Controversial crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun finally got his suborbital ride into space today from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, four years after he put in the winning $28 million bid for a seat.
Five other spacefliers were alongside with Sun when Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship rose from its launch pad at the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 7:43 a.m. CT (5:43 a.m. PT) for a 10-minute trip.
When Sun emerged from the crew capsule, he made a thumbs-up gesture, then stepped down to kiss the ground.
“I wished to go into space since I was a child, and after almost 30 years, it’s come true,” Sun said on Blue Origin’s webcast. “For this mission I waited four years, but we finally delivered it. I really appreciate Mr. Bezos and his team to make it possible. … This is my first commitment and step to space, and we will have more.”
Sun is the founder of a blockchain venture called Tron and an adviser to HTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. When the 35-year-old, Chinese-born billionaire won Blue Origin’s space auction in 2021, it was meant to guarantee him a spot on New Shepard’s first crewed flight that summer. Instead, Sun put his reservation on hold, reportedly due to scheduling conflicts.
While Sun was waiting for his flight, legal complications arose: In 2023, he became the subject of a federal investigation over alleged market manipulation and unregistered sales of crypto asset securities. But that case was put on hold in February, and a couple of months later, Sun earned a place of prominence at a crypto dinner with President Donald Trump by purchasing the biggest share of the $TRUMP meme coin.
Last month, Tron Inc. became a publicly listed company on Nasdaq.
Today’s mission, known as NS-34, marked the 34th flight and 14th crewed flight for Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital space program. This flight followed the standard profile for crewed missions: The autonomously controlled, reusable rocket ship’s hydrogen-fueled booster sent the crew capsule to an altitude of 65.7 miles (105.7 kilometers), just above the 100-kilometer Karman Line that marks the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.
At that height, the NS-34 crew members experienced a few minutes of zero gravity and got an astronaut’s-eye view of Earth beneath the black sky of space. Then, at the end of the ride, they made a parachute-assisted touchdown not far from their launch pad.
Sun’s five crewmates for NS-34 reflected varied backgrounds. Here’s the list:
- Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal is a real-estate investor and adventurer who was born in Agra, India, and is now a naturalized U.S. citizen.
- Gökhan Erdem is a Turkish business executive and a board member of Erdem Holding, a diverse group of companies operating in the energy, telecommunications, construction and manufacturing sectors.
- Deborah Martorell is a Puerto Rican meteorologist and journalist. Her reporting on environmental and space topics has garnered eight Emmy Awards and two Awards of Excellence in Science Reporting from the American Meteorological Society.
- Lionel Pitchford is an Englishman who has spent the last four decades in Spain working as a teacher, translator and tour guide. He is the founder of a nonprofit in Nepal dedicated to serving disadvantaged children and girls, and has run an orphanage in Katmandu for more than 30 years.
- James (J.D.) Russell is the founder of Alpha Funds, a technology-focused venture capital company; and Alpha Aerospace, an aerospace consulting and solutions company. He first flew to space on Blue Origin’s NS-28 mission last November.
“It was an honor to see so many nations represented on our flight today,” Phil Joyce, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for the New Shepard, said in an online recap of today’s mission. “The view of our fragile planet from space has a unifying effect on all who witness it, and I am always eager to see how our astronauts use this experience for the benefit of Earth.”
Blue Origin has now sent 75 people on suborbital space trips, including Russell and four other people who have taken multiple trips. The company doesn’t typically reveal how much its customers are paying for their flights. Sun’s case is the rare exception, due to the fact that the 2021 auction was conducted publicly.
Sun’s $28 million fare went to Blue Origin’s nonprofit educational foundation, the Club for the Future. Most of that money was distributed in the form of million-dollar grants to 19 space-focused nonprofits.
In addition to the crew, today’s flight carried more than 1,500 digital postcards and 16,000 physical postcards for the Club for the Future’s “Postcards in Space” program, which collects messages from students around the world. Sun set up his own “To the Sun” program to collect messages — and carried more than 1,000 of those messages into space on a thumb drive.
Sun’s space ride isn’t his only notable purchase: Last December, he made headlines when he spent $6.2 million to purchase a work of conceptual art featuring a banana that was duct-taped to a wall — and then ate the banana.
And for what it’s worth, Sun isn’t the only controversial crypto figure to take a trip on New Shepard. In February, Blue Origin withheld the identity of one of its spacefliers on the NS-30 mission. An analysis of photos and references to the flier in public records, including the Federal Aviation Administration’s list of spaceflight participants, suggested that the mystery man was an Australian crypto entrepreneur named Russell Wilson (not to be confused with the former Seahawks quarterback).
In response to emailed inquiries, a Blue Origin representative told GeekWire that the company works with a third party to accept crypto payments for spaceflights.
