By David Bullock
The seventh manned flight and the twenty-fifth flight for the New Shepherd launch vehicle has been announced today. The six person crew includes Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller, Gopi Thotakura, and former Air Force Captain Ed Dwight. A date for liftoff has not been chosen yet.
Dwight, who was selected by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as the nation’s first Black astronaut candidate but was never granted the opportunity to fly to space. Outside of his many aerospace accomplishments, for the past five decades he created, “large-scale monuments of iconic Black figures, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, among many others. His more than 130 public works are installed in museums and public spaces across the U.S. and Canada,” according to a Blue Origin press release.
Angel is the founder of Industrious Ventures, a venture capital fund. Chiron founded the Brasserie Mont Blanc, one of the largest craft breweries in France. Hess, a software engineer and entrepreneur shaped today’s technology-based family history industry when he developed the Family Tree Maker product line in the 1990s. That product was bought by Ancestry.com.
Schaller, a retired CPA, was told by her doctor in 2017 that she would likely go blind. Since then, she has traveled to twenty-five countries around the world, visited Mount Everest Base Camp, trekked to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Uganda to see mountain gorillas, visited the South Pole, and camped in a tent in the desolate Antarctic plain at -20 degrees.
Thotakura is co-founder of Preserve Life Corp, a global center for holistic wellness and applied health located near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and has served as an international medical jet pilot.
The Blue Origin press release continued to talk about the benefits of the mission besides space tourism, “Each astronaut will carry a postcard to space on behalf of Blue Origin’s foundation, Club for the Future. This program gives students access to space on Blue Origin’s rockets, including an all-digital method to create and send postcards, which can be found here. The Club’s mission is to inspire and mobilize future generations to pursue careers in STEAM for the benefit of Earth.”
The release continued, “From an environmental standpoint, nearly 99% of New Shepard’s dry mass is reused, including the booster, capsule, engine, landing gear, and parachutes. New Shepard’s engine is fueled by highly efficient liquid oxygen and hydrogen. During flight, the only byproduct is water vapor with no carbon emissions.”