Introducing RSS First Step

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is fortunate to care for and display examples of some of the most historically significant human spacecraft, from NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules, to Space Shuttle Discoveryand Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne. Soon, the Museum will welcome another important vehicle, which represents a new way for non-professional astronauts to access space. 

Reusable Space Ship (RSS) First Step, Blue Origin’s autonomous crewed suborbital spacecraft, carries up to six people, including paying and sponsored passengers, from the West Texas desert to space and back. The New Shepard crew capsule launches on a reusable New Shepard booster, which is powered by one BE-3PM engine. The crew capsule reaches an apogee of over 62 miles (100 kilometers), known as the Kármán line, allowing crew and any onboard experiments to experience three to four minutes in microgravity. The 11-minute flight follows a similar profile to the 1961 Mercury-Redstone 3 mission flown by Alan Shepard (the program’s namesake). The capsule descents to Earth under parachutes while the booster autonomously navigates back to its landing pad.  

RSS First Step is among a cohort of privately operated spacecraft (including SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Virgin Galactic’s Virgin Space Ship Unity) that are changing pathways to space. For the first twenty years of United States human space exploration, only NASA astronauts could access space. Although astronaut selection criteria have changed over time, they have always privileged military flying experience and advanced education in science, engineering, mathematics, or medicine—career paths that have not historically been equally accessible to all. 

Beginning with the space shuttle program in the 1980s, the space agency opened flights to a limited number of other individuals, including payload specialists and special guests, such as congressional observers. By 2001, US company Space Adventures began helping private citizens purchase trips to the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Today, private companies offer a fast track to space for individuals with the means to buy a seat. Suborbital space travelers have indicated they paid between $250,000 to over $1 million for their spaceflights.  

Since 2021, RSS First Step has carried 43 first-time astronauts across the Kármán line and back to Earth. Each traveler has a deeply personal and unique reason for going to space. To these crewmembers, RSS First Step is more than a spacecraft—it’s a dream maker. And for some of them, those dreams were especially long held. 

Pilot, flight instructor, and flight safety professional Wally Funk first set her sights on space in 1960. She volunteered to participate in unofficial tests to assess women’s physical and psychological fitness for spaceflight at the Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Despite the superb performance of Funk and other participants in the privately funded “Woman in Space Program,” NASA did not integrate women into the astronaut corps at that time, citing the urgent effort of beating the Soviet Union to the Moon. Yet Funk never gave up on her dream of spaceflight. She sought out additional training on her own, including at US Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, in the 1990s and at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, in the early 2000s. In July 2021, at the age of 82, Funk at last realized her dream in RSS First Step as a member of the NS-16 mission. Funk flew as a guest of crewmate and Blue Origin founder, Jeff Bezos. 

Ed Dwight, a retired US Air Force test pilot and prolific sculptor, became the oldest person in space at age 90 in May 2024. In 1963, at the request of the Kennedy White House, Dwight joined the US Air Force’s Aerospace Research Pilot School, which was understood to be a pipeline to NASA’s astronaut corps. Many people expected him to become America’s first Black astronaut candidate, an expectation established because NASA featured Dwight in public affairs campaigns. Ultimately, Dwight left the Air Force in 1966—his dreams of space thwarted by a culture of exclusion. Space for Humanity, a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding humanity’s access to space, sponsored Dwight’s spaceflight as part of the NS-25 mission.

RSS First Step’s flights have broadened the demographics of spaceflight. At 18 years old, Oliver Daemen of the Netherlands joined Funk and Jeff and Mark Bezos on the NS-16 mission as the youngest space traveler. Karsen Kitchen, age 21, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, flew as a member of the NS-26 crew in August 2024. She became the youngest woman in space and is also the daughter of NS-20 crewmember Jim Kitchen. Other notable “firsts” include the first astronauts from Egypt (Sara Sabry, NS-22) and Portugal (Mário Ferreira, NS-22), as well as the first Mexican-born woman in space (Katya Echazarreta, NS-21). 

RSS First Step is still in service. When the vehicle retires, it will continue to spark space dreams at the National Air and Space Museum. Visitors will be able to see RSS First Step on display in the forthcoming Futures in Space gallery. Until then, a full-size mockup of the spacecraft will be included in the exhibition, which will open by 2026.