Blue Origin reveals space tourists to launch on next New Shepard rocket

We now know which people will fly on Blue Origin’s next space tourism mission — most of them, anyway.

On Wednesday (Oct. 1), Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, announced the passenger list for NS-36, the next flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. (We don’t yet know when NS-36 will launch; that info is coming soon, according to Blue Origin.)

The company gave us five names for NS-36. There will also be a sixth, but that person “asked to remain anonymous until after the flight,” Blue Origin wrote in an update on Wednesday. Here’s a brief rundown of the announced five, using information provided in the update.

• Jeff Elgin, founder of FranChoice, a network that helps match people with franchise-owning opportunities.
• Danna Karagussova, founder of Portals, “a multimodal ecosystem that features digital self-regulation tools that fuse art and science,” according to Blue Origin. She’s also a lifelong mountaineer.
• Dr. Clint Kelly III, an electrical engineer with a long history in computer and robotics research. His work at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the 1980s helped lay the foundation for driverless cars, Blue Origin wrote. He’s also a wildlife photographer who wrote a book about penguins. Kelly has already flown with Blue Origin, reaching space on the NS-22 mission in August 2022.
• Aaron Newman, an entrepreneur who founded five software startups. Newman is also a veteran of the U.S. Army and an explorer, having descended into the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the world’s oceans.
• Vitalii Ostrovsky, a Ukrainian businessman, investor and globetrotter who has lived in more than 100 countries around the world.

As its name suggests, NS-36 will be the 36th spaceflight for New Shepard, which consists of a reusable booster and a reusable capsule. It will be just the 15th New Shepard tourist flight, however; most of the vehicle’s missions have been uncrewed research flights.

New Shepard flights — crewed or uncrewed — last 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to the parachute-aided touchdown of the capsule. Passengers get to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see Earth against the blackness of space. It’s unclear how much this costs; Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket prices.