Production engineer Victor Correa Hespanha, 28, will be the second Brazilian to go into space. Not as a space agency astronaut, but as a tourist. The flight does not yet have a date, but it will take place this year, aboard a New Shepard capsule, from the American company Blue Origin, on the NS-21 mission, the fifth to take people.
Like the previous ones, it will be a suborbital trip. That is, instead of the spacecraft entering orbit, it reaches the edge of space, surpassing the limit of 100 km in height, and descends shortly thereafter. On the way, the capsule’s occupants experience about three minutes of weightlessness – the sensation of weightlessness.
Like previous missions, this one will depart from Blue Origin’s Texas hub. By this time, Jeff Bezos’ space company has taken 20 people to the edge of space. On the first manned flight, in July 2021, Bezos himself made the trip, accompanied by three other people. From the third mission with humans on board, the total number of passengers rose to six. Flight NS-21 will also carry a sextet.
With the flight, Hespanha will become the first Brazilian space tourist. Before him, only then astronaut Marcos Cesar Pontes, as a representative of the Brazilian Space Agency, had arrived in space, in 2006. On that occasion, Pontes carried out a work mission at the International Space Station, traveling aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. The Brazilian astronaut spent ten days in space.
PRIZE DRAW
Contrary to what one might imagine, Hespanha did not enter this as one of the tycoons to go to space. On the contrary, he was the winner of a lottery, after investing in an NFT (acronym for Non-Fungible Token), something like a unique property that only exists in the virtual world, from the Crypto Space Agency.
The investment would give the right to participate in a draw, and Hespanha was the winner. “I bought it thinking about the potential for appreciation, I never imagined that I would be drawn. I’m fulfilling a childhood dream through an NFT, the chip is still dropping”, he says.
The actual cost of the trip is not known, as Blue Origin does not currently have a list price per seat. They are traded individually.
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