Karsen Kitchen, a 21-year-old college student, will become the youngest woman to ever cross the Kármán line on the next flight to space by Kent-based Blue Origin.
The company announced the six-member crew flying on its New Shepard-26 mission on Wednesday, July 24. They are Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Ephraim Rabin and Kitchen. The Kármán line is the internationally recognized boundary of space.
Ferl will be the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment as part of a commercial suborbital space crew, according to Blue Origin. The experiment is designed to help scientists understand how plant genes react to the transition to and from microgravity.
Ferl will activate a device called a Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tube, or KFT, to “fix” or take a snapshot of the gene activity of an Arabidopsis thaliana plant inside the tube so researchers can later study it in the lab. On the ground, co-investigator Anna-Lisa Paul will track Ferl’s actions and activate identical control KFTs at the same four times during the flight.
This mission will be the eighth human flight for the New Shepard program and the 26th in its history. Since the first flight in 2021, the program has flown 37 people above the Kármán line.
Blue Origin charges people to be part of the crew. The company does not reveal its prices. Some crew members are sponsored by others. The flight lasts about 11 minutes and goes about 62 miles into space from the company’s launch site in Texas.
The flight date will be announced soon, according to Blue Origin, founded in 2000 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Meet the crew
• Nicolina Elrick
Elrick is a philanthropist and entrepreneur whose career spans high fashion modeling to property development and founding multiple IT corporations in the 1990s. A graduate of CoachU and a vocal advocate for STEM education, she has dedicated her life to mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs. Her forthcoming biography, “Grit, Diamonds, Stars,” delves into her journey, offering insights into overcoming hardship with grace and determination. Based in Singapore, Elrick is a certified helicopter pilot and a spirited explorer with a love for cars, fine wine, and the occasional cigar.
• Rob Ferl
Ferl is a distinguished professor and director of the Astraeus Space Institute at the University of Florida. He has spent his career studying how living organisms respond to extreme conditions, especially microgravity. He and his colleagues have worked with NASA astronauts to conduct numerous experiments on the International Space Station that have shown that plants turn certain genes on and off in response to changes in gravity. They were also the first to prove that plants could grow in lunar soil collected during the Apollo missions. Ferl is also a national leader in space policy, having recently chaired a National Academies of Sciences committee on the direction of space biology research over the next decade.
Ferl received funding for this technology flight test through a NASA TechFlights grant by the agency’s Flight Opportunities program as well as from NASA’s Division of Biological and Physical Sciences.
• Eugene Grin
Grin was born in Ukraine and emigrated to the United States in 1979, where he started his career in real estate and finance. His passions include meditation, travel and adventure sports. He lives in upstate New York and has four children.
• Dr. Eiman Jahangir
Jahangir is a cardiologist and associate professor of medicine and radiology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, where he treats patients with heart disease and educates future physicians. Outside of medicine, he has a passion for exploration, including a lifelong dream of going to space. Over the past two decades, Jahangir has participated in analog astronaut missions and trained in various aspects of human spaceflight. This mission not only fulfills his dream but also represents his vision of making space accessible to everyone.
Jahangir’s seat is sponsored by MoonDAO, an organization whose mission is to accelerate a multiplanetary future.
• Karsen Kitchen
Kitchen is poised to make history as the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line. A senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kitchen is majoring in communications and astronomy. After graduation, she intends to pursue a career in the space industry. In 2024, she founded Orbitelle, an initiative to encourage women to pursue careers in the space industry. Kitchen has researched radio astronomy at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and worked at UNC’s Morehead Planetarium. She’s also immersed herself in centrifugal force training, experienced weightlessness during a Zero-Gravity flight, and currently in training for her scuba diving license.
• Ephraim Rabin
Rabin is an American-Israeli businessman, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Parchem Fine & Specialty Chemicals, a technology company revolutionizing supply chains for specialized raw materials and ingredients globally. Rabin is a trustee and mentor at a variety of organizations and think tanks, as well as a race car driver, chef, and avid skier and adventurer. Rabin and his family split their time between New York, Israel and the Caribbean.
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The crew for Blue Origin’s next flight to space will include Ephraim Rabin, Nicolina Elrick, Eugene Grin, Rob Ferl, Karsen Kitchen and Dr. Eiman Jahangir. COURTESY PHOTO, Blue Origin
