Hans Koenigsmann<\/strong>: A few years ago, Michi asked me for some help in finding donations for a parabolic flight. I basically just pointed her at OHB, and they gave her a little donation for the travel costs she had, and it was good. Then I met her again at a drone competition in Munich, where I was invited to be a juror. I was told I could invite friends and family. She and somebody else were the only people who I knew in Munich. So I just invited them, and she came there. And because the drones were kind of lame, we started talking about other things.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Then she kind of asked me, \u201cDo you think I could be an astronaut?\u201d I mean, technically, you don\u2019t need your legs, and so on and so forth. When I realized that she meant New Shepard, I said, \u2018Well, let me talk to people I know.\u2019 So I called Audrey Powers (a Blue Origin engineer), and she said she loved the project. In a very subtle and slippery slope, I thought about this and said, \u201cActually, I think I can do this, too.\u201d<\/p>\n The logic, for me, is that it doesn\u2019t keep me from flying orbital. I\u2019ve thought about this for a long time now because obviously I\u2019m a risk person, so all kinds of things go through my head, right? And then there\u2019s SpaceX and Blue, and all kinds of things go through my head there, too. So I talked to a lot of people, and there was not a single person who said, \u201cNo, you shouldn\u2019t do that.\u201d Yeah? That doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s right. But I asked people I\u2019m not friends with, too, and they all said, \u201cWell, why not?\u201d So that\u2019s how we ended up on this mission together.<\/p>\n Ars<\/strong>: What were your primary concerns about flying yourself?<\/em> Was it safety? Was it the fact that you worked for SpaceX for 20 years and you were going to fly on Blue Origin?<\/em><\/p>\n Hans Koenigsmann<\/strong>: All of the above. I don\u2019t know what they did for safety. I know what SpaceX did for safety. So I talked to a few people who worked there. And it all came down to the point that they would all fly on New Shepard. But for me, the ultimate discriminator is if you would let your children fly on it. And later, when we met them, I asked a lot of technical questions on the safety side, and I feel like they answered the majority of them thoughtfully and correctly. So on the safety side, I felt better after a while.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Benthaus and Koenigsmann pose in front of a New Shepard capsule.<\/p>\n Credit: Ars<\/strong>: And the fact that you worked at SpaceX for two decades?<\/em><\/p>\n Hans Koenigsmann<\/strong>: On the SpaceX side, I wondered what it would look like for me to fly on Blue. Would it look like I was telling SpaceX to F-off or something like that? I ran this by Gwynne [Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX]. She was fine with it. I ran it by other people. There\u2019s also another guy at SpaceX who flew on Virgin Galactic (Andy Sadhwani, a SpaceX propulsion engineer). I talked to Andy. And he contributed a lot to this. Because I was thinking, \u201cI really want to go orbital, but this is just a little jump.\u201d But Andy said, \u201cNo, it was awesome. It was really amazing.\u201d So I thought maybe I should be a little bit more open to a hop on this thing. I figured maybe this is just the first step toward an orbital flight.<\/p>\n Ars<\/strong>: Another big difference is that you have to train for months for an orbital mission. But this is like a couple of days, so there\u2019s a lot less time commitment.<\/em><\/p>\n Hans Koenigsmann<\/strong>: I wouldn\u2019t even mind doing that kind of training. For New Shepard, it literally boils down to, like, four or five things that you need to memorize and learn. For me, it was a little bit different because I\u2019m basically in charge of Michi\u2019s safety.<\/p>\n Ars<\/strong>: What are you most looking forward to?<\/em><\/p>\n Hans Koenigsmann<\/strong>: I\u2019ve always been interested in experiencing Max Q from the inside. Does it shake you side to side? Or is it just something you fly through so fast you don\u2019t even notice it? None of the astronauts I\u2019ve talked to really had a good report on that. So I want to find this out for myself. I also want to be able to say that I saw that Earth is a sphere. I just want to see the whole thing from above and get an idea of how big it really is in terms of curvature, right? Because you can extrapolate the curvature all the way around, and it gives you a great idea of how small we are and how big the planet is.<\/p>\n Ars<\/strong>: We can\u2019t wait to hear all about it when you get back.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hans Koenigsmann is one of SpaceX\u2019s earliest, longest-tenured, and most-revered employees. When Elon Musk started the company in 2002, he was joined by two other \u201cfounding\u201d employees, Tom Mueller in propulsion and Chris Thompson in structures. Koenigsmann was the next hire, brought on to develop avionics for the Falcon 1 rocket. Koenigsmann remained at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/hans-and-michi.jpg\")
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\n Hans Koenigsmann\/LinkedIn<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n