Undated photo released on May 17, 2024 of Frenchman Sylvain Chiron in Texas, wearing clothing with the name of his mission, NS-25 (North Communication/AFP/Archives/Géraldine Chiron)
A French entrepreneur is due to fly into space on Sunday aboard a rocket from the American company Blue Origin, which will be the first crewed flight in almost two years.
A total of six passengers are scheduled to take off from West Texas aboard the small New Shepard rocket from Blue Origin, a space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. The shooting window opens at 8:30 a.m. local time (1:30 p.m. GMT).
“I’m going to live my childhood dream,” Sylvain Chiron, a 52-year-old entrepreneur, told AFP this week. “I was immersed in aeronautics quite young. I really wanted to become an astronaut.”
This thrill-seeking Savoyard arrived on Thursday at the Launch site one site, the Blue Origin base in the middle of the Texan desert. Passionate about aviation, he now looks forward to being able to “see the Earth as a whole, from above, without borders, with all its fragility and beauty”.
Blue Origin flights only last around ten minutes but allow passengers to admire the curvature of the Earth and to float briefly in the capsule.
According to Sylvain Chiron, Blue Origin received “thousands of applications”. He believes he was selected thanks to an application demonstrating his “devouring passion for space”.
Undated photo released on May 17, 2024 by North Communication of Frenchman Sylvain Chiron exiting a Blue Origin capsule in Texas (North Communication/AFP/Géraldine Chiron)
The ticket price is kept secret. “Yes, it’s expensive” but “not completely crazy either,” the Frenchman simply indicated.
The company has already taken 31 people above the Karman line, which marks the boundary of space at an altitude of 100 km according to an international convention.
The opportunity is extremely rare: only ten French astronauts have been to space, the latest of which is Thomas Pesquet – his second mission, the most recent, dates from 2021.
In 2023, the Franco-Italian Ketty Maisonrouge flew with a company competing with Blue Origin in this niche of short flights, Virgin Galactic.
– “Overcome your fears” –
The New Shepard rocket takes off vertically, propels the capsule which detaches in flight, reaches space then falls before being slowed by parachutes and landing.
Sunday’s mission, named NS-25, will be the first crewed flight of this rocket since August 2022.
In September of the same year, a flight without a human on board resulted in the crash of the rocket’s propulsion stage. The automatic ejection system of the capsule – where the passengers are during a manned flight – was triggered and it fell to the ground, slowed down by its parachutes.
After an investigation by the American aviation regulator (FAA), Blue Origin made modifications and carried out a new uncrewed flight in December 2023.
A Blue Origin New Shepard rocket takes off from the Van Horn launch site on March 31, 2022 in Texas (AFP/Archives/Patrick T. FALLON)
Sylvain Chiron concedes that the adventure is “not completely devoid of risk”.
“That being said, you have to know how to overcome your fears if you want to do things in life,” he said.
This risk is one of the reasons why he rejects the term “space tourism”, which according to him rather evokes the image of “a cruise” with “a pina colada”.
Having obtained his private pilot’s license at the age of 16, he finally turned to business studies in the United States, before founding an artisanal brewery in Savoie, the Brasserie du Mont-Blanc.
Today he hopes to become a source of “inspiration for young people”, to show them that “you must not give up. You must pursue your dreams and with a little luck, you can live them”.
– Senior on board –
The complete crew of Blue Origin’s NS-25 space mission, with Frenchman Sylvain Chiron on the far left, on May 17 in Texas (BLUE ORIGIN/AFP/-)
Among the other passengers on Sunday was Ed Dwight, born in 1933 and who had been tipped to become the first African-American to go to space, but ultimately never had the opportunity.
Ed Dwight subsequently became a sculptor and his work, exhibited in museums, highlights African-American history and personalities.
At 90 years old, on Sunday he will become the oldest person to have reached space, beating by just a few months the actor who played the iconic Captain Kirk in the Star Trek series, William Shatner.
The latter also flew at the age of 90 aboard the Blue Origin rocket. Jeff Bezos himself participated in the first manned flight of the machine, in July 2021.
© 2024 AFP
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