Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin yesterday sent a spaceship from its Van Horn, Texas base with Turkish businessman Gokhan Erdem, whose wife is Serbian, which is why he took the flags of Turkey and Serbia into space.
Thus, the flag of Serbia flew into space for the first time.
There were eight passengers on the New Shepard NS-34 flight, none of whom were astronauts.
After the successful missions of Turkish astronauts Alper Gezeravcı and Tuva Cihangir Atasever through the National Space Program, Gokhan Erdem is the third space traveler from Turkey.
Erdem is a member of the Board of Directors of Erdem Holding and became the first Turkish businessman in space and the first Turkish citizen to fly with Blue Origin.
New Shepard NS-34 took off at 2:30 p.m. Serbian time, and the broadcast could be followed live.
In addition to the flags of Turkey and Serbia, Erdem took the silhouette of the Bosphorus with him into space, as a symbol of his connections with Istanbul, as published on the Blue Origin website.
When it comes to the items that other passengers on the NS 34 mission symbolically took with them, there was a globe representing Arvi Bahal’s passion for travel and polar expeditions, the shape of Puerto Rico, as a symbol of the homeland of meteorologist Debora Martorel, and Mount Everest, which pays tribute to Lionel Pitchford’s decades of work in Nepal.
There is also a book that symbolizes the “J.D. Russell” foundation, founded in memory of his daughter, a banana, as a symbol of H.E. Justin Sun’s interest in conceptual art, and the sun, which symbolizes Debora Martorel’s meteorological past and the new beginnings of all crew members.
During the flight, Erdem and the other passengers crossed the internationally recognized boundary of space – the Kármán line (100 km above the Earth), experiencing microgravity and unique views of the Earth.
The entire flight lasted about 11 minutes, including ascent, capsule separation, free fall, and parachute landing.
This is the fourteenth manned flight of the New Shepard system. The capsule flight is completely autonomous and without a pilot.
It is a space system developed by Blue Origin for suborbital human flights, approximately 20 meters high, with a launch weight of about 35 tons.
The Ambassador of Serbia to the USA, Dragan Šutanovac, had previously received the Turkish businessman Erdem and his wife Jelena at the embassy in Washington.
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Source: Euronews; Photo: Printscreen Tanjug