Washington:

Blue Origin is set to fly adventurers to the final frontier on Sunday for the first time in nearly two years, reigniting competition in the space tourism market after a rocket mishap put its crewed operations on hold.

Six people including Black sculptor and former Air Force pilot Ed Dwight, who was controversially spurned by NASA’s astronaut corps in the 1960s, will blast off at around 8:30 am local time (1330 GMT) from the company’s Launch Site One base in west Texas.

Dwight — at 90 years, 8 months, and 10 days — is set to become the oldest person to go to space, narrowly pipping Star Trek actor William Shatner, who was almost two months younger when he launched with Blue Origin in 2021.

Mission NS-25 is the seventh human flight for the enterprise owned and founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, who sees short jaunts on the New Shepard suborbital vehicle as a stepping stone to greater ambitions, including the development of a full-fledged heavy rocket and lunar lander.

French entrepreneur Sylvain Chiron, one of the crew, told AFP he was most excited about “this sensation of leaving the world of men and seeing the Earth as a whole, from above, without borders, with all its fragility and beauty.”

To date, Blue Origin has flown 31 people aboard New Shepard — a small, fully reusable rocket system named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

Second nonagenarian

The program encountered a setback when a New Shepard rocket caught fire shortly after launch on September 12, 2022. The uncrewed capsule ejected in time, meaning astronauts would have been safe had they flown.

A federal investigation revealed an overheating engine nozzle was at fault. Blue Origin took corrective steps and carried out a successful uncrewed launch in December 2023, paving the way for Sunday’s mission.

After lift-off, the sleek and roomy capsule separates from the booster, which produces zero carbon emissions as its fuel — liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen — combust to produce water vapor. The rocket performs a precision vertical landing.

As the spaceship soars beyond the Karman Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level, passengers can marvel at the Earth’s curvature and unbuckle their seats to float — or even perform jumping jacks — during a few minutes of weightlessness.

The capsule then reenters the atmosphere, deploying its parachutes for a gentle desert landing in a puff of sand.

Bezos himself was on the program’s first-ever crewed flight in 2021. A few months later, Shatner blurred the lines between science fiction and reality when he became the world’s oldest-ever astronaut, decades after he first played a space traveler.

Dwight will become only the second nonagenarian to venture beyond Earth.

Ticket prices are a well-guarded secret, but guests like Dwight — whose seat was sponsored by the nonprofit Space for Humanity — ride for free.

To space, finally

Blue Origin’s competitor in suborbital space is Virgin Galactic, which deploys a supersonic spaceplane that is dropped from beneath the wings of a massive carrier plane at high altitude.

Virgin Galactic experienced its own two-year safety pause because of an anomaly linked with the 2021 flight that carried its founder British tycoon Richard Branson into space. But the company later hit its stride with half a dozen successful flights in quick succession.

Its next mission is set for June, after which it will head into another pause to build out a new class of advanced spaceplane.

Sunday’s mission finally gives Dwight the chance he was denied decades ago.

He was an elite test pilot when he was appointed by president John F Kennedy to join a highly competitive Air Force program known as a pathway for the astronaut corps, but was ultimately not picked.

He left the military in 1966, citing the strain of racial politics, before dedicating his life to telling Black history through sculpture. His art, displayed around the country, includes iconic figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and more.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Billionaire American businessman Jeff Bezos crew mates after they flew on Blue Origin’s inaugural flight to the edge of space in 2021. File.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Gopi Thotakura, an entrepreneur and a pilot, is set to become the first Indian to venture into space as a tourist on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin’s NS-25 mission.

Mr. Thotakura was selected as one of the six crew members for the mission, making him the first Indian space tourist and the second Indian to venture into space after the Indian Army’s Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma in 1984.

The flight date is yet to be announced, the aerospace company said.

This mission will be the seventh human flight for the New Shepard programme and the 25th in its history. To date, the programme has flown 31 humans above the Karman line, the proposed conventional boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

New Shepard is a fully reusable sub-orbital launch vehicle developed for space tourism by Blue Origin.

According to Blue Origin, “Gopi is a pilot and aviator who learned how to fly before he could drive.”

He is the co-founder of Preserve Life Corp, a global centre for holistic wellness and applied health located near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

In addition to flying jets commercially, he pilots bush, aerobatic, and seaplanes, as well as gliders and hot air balloons, and has served as an international medical jet pilot.

A lifelong traveller, his most recent adventure took him to the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

Andhra Pradesh-born Thotakura is a graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Other crew members of the flight include Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller, and former Air Force Captain Ed Dwight, who was selected by President John F Kennedy in 1961 as the nation’s first Black astronaut candidate but was never granted the opportunity to fly to space.

During the flight, each astronaut will carry a postcard to space on behalf of Blue Origin’s foundation, Club for the Future.

This programme gives students access to space on Blue Origin’s rockets, including an all-digital method to create and send postcards. The Club’s mission is to inspire and mobilise future generations to pursue careers in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) for the benefit of Earth.

From an environmental standpoint, nearly 99% of New Shepard’s dry mass is reused, including the booster, capsule, engine, landing gear, and parachutes.

New Shepard’s engine is fuelled by highly efficient liquid oxygen and hydrogen. During the flight, the only byproduct is water vapour with no carbon emissions, the company said.

The Lunar Resources Registry, a private business that locates valuable resources on the moon and helps investors conduct the required exploration and extraction operations, notes: “The space race is evolving into space industrialization.” Image for Representation.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Humans have always looked at the sky, using the stars as navigation guides or for spiritual storytelling. Every human civilization has looked to the stars and used celestial movements to measure time and find meaning.

This insatiable thirst for knowledge combined with technological advancements have made it possible for us to dream of travelling in space. These dreams became more and more real after the Second World War, the Industrial Revolution, the Cold War and the large-scale exploitation of the Earth’s resources.

Dreams of space travel started small with the launch of Sputnik-1 by the Soviet Union, and escalated with the U.S. Apollo landing on the moon in 1969.

Six decades later, plans are ramping up for space tourism, missions to the moon and Mars, and mining on the moon.

The Lunar Resources Registry, a private business that locates valuable resources on the moon and helps investors conduct the required exploration and extraction operations, notes: “The space race is evolving into space industrialization.”

According to NASA, “the moon holds hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resources,” including water, helium-3 and rare earth metals used in electronics.

The dawn of the Anthropocene

As a group of academics researching various aspects of environmental sustainability on Earth, we are alarmed at the speed of these developments and the impacts resource exploitation will have on lunar and space environments.

There is a movement among the international geologic scientific community calling for a new epoch — the Anthropocene — reflecting the enormous extent to which human activity has altered the planet since the end of the Second World War.

Stratigraphers — geologists who study the layers of rock and sediment — look for measurable global impact of human activities in the geologic record. According to their research, the starting point for the Anthropocene has been identified as beginning in the 1950s, and the fallout from nuclear testing.

To shock humankind into preventing the extensive destruction in space that we have wrought on Earth, it may be effective to add a “lunar Anthropocene” to the moon’s geologic time scale.

The case for a lunar Anthropocene is interesting. It can be argued that since the first human contact with the moon’s surface, we have seen anthropogenic impact. This impact is likely to increase dramatically. This is presented as justification for a new geologic epoch for the moon.

Damaging the Earth

This new “human epoch” is hotly debated among stratigraphers as well as researchers in other disciplines. For humanities researchers and artists, the importance of the Anthropocene lies in the power the concept has to evoke human responsibility for bringing the Earth’s system to a tipping point.

In The Shock of the Anthropocene, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue that the new human epoch entails recognizing that technoscientific advances — which have driven socio-political economies relying on extractivism, consumption and waste — have led to the extent of damage we measure on Earth at present.

For millenia, most societies understood the importance of their relationship with the natural world for survival. But industrialization and the endlessly growing economy in developed countries has destroyed this relationship.

For example, trees used to be respected for providing timber, food, shade and more. But our industrial growth changed all that; in the past 100 years, more trees have been cut than had been felled in the preceding 9,000 years.

A lunar Anthropocene

And now the Anthropocene, this age of human impact, is also arriving on the moon.

NASA estimates there are already 227,000 kilos of human garbage littering the moon, mostly from space explorations, including moon buggies and other equipment, excrement, statues, golf balls, human ashes and flags, among other objects.

An increasing number of moon missions and extracting resources from the moon could destroy lunar environments. This mirrors what has happened on our planet: humans have used this collection of “natural resources” and produced enough waste and degradation to bring us to the current sixth mass extinction precipice.

Our throwaway society leads to not only habitat destruction on Earth, but also now on the moon and in space. We must rethink what we really need. Without a fully functional Earth system, including biodiversity and nature’s contribution to life, we will be unable to survive.

If the intent is to issue a word of caution and pre-emptively shock and elicit a feeling of responsibility on the part of those actors likely to impact the moon’s surface, it may very well be the right time to name a lunar Anthropocene. This may help prevent the kind of extensive and careless destruction we have caused and continue to witness on Earth.