Blue Origin to launch youngest woman across the Kármán Line

Blue Origin announced Wednesday its crew for the NS-26 missions. On board will be several high achieving and and lucky individuals that will get the chance to fly and feel weightlessness above the Karman Line. One of the crew members, a daughter of a previous participant, will become the youngest woman to reach 100 km.

New Shepard, Blue Origin’s suborbital and fully reusable rocket, has flown 26 times, given this mission’s name. This will be the company’s seventh crewed flight and fifth time breaking an age record on a flight.

Blue Origin NS-26 Crew

• Nicolina Elrick
• Rob Ferl
• Eugene Grin
• Dr. Eiman Jahangir
• Karsen Kitchen
• Ephraim Rabin

Karen Kitchen, daughter of previous New Shepard customer Jim Kitchen, is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is studying communications and astronomy. An advocate in getting women to pursue a career in the space industry, this will be a crowning moment in her recent adventures of zero-g flights, centrifugal force training, and scuba diving.

The six crew members, the max seating inside a New Shepard capsule, will experience a roughly 10-15 minute flight up to ~100 km before falling back to Earth. Unlike orbital rockets, New Shepard launches straight up, attempting to get as high as possible rather than gaining horizontal speed.

This will be Blue Origin’s fifth age record (although this will be disputed) on its human spaceflights. The first record was on the company’s first human mission where Oliver Daemen became the youngest person to reach space at 18 years old. Wally Funk (82) was also on that mission and at the time was the oldest person to fly to space.

Two other crew members would beat that age record, first being actor William Shatner (90 years 6 months) on NS-18 then Ed Dwight (90 years 8 months) earlier this year on NS-25.

Kitchen’s record will be a disputed one as her record will come down to whether you look at the US definition of space or base it off the Kármán Line. As on Virgin Galactic‘s Galactic-02 mission, Anastatia Mayers (18) flew and was then crowned the youngest woman to fly to space. However, Virgin Galactic’s spaceplanes don’t reach the 100 km (62 miles) mark of the Kármán Line, they usually just pass the 80 km (50 miles) mark the US views as the boundary of space.