Blue Origin has announced the launch date of its next crew flight. The NS-37 mission is scheduled to liftoff at 8 pm IST [8:30 am CST] on December 18 from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas, as the seventh crewed flight of 2025. NS-37 will also mark Blue Origin‘s 37th mission and 16th human spaceflight overall.
New Shepard is preparing to launch from West Texas, giving six people a perspective that only space can provide. Our crewed NS-37 mission is targeting liftoff from Launch Site One on Thursday, December 18, with the launch window opening at 8:30 AM CST / 14:30 UTC.
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— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) December 11, 2025
NS-37 has a crew of six people, like previous missions, who will cross the Karman Line – the internationally recognised boundary of space 100 km above surface. They will board the New Shepard spacecraft that will be launched into space atop the reusable New Shepard booster.
The entire flight lasts between 10-11 minutes, with the space tourists experiencing about three minutes of microgravity.
Blue Origin set to make history with NS-37 mission
This mission will make history by launching the first wheelchair user – Michaela Benthaus (Michi) – to space. She is an aerospace and mechatronics engineer at the European Space Agency (ESA), who was involved in a mountain biking accident in 2018. The resulting spinal cord injury impacted her ability to walk.
She will be accompanied by five men from different fields of life. Joey Hyde is a Florida-based physicist, Hans Koenigsmann is a German-aerospace engineer who was once part of SpaceX for two decades. Neal Milch is a global business executive and entrepreneur, Adonis Pouroulis is an entrepreneur, investor and mining engineer whereas Jason Stansell is a computer scientist.
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Michi will join a long list of record setters who have flown with Blue Origin. The company launched the first siblings to space – Mark and Jeff Bezos – on its first crew mission (NS-16), youngest person to space (Oliver Daemen, age 18), oldest person to space (Wally Funk age 82), all-female crew with pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s wife Lauren Sanchez, first celebrity to space (Star Trek’s William Shatner) and first Indian tourist (Gopi Thothakura).
On Friday, Blue Origin released the mission patch for NS-37 with different symbols linked to each of the crew members.
The DNA symbolises the importance and impact of science to Milch, the hippo is Michi’s favourite animal and she will take her plush toy which comforted her in the hospital with her on the flight. The patch has a baobab tree representing Pouroulis‘ South African roots, a spiral galaxy symbolising Hyde’s astrophysics research, a dog-bone and stars in the crew capsule which represent the number 201 and ‘K’ for Jason Stansell’s late brother; and finally the shards representing “Blue Origin’s commitment to breaking down the barriers to accessing space, including cost, nationality, and ability.”
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