Four years after he put in a precedent-setting $28 million bid for a suborbital space trip, crypto billionaire Justin Sun is due to fly on the next mission planned by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.
Sun and five other people were listed today as participants in Blue Origin’s NS-34 mission, which will be the company’s 14th crewed spaceflight. The date for liftoff from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas hasn’t yet been announced.
In a posting to the X social-media platform, Sun said he was “proud to join Blue Origin’s NS-34 mission and continue encouraging youth to pursue their dreams in science and space.” And in a follow-up posting, Sun claimed the title of “the youngest Chinese commercial astronaut.”
It’s been a long and not-always-smooth road to space for Sun, the 34-year-old founder of the Tron blockchain venture.
Until recently, Sun was the subject of a federal investigation over alleged market manipulation and unregistered sales of crypto asset securities. 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.
It’s not clear what impact Sun’s travails have had on the timing of his spaceflight. Back in 2021, Sun was the winning bidder in an auction for a seat on Blue Origin’s first crewed flight, which was set for later that year. However, Blue Origin said soon afterward that the winner — who at that time was anonymous — had to pass up the first flight due to scheduling conflicts.
When Sun was revealed as the winning bidder in late 2021, Blue Origin said that he’d fly in late 2022. At the time, Sun said he would bring along five hand-picked “space warriors” for a mission he called “Sea of Stars,” but that part of the plan apparently went by the wayside (along with the timeline that Sun originally had in mind).
Sun’s five crewmates for NS-34 reflect 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.
The NS-34 crew members are officially next in line to lift off from Launch Site One aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket ship. If all goes according to plan, they’ll experience zero gravity and get an astronaut’s-eye view of Earth beneath the black sky of space, during an autonomously controlled flight that typically lasts about 10 minutes. At the end of the ride, they’ll make a parachute-assisted touchdown not far from their launch pad.
Blue Origin 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. Blue Origin said the $28 million from Sun’s bid went to its nonprofit foundation, the Club for the Future. The foundation, in turn, selected 19 space-focused nonprofits to receive grants amounting to $1 million each.
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).
We’ve emailed inquiries to Blue Origin relating to the backgrounds of Sun and Wilson, and will update this report with anything we can pass along. For what it’s worth, we’ve also asked Blue Origin about its current policy on crypto purchases.