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Blue Origin: Record broken for oldest person to go to space

Blue origin blast offImage source, Blue Origin
Image caption,

Blast off! This is the moment Blue Origin safely headed into space

Blue Origin - a space tourism project by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, has sent six people up just past the edge of space.

The last time Blue Origin tried to launch, in 2022, the mission failed but this time it was a success and everyone made it back down safely.

One of the passengers made history by becoming the oldest person to travel to space.

Ed Dwight, who is 90, described the experience as "life changing".

What is space tourism?

Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,

How about a holiday... to space?

Space tourism is the term for people paying to get a trip into space.

There are several different companies trying to send people to space on tourist trips - including Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

Flying up into space costs a lot of money, so the price of a ticket is very expensive.

A lot of the space missions we hear about, like Artemis, are funded by governments or space agencies, like Nasa and the ESA.

This is space exploration, and it's mainly done to help us understand space and technology.

There's also commercial space exploration - like SpaceX - which is owned by Elon Musk.

Space tourism can sometimes be for scientific research, but it's also so people can have fun.

The Karman Line

There's no official place where Earth's atmosphere ends and outer space begins, and lots of people have different places where they think it might be.

However, the Karman line is recognised by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) as the edge of space.

It's 100 kilometres (about 62 miles) above sea level. Blue Origin went through this line before returning to Earth.

What happened on Blue Origin?

The rocket launched into the sky on Sunday 19 May.

The trip only lasted around 10 minutes.

It went up just past the edge of space, and then came back to land safely on Earth.

People on board got to look back at the curve of the Earth and experience floating about inside the craft.

Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,

Ed Dwight is the oldest person to go to the edge of space

The crew of six people included the oldest man to head into space - at 90 years, 8 months and 10 days!

He was actually selected to train as as astronaut with Nasa in the 1960s.

He would have been the US's first black astronaut, but in the end he wasn't chosen for the team.

Instead he became an artist and spent a lot of his life making sculptures of famous black figures, including Martin Luther King Jr and Harriet Tubman.

Despite missing out when he was younger he has now made it to space and is also a record breaker.

I am ecstatic … It was a life-changing experience.

— Ed Dwight