WASHINGTON — Blue Origin conducted its third crewed New Shepard flight in just over two months Aug. 3, sending six people to space that included the winner of the auction for a seat on the company’s first crewed flight four years ago.
New Shepard lifted off from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 8:43 a.m. Eastern on the NS-34 mission. The capsule RSS First Step flew to a peak altitude of approximately 106 kilometers before landing under parachutes about 10 minutes after liftoff. The booster performed a powered landing about three minutes before the capsule touched down.
Among the six people on board was Justin Sun, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur. Sun won an auction in June 2021 for a seat on the first crewed New Shepard flight, NS-16, although his identity was not disclosed at the time. His winning bid was $28 million, with Blue Origin donating $19 million of that to various organizations.
He backed out of the flight, though, with Blue Origin saying that “scheduling conflicts” would keep him from participating. Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen took his place alongside Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos and female aviation pioneer Wally Funk.
Blue Origin revealed the identify of Sun in December 2021, announcing that he would instead fly on a dedicated New Shepard flight in late 2022, with Sun planning to later select the other five people who would accompany him. That “Sea of Stars” project, though, never materialized, and only last month did Blue Origin announce that Sun would fly on NS-34.
Around the time Sun announced his plans for a dedicated New Shepard mission, he was facing federal investigations in the United States for sale of unregistered securities related to his cryptocurrency ventures. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Sun in 2023 on those grounds, but dropped it earlier this year.
Blue Origin’s biography of Sun identifies him as “Ambassador and former Permanent Representative of Grenada” to the World Trade Organization; Sun stepped down from that post in 2023. He is also identified as “Prime Minister of Liberland,” a seven-square-kilometer parcel of land on the Danube River between Croatia and Serbia that neither country has claimed. No country has formally recognized the existence of Liberland as an independent nation.
Blue Origin’s NS-34 mission patch referenced another milestone in Sun’s life, when he purchased for about $6 million a work of art consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall, then proceeded the eat the banana. The mission patch includes a banana for Sun, the company stated, to symbolize his “passion for conceptual art.”
“For this mission I waited for four years but we finally delivered it,” Sun said in comments on the Blue Origin webcast after landing. “I really appreciate Mr. Bezos and his team to make it possible.”
The other five people on NS-34 were:
- Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal, a real estate investor;
- Gökhan Erdem, a Turkish businessman;
- Deborah Martorell, a Puerto Rican meteorologist;
- Lionel Pitchford, an English teacher, translator and tour guide living in Spain; and
- James (J.D.) Russell, an investor who previously flew on NS-28 in 2024.
The flight is the third New Shepard mission since late May and the fourth in less than four months, as Blue Origin works to increase its flight rate to meet what the company says is strong demand. There have been six New Shepard flights so far this year, including one payload-only flight.
NS-34 was the 14th crewed New Shepard flight. The company has now taken 75 individuals on suborbital flights, with five of them, including Russell, going twice.