(NEXSTAR) – Blue Origin sent six more people to the edge of space on its New Shepard rocket on Thursday morning. The launch, dubbed Mission NS-38, lifted off from the company’s West Texas launch site at 10:25 a.m. CST. The crew reached their apogee in the spacecraft mere moments later, before returning back to Earth by approximately 10:36 a.m. (Viewers can watch the launch on YouTube.) The crew of Mission NS-38 included: Tim Drexler, a pilot and the CEO of Ace Asphalt; Dr. Linda Edwards, an avid traveler and retired obstetrician/gynecologist; Alain Fernandez, a real estate developer and former scuba instructor; Alberto Gutiérrez, an entrepreneur who founded the travel experiences company Civitatis; and Jim Hendron, a retired Air Force colonel and the founder of Hendren Plastics. Earlier this week, Blue Origin also announced that Laura Stiles, the director of New Shepard Launch Operations for Blue Origin, was launching into space with the crew of NS-38, replacing a previously announced passenger who dropped out “due to illness.” “Laura is also a skydiving instructor and holds 2 World Records in large-formation skydiving,” Blue Origin wrote of Stiles in a recent blog entry. “She recently began her journey toward becoming a fixed-wing pilot.” Thursday’s launch was the 17th crewed Blue Origin flight to ferry passengers into space. The previous mission, NS-37, was successfully completed just over a month ago on Dec. 20, 2025. Blue Origin often boasts that its New Shepard spacecraft brings its crew past the Kármán line, which is recognized as the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, a Swiss-based governing body and record-keeping organization. For years, Blue Origin has also maintained that the Kármán Line is the threshold that separates Earth’s atmosphere from space. In 2021, Blue Origin made this opinion known when Virgin Group founder Richard Branson successfully rocketed to an altitude of approximately 282,000 feet, or over 53 miles, on a Virgin Galactic space plane called the VSS Unity. At the time, Blue Origin further suggested that Branson and his fellow astronauts would need “asterisks” next to their names. “From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line, so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” the company wrote on X (then Twitter). “For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line.” The boundary between Earth and “space,” meanwhile, is not clearly defined. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell has proposed the boundary should be lower, at around 80 kilometers up, arguing that satellites can survive certain elliptical orbits that dip to this height. But NASA heliophysicist Doug Rowland said it’s tough to demarcate where “space” begins, because Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t necessarily stop at any single point, but instead “just gets less and less dense the higher you go.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) further pointed out that a spacecraft would have to travel 600 miles above Earth to escape the planet’s atmosphere completely — meaning that the International Space Station (orbiting between 205 and 270 miles up) wouldn’t even be considered as being in proper “space,” either. “When you go to where the Space Station is — only a couple of hundred miles above the Earth — there’s still enough air there to slow the Space Station down. And if you didn’t re-boost it with rockets, it would come back to Earth based on the air drag,” Rowland said.