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The New Shepard booster descends to a landing at Launch Site One in West Texas. (Blue Origin via YouTube)
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent its 10th crew on a quick suborbital ride to space today, extending its list of spacefliers to more than 50. And that list now includes the first Blue Origin spaceflier who preserved a bit of his privacy as he flew.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard reusable rocket ship rose from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 9:49 a.m. CT (7:49 a.m. PT) for a flight that lasted just under 10 minutes and rose to an altitude of 105 kilometers, or 65 miles. That’s beyond the Karman Line, the 100-kilometer level that marks the internationally recognized boundary of space.
The six spacefliers included a Spanish TV host, a media entrepreneur, a fertility-clinic founder, a hedge-fund partner and a venture capitalist who made his second New Shepard flight. And the sixth crew member? Blue Origin said it was respecting that person’s request for privacy by not releasing his full name.
“I like to think that he simply requested he remained under the radar, but over the Karman Line,” launch commentator Isabella Gillespie said.
In photos of the crew for today’s mission, known as NS-30, the mystery customer is shown wearing a flight suit emblazoned with the name “R. Wilson,” and his last name also appears on the mission patch. As he emerged from the crew capsule at the end of today’s flight, Wilson shouted out a “Wooo” of joy.
Space historian Robert Pearlman, who tracks milestones and cultural trends on the final frontier at CollectSpace.com, said Wilson appears to be the first person who was not fully identified before flying into space. “The Chinese have come close,” he told GeekWire in an email. “Lately, they seem to wait to within 24 hours of a launch to reveal their Shenzhou crews.”
After the flight, online sleuths searched for clues to Wilson’s identity. A YouTube space commentator named Chris Enfest (a.k.a. Ufotinik) zeroed in on a person named Russell Wilson.
This Russell Wilson is not the quarterback who spent his glory years with the Seattle Seahawks — instead, he’s one of the founders of CoinSpot, a cryptocurrency trading company based in Australia. A Daily Mail report from 2023 noted that Russell Wilson reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends over the previous two years, and characterized him as “Australia’s reclusive crypto king.”
We’ve asked Blue Origin and CoinSpot about the potential connection and will update this report with anything we can pass along.
The crewmates of the R. Wilson who went to space included:
Lane Bess, the principal and founder of Bess Ventures and Advisory, an investment fund that focuses on technology firms. Bess first flew to space in 2021, on the third crewed New Shepard mission. “The second time is better than the first,” Bess said after touchdown.
Jesús Calleja, who is a race-car driver, mountaineer and pilot as well as a Spanish TV host. When today’s flight was over, Calleja got emotional as he reflected on the “beautiful” view of the Texas terrain as seen from space. “It’s my small dream,” he told an interviewer. “I cry … sorry, everybody.”
Elaine Chia Hyde, a Singapore-born physicist and entrepreneur who founded Chicago Star, a news and media company; and Eastside Enterprises, a research-and-development company focused on AI-assisted media products. “I thought I knew what home was, but when I was floating up there, and you see [Earth] right there, it’s like home,” she said. “You get this new definition of what that means.”
Richard Scott, a reproductive endocrinologist who was a founding partner of IVIRMA Global, the world’s largest fertility care group, with clinics and laboratories in 10 countries.
Tushar Shah, a partner and the co-head of research at a quantitative hedge fund in New York City.
“There’s nothing like seeing the diversity among our crews, and this mission brought together people from all over the world — scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs and adventurers,” Phil Joyce, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for the New Shepard, said in a news release. “It’s always inspiring to hear their unique perspectives about the life-changing impact of seeing Earth from space. Huge thanks to our customers for supporting our mission to build a road to space for the benefit of Earth.”
Today’s flight followed the model that Blue Origin has used for its nine previous crewed missions. There have also been 20 uncrewed New Shepard missions — and when you add them all up, the total of 30 explains the NS-30 mission designation.
New Shepard’s hydrogen-fueled booster sent its crew capsule skyward and then separated while the capsule continued its upward arc. Crew members unstrapped themselves from their seats for a few minutes of weightlessness. Then they got back in their seats for a parachute-assisted touchdown amid the Texas rangeland. Meanwhile, the booster made its own autonomous landing on a pad not far from where the launch occurred.
In addition to the six crew members, today’s flight carried postcards sent in by students and space enthusiasts for a program supported by the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s educational foundation.
NS-30 brought Blue Origin’s tally of suborbital spacefliers to 52, including four people who have now taken two New Shepard trips.
The New Shepard system is fully reusable, and in October, Blue Origin added a second crew capsule to its fleet to accommodate what it said was growing customer demand. Blue Origin hasn’t disclosed how much its customers are paying for suborbital space trips, but just after Bezos flew on the first crewed New Shepard mission in 2021, he said the company was “approaching $100 million in private sales already, and the demand is very, very high.”
In addition to the New Shepard suborbital program, Blue Origin is working on its orbital-class New Glenn rocket (which was launched for the first time last month) as well as its Blue Moon lunar lander, Blue Ring orbital space platform and a commercial space station project called Orbital Reef.
We’ve updated this report with further information about the search for Wilson’s identity.
