Blue Origin announced plans April 4 for its first crewed New Shepard flight in more than 18 months, a mission that will give an opportunity for America’s first Black astronaut candidate to finally go to space.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...