The second Brazilian to go to space should make his short, but historic, trip this Saturday (4). It’s for when the Blue Origin company scheduled the flight of its NS-21 mission, the company’s fifth to take humans beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
Production engineer from Minas Gerais Victor Correa Hespanha, 28, will be on board thanks to a raffle conducted among investors from the company Crypto Space Agency, which purchased the ticket. The company trades NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), something like a unique property that only exists in the virtual world.
He will occupy one of two seats in the New Shepard vehicle intended for passengers who have not paid for their own flight. In addition to Crypto, which paid for the trip from Spain, one of the places was acquired by the NGO Space for Humanity, which is taking to space Katya Echazarreta, an engineer who has worked on NASA missions and is expected to become the first Mexican-born woman to leave Earth—albeit for a short time.
The take-off window is due to open at 10 am (GMT), and the rocket will depart from Blue Origin’s operations center in West Texas (USA). That’s if the weather and launch systems allow.
The flight had originally been scheduled for May 20, but was postponed for technical reasons. Blue Origin said in a statement: “During final vehicle checks, we observed that one of the New Shepard’s reservation systems was not meeting our performance expectations.” As a result, out of excessive caution, they decided to postpone it, rescheduling it to this Saturday.
The New Shepard vehicle is intended for suborbital missions. It is a capsule that, propelled by a single-stage rocket, is taken to the edge of space, crossing the so-called Kármán Line, at an altitude of 100 km. Without enough speed to reach Earth orbit, the capsule then returns to the ground, in a parabolic flight, and lands with the help of parachutes and retro-propulsion. On this journey, its occupants have the opportunity to observe the curvature of the Earth as seen from space through one of the six large windows on board, as well as to experience about three minutes of weightlessness, floating around the cabin.
The flight profile reproduces that performed by the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, in May 1961. It is from him, by the way, that the name of the capsule-rocket pair comes from.
Alongside Hespanha and Echazarreta, the engineer and investor Evan Dick (on his second tour of New Shepard, after having flown on NS-19, in December 2021), the aviation entrepreneur and pilot Hamish Harding, real estate developer Jaison Robinson and investor Victor Vescovo.
For the Brazilian Hespanha, it is a new and unexpected experience. “I don’t think I’ll ever feel ready until I’m on board and the rocket is taking off,” he says. “My family is very anxious, as am I. Everyone is excited and anxious. Like many Brazilian children, I’ve dreamed of being an astronaut.”
Upon completion of the flight, he will be the second Brazilian to have gone into space, after astronaut Marcos Pontes, who flew to the International Space Station in 2006. But they are two very different experiences; Spain will make a quick space tourism flight; Pontes spent ten days working in orbit for the Brazilian Space Agency.
COSTS AND ACCESS
The great novelty of missions like this one from Blue Origin is that the possibility of going to space begins to open up to people who are not ultra-rich or professional astronauts in the service of governments. And the key to that is the ability to reuse vehicles.
In contrast to old rockets (and even most new ones), the New Shepard is fully reusable. The capsule is recovered and retreaded for further flights, as is the launcher, a single-stage engine powered by liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The combustion results in the emission of water into the atmosphere, and the engine restarts close to the ground for a smooth landing.
The tendency is that the frequent reuse, as well as the recovery of the initial investments in the development of the vehicle, will end up bringing down prices and making the space adventure accessible to more people.
Currently, Blue Origin does not advertise how much each ticket sells for. In 2021, the company held an auction to sell its first ticket and fetched it for $28 million. The high price reflected the originality more than the actual value of the flight, and the auction helped the company raise other potential buyers, who were sought out for subsequent sales. A new auction held in May of this year sold another seat for $8 million — which reflects the drop in prices, but is still quite expensive.
For comparison, Blue Origin’s main competitor in manned suborbital flights is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. It offers flight reservations at $450,000 per seat, but has only flown one full-cabin mission on July 11, 2021, and is not expected to fly again until next year.
Blue Origin performed its first manned flight nine days later, carrying company owner Jeff Bezos alongside brother Mark, aviator Wally Funk and student Oliver Daemen. But after that, it never stopped flying. Two other flights were carried out in 2021, the first with four crew members (including Canadian actor William Shatner, 91, better known as Captain James T. Kirk, from the series “Star Trek”) and the second with six.
In 2022, Flight NS-20 took six more people into space in March. With it, Blue Origin reached the mark of 20 people transported in space tourism flights. This is not something to be overlooked, as before the advent of companies capable of carrying out these missions, only about 400 people had flown into space.
With the completion of the NS-21 mission, the number of passengers transported briefly off Earth by Blue Origin is expected to rise to 25 (as Evan Dick goes on the second flight). The company still hopes to make more flights before the year ends.
