled out, and retro-thrust expelled a final breath of air a second before touchdown, cushioning the capsule at 16 mph.
Price Tag: “If You Have to Ask …”
Blue Origin no longer publicizes seat prices, but a reservation form demands a $150,000 deposit. The 2021 auction that secured the first passenger slot closed at $28 million, and industry insiders peg current tickets between $1 million and $2 million depending on timing and payload mass.
The Strategic Backdrop: Tourism as R&D
Each suborbital hop doubles as a rehearsal for the much larger New Glenn booster, whose 322-foot stainless-steel body is being prepped for its third flight from Cape Canaveral later this year. While the rockets share only a name and corporate parent, Blue Origin uses tourist missions to refine life-support, crew-escape, and rapid-turnaround procedures that will feed into orbital cargo and crew programs competing directly with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
How to Watch the Next Launch
Blue Origin webcasts every New Shepard flight about 30 minutes before liftoff on its website and on X. The FAA files public advisories 48 hours in advance; backup dates are typically reserved for the following day in case of weather or technical holds.
Why This Matters
Suborbital tourism is no longer a headline-grabbing novelty—it is a predictable revenue stream that underwrites Blue Origin’s heavier ambitions: a lunar lander for NASA, a commercial space station with Sierra Space, and the Project Jarvis reusable upper stage meant to challenge Starship. Every smooth landing of a tourist capsule is another data point Bezos can show lawmakers and investors as he pursues multi-billion-dollar government contracts that will shape who controls the high ground of Earth orbit.
Meanwhile, the passenger list is slowly shifting from celebrities to professionals—engineers, doctors, even company insiders like Stiles—signaling that Blue Origin wants real operational experience, not just publicity. If cadence climbs and costs fall, the 11-minute ride could become a standard training qualification for longer orbital voyages, turning today’s joyriders into tomorrow’s colonists of O’Neill cylinders—the rotating habitats Bezos often cites as humanity’s off-world future.
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