Blue Origin successfully completes 8th manned New Shepard space tourism flight

Aug. 29 (UPI) -- Jeff Bezos ' space tourism venture Blue Origin on Thursday successfully completed its eighth human suborbital spaceflight and the 26th flight in its New Shepard program.

A crew including Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen and Ephraim Rabin touched down in the reusable RSS First Step capsule at Blue Origin's Corn Ranch spaceport in West Texas at 9:07 a.m. EDT, 12 minutes after takeoff.

During the flight, the crew of the NS-26 mission reached a maximum altitude of about 341,000 feet and experienced weightlessness for about 1 minute.

The company noted that, at age 21, Kitchen made history Thursday as the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line -- the boundary separating Earth's atmosphere and outer space. She is a student at the University of North Carolina who has conducted research in radio astronomy at the Green Bank Observatory.

In another accomplishment for the New Shepard program Thursday, Ferl became the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment, or "payload," as part of a commercial suborbital space crew.

The payload from the University of Florida in Gainesville sought to understand how changes in gravity during spaceflight affect plant biology. During the flight, Ferl activated small, self-contained tubes pre-loaded with plants and preservative to biochemically freeze the samples at various stages of gravity, which will be compared to ground-based control samples, according to NASA .

The samples will be studied to determine the effects of gravity transitions on the plants' gene expression to support future missions to the moon and Mars.