The NS-21 mission, which will take the second Brazilian into space, Victor Correa Hespanha, is being broadcast live on the Blue Origin YouTube channel. Take-off is due to take place at 10:00 am (Brasilia time), and the entire trip is scheduled to take about ten minutes.
The broadcast, live from West Texas (USA), can be watched below.
Before Victor Hespanha, from Minas Gerais, the only Brazilian to go into space was Marcos Pontes, an astronaut who held the post of Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation from 2019 to 2022. Pontes, working for the Brazilian Space Agency, departed Earth on 30 December. March 2006 and stayed in space for ten days — eight of them on the International Space Station.
Hespanha is a 28 year old production engineer. The trip to space —historical and brief— takes place 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.
The Brazilian is part of yet another space tourism flight, an activity that has become a reality —expensive—thanks to the development of reusable rockets. The flight was originally supposed to take place on May 20, but was postponed for technical reasons.
In addition to the Hespanha seat, another seat in the New Shepard vehicle is intended for a passenger who did not pay for his own flight: engineer Katya Echazarreta. This place was acquired by the NGO Space for Humanity, which is taking the engineer who has worked on NASA missions into space and is expected to become the first Mexican-born woman to leave Earth.
The ship’s crew is complete with engineer and investor Evan Dick (on his second outing of New Shepard, after having flown NS-19 in December 2021), aviation entrepreneur and pilot Hamish Harding, real estate developer Jaison Robinson and investor Victor Vescovo.
Blue Origin, like Virgin Galactic, does suborbital flights, which basically take people just a little bit outside the Earth’s atmosphere — to the point where they experience microgravity and see Earth. After the capsule where the astronauts are at the maximum point, it begins to descend on the journey back to the ground, which is cushioned by a set of parachutes.
In addition to these two companies, SpaceX has also made a more complex and historic space tourism flight, carrying out the feat of putting the first mission composed entirely of civilians, Inspiration4, into Earth orbit.
