UAE space tourist to travel to final frontier on June 4
Hamish Harding’s Blue Origin flight was originally scheduled for launch in May
Blue Origin’s fifth flight carrying humans to space is scheduled for take off on at 5pm UAE time on June 4, with UAE expat Hamish Harding onboard.
Harding, chairman of Action Aviation, and long-term resident of Dubai is part of the mission to explore the most undiscovered places on earth.
Blue Origin’s NS-21 flight, carrying six people was originally supposed to take off on May 20, but was delayed due to technical reasons.
Harding will be part of a six-person crew for Blue Origin’s New Shepard programme. The passengers, who will go up 106 kilometres above ground in the suborbital flight, would experience a few minutes of weightlessness.
Harding and his fellow crew members have undergone training in the zero gravity Boeing aircraft, Boeing 727, by the Zero-g Corporation which is said to be an efficient aircraft for simulating Zero G.
As part of his mission, Harding will carry a postcard to space on behalf of Blue Origin’s Foundation, Club for the Future. The foundation’s mission is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM and help invent the future of life in space.
Blue Origin NS-21 is a 60-foot reusable, autonomous and suborbital rocket system and was built for human flight. The capsule and booster will take off vertically before separating at about 250,000 feet (76km) and will continue to ascend to space to reach an apogee of 350,000 feet (106km) and a speed of over 2,200 miles per hour (3,500km/h).
The astronauts will ascend past the Kármán Line (100km), which is the internationally recognised boundary of space where full weightlessness is experienced. This will be the 21st consecutive New Shepard launch.
Some of the other crew members include Katya Echazarreta, the first Mexican-born woman and youngest American woman to fly into space, and famed undersea explorer Victor Vescovo, who co-piloted DSV Limiting Factor with Harding to the bottom of the deepest point of the ocean in March 2021.
Harding is no stranger to extraordinary feats and Guinness World Records. The ‘adrenaline junkie’, as he likes top call himself, has notched up records for the longest duration spent at full ocean depth and longest distance traversed at full ocean depth, when he dived the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in a two-person submersible to a depth of 36,000 feet (11,000 meters).
Captain Harding also led the One More Orbit mission which achieved the record for the fastest circumnavigation of the earth via both poles in a Gulfstream G650ER (46 hours, 40 minutes).
He has also recently established the One More Orbit Foundation to inspire and sponsor the explorers of tomorrow to achieve the impossible through educational outreach in science, technology, art, engineering and mathematics (STEAM).
Harding is also chair of the Middle East Chapter of The Explorers Club, an international organisation founded in New York in 1904 dedicated to the advancement of field exploration and scientific enquiry.