Co-founder of Planet Labs announced as the first of four customers on Blue Origin’s second human flight.
San Francisco, CA, September 27, 2021 — Dr. Chris Boshuizen will soon become the third Australian to fly to space when he boards an upcoming Blue Origin New Shepard flight with three other passengers.
Dr. Chris Boshuizen will join fewer than 20 non-professional astronauts who have been to space after he launches to space on New Shepard from Blue Origin’s launch site in west Texas. Traveling above the Kármán Line, the international boundary of space, fulfills a lifelong dream for the space pioneer, who has worked for two decades to make space flight more accessible.
“I have always wanted to make space travel as easy as catching a bus, and so I am excited to be one of the first passengers,” says Boshuizen. “I hope spaceflight becomes cheap enough in the future that everyone can have a chance to look down on the Earth from space.”
Chris’s initial attempt to find a path to space ended abruptly when he was rejected from pilot school at the Australian Defence Force Academy at age 17 when his admissions test showed that he was partly colour blind. Instead, Chris studied physics and mathematics at University of Sydney, completing a PhD and later organizing the Space Generation Congress, an annual gathering of the space youth of the world.
His stewardship of the Congress eventually led to the NASA Ames Research Center in California, where Chris worked on a number of programs, including a lunar lander and one of the earliest electric airplanes. His most influential project was the invention of the NASA Phonesat, an orbital satellite composed of an entire smartphone. The Phonesat demonstrated that low-cost, high value activities were within reach of regular citizens.
The success of Phonesat inspired Chris to co-found Planet Labs in 2010, in order to further reduce the costs and complexities of spacecraft. The company, where Chris was Chief Technology Officer for 5 years, has launched over 450 satellites, which would have cost over a billion dollars with conventional satellite technology. Today, Chris is a Partner at the venture capital firm DCVC, where he continues to follow his vocation by funding and growing startups that are democratizing space flight.
Chris is also an avid musician and DJ, writing and producing music from his home studio in San Francisco and performing as Dr Chrispy.
Follow Chris’s journey to space at https://drchrispy.com
For all press inquiries contact Dylan McLaren, Founder and CEO , Content Merchants (Pty) Ltd: dylan@contentmerchants.com
For more information on Blue Origin and their New Shepard vehicle, visit: https://www.blueorigin.com/
Or contact Caitlin Dietrich, Director, Public Relations: media@blueorigin.com
Additional Links
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drchrispymusic
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cboshuizen & https://twitter.com/drchrispymusic
Dr Chrispy Music: https://drchrispy.com/spotify