Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin has announced its next space tourism flight, expected to take place in August 2025. It will be the 34th New Shepherd “mission” and, follows four flights earlier in the year, including the company’s controversial all-woman flight that took pop-star Katy Perry to the edge of space, along with Bezos’s then fiancé Lauren Sanchez.
This time the crew will include just one woman: Deborah Martorell, a Puerto Rican meteorologist and journalist whose environmental and space reporting has won eight Emmy Awards and two Awards of Excellence in Science Reporting from the American Meteorological Society. She has previously participated in a microgravity flight with NASA in 2007 and is also a Solar System Ambassador for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Also on the space flight, three businessmen:
- Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal, a real estate investor born in Agra, India, and now a naturalized U.S. citizen who is a lifelong traveller who has apparently exhausted Earth’s offerings having been to every country in the world, the North and South Poles, skydived Mount Everest and the Pyramids of Giza. He holds a private pilot’s license and also flies helicopters.
- Plus, Türkiye’s Erden Holding board member Gökhan Erdem, described in a press release as a “passionate space enthusiast and an avid photographer.”
- And James (J.D.) Russell, styled in press materials as “a serial entrepreneur and founder of Alpha Funds, a technology-focused venture capital company, and Alpha Aerospace, an aerospace consulting and solutions company.” In memory of his deceased daughter he created a foundation dedicated to children’s education and first responders, which partners Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. He has already been to space with New Shepherd in November 2024.
Alongside them, another philanthropist, Brit Lionel Pitchford, a teacher, translator, and tour guide, and the founder of an orphanage in Kathmandu and a Nepal non-profit dedicated to serving disadvantaged children and girls.
And finally, H.E. Justin Sun – another who has already been to space with New Shepherd. He is the Ambassador and former Permanent Representative of Grenada to the World Trade Organisation, and Prime Minister of Liberland, Founder of blockchain TRON and DAO, recognised by Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in the Consumer Technology category several times. He placed the winning bid for the first seat on New Shepard in 2021, with the $28 million in proceeds donated to Blue Origin’s foundation, Club for the Future, which selected 19 space-focused nonprofits to each receive a $1 million grant to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEAM and help invent the future of life in space.
