She kind of asked me, “Do you think I could be an astronaut?” I imply, technically, you do not require your legs, and so on etc. When I recognized that she suggested New Shepard, I stated, ‘Well, let me talk with individuals I understand.’ I called Audrey Powers (a Blue Origin engineer), and she stated she liked the task. In an extremely subtle and domino effect, I thought of this and stated, “Actually, I think I can do this, too.”

The reasoning, for me, is that it does not keep me from flying orbital. I’ve believed about this for a long time now since undoubtedly I’m a threat individual, so all kinds of things go through my head? And after that there’s SpaceX and Blue, and all examples go through my head there, too. I talked to a lot of individuals, and there was not a single individual who stated, “No, you shouldn’t do that.” Yeah? That does not imply that it’s. I asked individuals I’m not pals with, too, and they all stated, “Well, why not?” That’s how we ended up on this objective together.

Ars: What were your main issues about flying yourself? Was it security? Was it the truth that you worked for SpaceX for 20 years and you were going to fly on Blue Origin?

Hans Koenigsmann: All of the above. I do not understand what they provided for security. I understand what SpaceX provided for security. I talked to a couple of individuals who worked there. And everything boiled down to the point that they would all fly on New Shepard. For me, the supreme discriminator is if you would let your kids fly on it. And later on, when we fulfilled them, I asked a great deal of technical concerns on the security side, and I seem like they addressed most of them attentively and properly. On the security side, I felt much better after a while.