This morning, as the sun climbed over a private spaceport in rural West Texas, a six-story-tall rocket lit its engines and lifted off, carrying a spacecraft with four people on board—the first passengers to ride Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket to the top of the sky. The rocket hurtled star-ward, and at about 250,000 feet the crew capsule separated from the booster and continued to the edge of the atmosphere, while the rocket fell back to Earth and executed a controlled vertical landing. 

As the capsule climbed, the crew members unbuckled their seatbelts and floated in weightlessness for a few minutes, whooping excitedly as they took in the views out the windows. At 351,210 feet, not quite