New record: Blue Origin launches youngest woman beyond Kármán line

Blue Origin set a new record on its latest space tourism flight.

That mission, called NS-26, sent six people to suborbital space and back this morning (Aug. 29) from Blue Origin‘s West Texas spaceport, reaching a maximum altitude of 64.6 miles (104 kilometers) above ground level.

One of them was Karsen Kitchen, a 21-year-old student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). According to Blue Origin, Kitchen is the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line, the 62-mile-high (100 km) boundary that many people regard as the start of outer space.

Kitchen has some space connections and aspirations: She’s interning with Blue Origin, according to ChapelBoro.com. And her dad, Jim, a business professor at UNC, flew on the company’s NS-20 mission in March 2022.

Blue Origin also launched the youngest man — and youngest person, period — beyond the Kármán line: 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemen. 

Related: The Kármán Line: Where does space begin?

Jeff Bezos‘ company notched that milestone on its very first crewed flight, which occurred on July 20, 2021. That mission also carried Bezos, his brother Mark and 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk to the final frontier.

As its name suggests, NS-26 was the 26th overall flight of New Shepard, Blue Origin’s reusable suborbital vehicle. Eight of those missions have been crewed; the rest have been robotic research flights.

The Kármán line, by the way, is not the only recognized space-delineation marker; Both NASA and the U.S. military award astronaut wings to anyone who gets at least 50 miles (80 km) above Earth’s surface.

And, by this metric, Kitchen is not the youngest woman to reach space. Eighteen-year-old Anastatia Mayers and her crewmates reached a peak altitude of 55 miles (88.5 km) on a flight with Virgin Galactic in August 2023.

Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin’s chief competitor in the suborbital tourism industry, currently charges $600,000 per seat, though the company has not yet restarted sales as it works on getting its new “Delta class” of space planes up and running. Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket prices.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 5 p.m. ET on Aug. 29 to give the correct figure for Virgin Galactic’s current ticket price. It’s $600,000, not $450,000, as the story originally stated.

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.