The Journey of New Shepard Spaceflight NS-26 | Blue Origin
Blue Origin successfully completed its eighth human spaceflight and the 26th flight for the New Shepard program on August 29, 2024. The astronaut crew included: Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen, and Ephraim Rabin. The New Shepard launch vehicle has now flown 43 people into space.
Karsen Kitchen made history as the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line. Rob Ferl became the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment as part of a commercial suborbital space crew.
Rob Ferl was the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment as part of a commercial suborbital space crew. The experiment is designed to help scientists understand how plant genes react to the transition to and from microgravity. Ferl activated a device called a Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tube, or KFT, to “fix” or take a snapshot of the gene activity of an Arabidopsis thaliana plant inside the tube for researchers to study in the lab.
This mission was the eighth human flight for the New Shepard program and the 26th in its history. To date, the program has flown 37 humans above the Kármán line, the "internationally recognized boundary of space."
Rob Ferl Biography:
Rob is a distinguished professor and director of the Astraeus Space Institute at the University of Florida. He has spent his career studying how living organisms respond to extreme conditions, especially microgravity. He and his colleagues have worked with NASA astronauts to conduct numerous experiments on the International Space Station that have shown that plants turn certain genes on and off in response to changes in gravity. They were also the first to prove that plants could grow in lunar soil collected during the Apollo missions. Ferl is also a national leader in space policy, having recently chaired a National Academies of Sciences committee on the direction of space biology research over the next decade.
Rob received funding for his technology flight test through a NASA TechFlights grant by the agency’s Flight Opportunities program as well as from NASA’s Division of Biological and Physical Sciences.
Karsen Kitchen Biography:
Karsen made history as the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line. A senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Karsen is majoring in Communications and Astronomy. After graduation, she intends to pursue a career in the space industry. In 2024, she founded Orbitelle, an initiative to encourage women to pursue careers in the space industry. Karsen has researched radio astronomy at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and worked at UNC's Morehead Planetarium. She’s also immersed herself in centrifugal force training, experienced weightlessness during a Zero-Gravity flight, and currently in training for her scuba diving license.
Duration: 1 minute, 38 seconds
