Then she kind of asked me, “Do you think I could be an astronaut?” I mean, technically, you don’t need your legs, and so on and so forth. When I realized that she meant New Shepard, I said, ‘Well, let me talk to people I know.’ So I called Audrey Powers (a Blue Origin engineer), and she said she loved the project. In a very subtle and slippery slope, I thought about this and said, “Actually, I think I can do this, too.”
The logic, for me, is that it doesn’t keep me from flying orbital. I’ve thought about this for a long time now because obviously I’m a risk person, so all kinds of things go through my head, right? And then there’s SpaceX and Blue, and all kinds of things go through my head there, too. So I talked to a lot of people, and there was not a single person who said, “No, you shouldn’t do that.” Yeah? That doesn’t mean that it’s right. But I asked people I’m not friends with, too, and they all said, “Well, why not?” So that’s how we ended up on this mission together.
Ars: What were your primary concerns about flying yourself? Was it safety? Was it the fact that you worked for SpaceX for 20 years and you were going to fly on Blue Origin?
Hans Koenigsmann: All of the above. I don’t know what they did for safety. I know what SpaceX did for safety. So I talked to a few people who worked there. And it all came down to the point that they would all fly on New Shepard. But for me, the ultimate discriminator is if you would let your children fly on it. And later, when we met them, I asked a lot of technical questions on the safety side, and I feel like they answered the majority of them thoughtfully and correctly. So on the safety side, I felt better after a while.
First Appeared on
Source link
