Blue Origin launches 6 tourists to the edge of space, including a couple on their second flight

Jeff Bezos’ Blue origin launched six space tourists on a high-speed flight to the edge of space and back Friday, giving the passengers — including a man and a woman making their second flight — about three minutes of weightlessness and an otherworldly view before the capsule made a parachute descent to to land at the company’s West Texas flight facility.

Science popularizer and TV host Emily Calandrelli cried tears of elation after landing, telling an interviewer, “Oh my god, when we reached weightlessness, I immediately turned upside down and looked at the planet, and then there was so much blackness, there was so much space! I didn’t expect to see so much space!”

“And I kept saying, that’s our planet,” she added, wiping away tears. “That’s our planet. It was the same feeling I got when my children were born, and I thought, that’s my baby, that’s my baby. I had the same feeling when I first saw it. It was just beautiful .

Calandrelli, developer Marc Hagle and his wife Sharon, both making their second flight to New Shepard, and three other entrepreneurs — Austin Litteral, James Russell and Henry Wolfond — took off from Bezos’ sprawling ranch near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:30 a.m. EST. The crew capsule was accelerated to nearly three times the speed of sound and released to fly on its own about two and a half minutes after takeoff.

As the plane continued to fly upwards, passengers were able to break free and float around the cabin for approximately three minutes of weightlessness, taking in the view of the Earth below and space above from the largest windows ever built into a spacecraft .

“We hit MECO (main engine shutdown) and it was like BOOM! I’m not scared anymore!” Calandrelli said. “That kick in the pants from the (capsule-booster) separation is wild. It’s wild. I had to tell my brain, this is normal, this is expected, it should be a kick in the pants.”

The launch marked Blue Origin’s 28th New Shepard flight and its ninth with passengers on board. The company has now sent 47 people into space, including Bezos and three who have already flown twice. It’s not known how much Blue Origin is charging for a ticket, but the company says Litteral won its place in a competition sponsored by Whatnot, a livestream shopping platform.