New Delhi, Aug 28: Jeff Bezos’ aerospace venture Blue Origin is set to launch its eighth tourist mission to suborbital space Thursday.

The flight will carry six people for an 11-minute ride above the Karman line -- the internationally recognised boundary of space.

It will be the eighth human flight for the New Shepard rocket which will lift off at 8:00 am CDT (6.30 pm IST) from Launch Site One in West Texas.

The New Shepard programme has to date "flown 37 humans”, the company said.

The six-person crew includes Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen, and Ephraim Rabin.

While Karsen will become the youngest woman ever to cross the Karman line, Ferl will be the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment as part of a commercial suborbital space crew, the company said.

Ferl’s experiment is designed to help scientists understand how plant genes react to the transition to and from microgravity.

He will activate 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 so researchers can later study it in the lab.

On the ground, co-investigator Anna-Lisa Paul will track Ferl’s actions and activate identical control KFTs at the same four times during the flight.

Meanwhile, Blue Origin has also partnered with NASA for the agency’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission -- aimed at studying the solar wind’s interaction with the magnetosphere on Mars.

The company's reusable New Glenn rocket’s will carry the ESCAPADE mission on its maiden launch on October 13.

Named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit Earth, completing three orbits in 1962, it is among the largest and most powerful rockets ever built and launched -- standing 98 meters tall.

The heavy-lift rocket also runs on cleaner fuel and is designed to take large payloads to low-Earth orbit.

“New Glenn's first stage is designed for a minimum of 25 flights,” the company said. It added that the rocket will operate like a commercial airliner and "will lead to significantly less waste and cost”.

(IANS)

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