(NewsNation) — Blue Origin, the space tourism venture launched by Jeff Bezos, completed its fourth crewed flight Thursday with a successful landing in rural west Texas.
The flight took half a dozen passengers for a 10-minute suborbital joyride before returning back to earth.
“You saw the sky getting darker and when it turned pitch black it was just gorgeous,” said George Nield, a passenger and former manager at NASA.
On the other side of this generation’s space race, the SpaceX Crew-4 team, which is comprised of NASA astronauts, held a news conference ahead of its launch in April.
The crew is set to make history as astronaut Jessica Watkins will become the first black woman to conduct a long duration spaceflight.
“This is certainly an important milestone, I think, both for our agency and for the country,” Watkins said. “I think it’s really just a tribute to the legacy of the Black women astronauts who have come before me, as well as to the exciting future ahead.”
And in just a few hours, a simulated launch countdown for NASA’s Artemis-1 will begin. The unmanned mission will provide a foundation for deep space exploration.
With the Artemis missions, NASA plans to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon. The missions will survey more of the lunar surface than ever before and use what is learned to take the next giant leap, sending astronauts to Mars.
Artemis-1 will lift off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida but an official launch date has not been announced, although reports suggests it could happen in June.
