Blue Origin flies thrill seekers to space after two year hiatus

Blue Origin is set to fly adventurers to the final frontier on Sunday for the first time in nearly two years, reigniting competition in the space tourism market after a rocket mishap put its crewed operations on hold.

Six people including Black sculptor and former Air Force pilot Ed Dwight, who was controversially spurned by Nasa's astronaut corps in the 1960s, will blast off at 8.52am local time (1352 GMT) from the Launch Site One base in west Texas, the company said on social media.

Dwight — at 90 years, 8 months and 10 days — is set to become the oldest person to go to space, narrowly pipping Star Trek actor William Shatner, who was almost two months younger when he launched with Blue Origin in 2021.

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Mission NS-25 is the seventh human flight for the enterprise owned and founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, who sees short jaunts on the New Shepard suborbital vehicle as a stepping stone to greater ambitions, including the development of a full-fledged heavy rocket and lunar lander.

"I was the first guy in the world to be famous for not doing something," Dwight joked ahead of launch."Needless to say, I'm overwhelmed."

To date, Blue Origin has flown 31 people aboard New Shepard — a small, fully reusable rocket system named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

The programme encountered a setback when a New Shepard rocket caught fire shortly after launch on September 12, 2022. The uncrewed capsule ejected in time, meaning astronauts would have been safe had they flown.

A federal investigation revealed an overheating engine nozzle was at fault. Blue Origin took corrective steps and carried out a successful uncrewed launch in December 2023, paving the way for Sunday's mission.

After lift-off, the sleek and roomy capsule separates from the booster, which produces zero carbon emissions. The rocket performs a precision vertical landing.

As the spaceship soars beyond the Karman Line, the internationally recognised boundary of space 100 kilometres above sea level, passengers can marvel at the Earth's curvature and unbuckle their seats to float — or even perform jumping jacks — during a few minutes of weightlessness.

The capsule then reenters the atmosphere, deploying its parachutes for a gentle desert landing in a puff of sand.

Bezos himself was on the programme's first ever crewed flight in 2021. A few months later, Shatner blurred the lines between science fiction and reality when he became the world's oldest ever astronaut, decades after he first played a space traveller.

Dwight will become only the second nonagenarian to venture beyond Earth.

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