Carsen Kitchen | University of North Carolina student selected as one of six for Blue Origin spaceflight to Kármán line

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (WTVD) — A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student will be making history in the coming months.

Fourth-grader Carsen Kitchen has been selected as one of six crew members to take part in Blue Origin's New Shepard 26 flight to the Kármán Line, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space.

The journey makes Kitchen the youngest woman ever to cross that boundary.

Kitchen is a Chapel Hill native and a double major in communications and astronomy at Carolina, according to Chapelboro.com.

Kitchen is an intern at Blue Origin, a commercial spaceflight company and manufacturer founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, previously worked a summer job at the University of North Carolina's Morehead Planetarium and recently founded Orbitel, a new initiative to encourage women to pursue space-related careers.

Other crew members selected by Origin Blue are Rob Phaar, director of the University of Florida's Astrauz Institute for Space Studies; cardiologist Dr. Aiman ​​Jahangir; philanthropist and entrepreneur Nikolina Elrich; investor Eugene Glynn; and entrepreneur Ephraim Rabin.

Kitchen's father, Jim Kitchen, a professor at the University of North Carolina Business School and local entrepreneur, was also a passenger on the New Shepard 20 spaceflight in early 2022.

Blue Origin said it will announce a launch date for New Shepard 26 and its crew later this year.