Engineer will be second Brazilian to go into space

Production engineer Victor Correa Hespanha, 28, will be the second Brazilian to go into space. Not as a space agency astronaut but as a tourist. The flight does not yet have a date, but it will take place soon, later this year, aboard a New Shepard capsule, from the American company Blue Origin, on the NS-21 mission, the fifth to take people. Like the previous ones, it will be a suborbital trip. With the flight, Hespanha will become the first Brazilian space tourist. Before him, only then astronaut Marcos Cesar Pontes, as a representative of the Brazilian Space Agency, had been to space, in 2006. On that occasion, Pontes carried out a work mission at the International Space Station, traveling aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. The Brazilian astronaut spent ten days in space. And does he feel ready to fly? "I think I'll only feel ready when I'm on board and with the rocket taking off," Hespanha told , laughing. Contrary to what one might imagine, Hespanha did not enter this as one of the tycoons to go to space. On the contrary, he was the winner of a lottery. Hespanha won the trip after investing in an NFT (acronym for Non-Fungible Token), something like a unique property that only exists in the virtual world, from the Crypto Space Agency. The investment would give him the right to participate in a draw, and Hespanha was the winner. "I bought it thinking about the potential for appreciation, I never imagined that I would be drawn. I'm fulfilling a childhood dream through an NFT. The chip is still dropping," he adds.