Blue Origin Just Made This North Carolina Student the Youngest Woman to Travel to Space

A North Carolina student became the world’s youngest woman to travel to space Thursday, thanks to a very brief trip on a Blue Origin rocket. 

Karsen Kitchen is a 21-year-old senior at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in communications and astronomy. She previously worked at UNC’s Morehead Planetarium, conducted research at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, and founded an organization called Orbitelle to encourage women to pursue careers in space.

“I have so many memories of going outside when I was younger, looking up at the night sky. I would come in and be like ‘Y’all, I want to be an astronaut,'” Kitchen told ABC 13.

Her dream became a reality when Blue Origin’s New Shepard NS-26 space tourism flight launched from the company’s West Texas launch site this morning. The ship reached about 65 miles above sea level, crossing the 62-mile-high Kármán Line (which is one definition of the threshold between Earth’s atmosphere and space), before parachuting back down to Earth. The mission, which launched at about 9:07 a.m., lasted a total of about 10 minutes.

Kitchen may have been the youngest woman to cross the Kármán Line, but 18-year-old Anastatia Mayers flew about 55 miles above Earth on a suborbital flight with Virgin Galactic in 2023, which the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes as a trip to space.

Kitchen’s father, a professor at UNC, traveled to space on a previous Blue Origin flight in 2022.

Along with Kitchen, the launch carried five other passengers, including Rob Ferl, the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment as part of a suborbital, commercial crew, and Eiman Jahangir, a cardiologist and professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. His seat was funded by MoonDAO, which aims to create a settlement on the moon. Other passengers included real estate and finance professional Eugene Grin, philanthropist and entrepreneur Nicolina Elrick, and tech entrepreneur Ephraim Rabin. The cost of seats on the flight was not disclosed.

Thursday’s mission represented the eighth human spaceflight for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company and the 26th flight overall for Blue Origin’s New Shepard program. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket resumed manned launches in May. The FAA had grounded the spacecraft following a midflight failure in 2022 during an unmanned research mission, Reuters reported.