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. When I realized she was talking about New Shepard, I said, “Well, let me talk to the people I know.” So I called Audrey Powers (a Blue Origin engineer), and she told me she loved the project. On a very subtle, slippery slope, I thought about this and said, “Actually, I think I can do that too.”
The logic, to me, is that this doesn’t stop me from flying into orbit. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time now because I’m obviously an at-risk person, so all kinds of things are going through my head, right? And then there’s SpaceX and Blue, and all kinds of things are going through my head there too. So I talked to a lot of people, and no one said, “No, you shouldn’t do that.” Yeah? That doesn’t mean it’s true. But I’ve also asked people I’m not friends with, and they’ve all said, “Well, why not?” This is how we found ourselves together on this mission.
Ars:WWhat were your main concerns about flying yourself? Was it security? Was it the fact that you worked for SpaceX for 20 years and 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 has done for security. So I talked to a few people who worked there. And it all came down to the point that they would all fly New Shepard. But for me, the ultimate discriminator is letting your kids fly on it. And later, when we met with them, I asked a lot of technical questions on the security side, and I feel like they answered the majority in a thoughtful and correct way. So in terms of safety, I felt better after a while.
