Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin on Thursday launched six people to space, including the first from Egypt and Portugal, on the company's sixth crewed flight.

Mission "N-22" saw the New Shepard suborbital rocket blast off around 8:58 am local time (1358 GMT) from Blue's base in the west Texas desert.

The autonomous, re-usable vehicle sent its crew capsule soaring above the Karman line, the internationally recognized space boundary, 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level.

"I'm floating!" a crew mate could be heard saying on a livestream, as the capsule coasted to its highest point and the passengers experienced a few minutes of weightlessness.

Both the rocket and capsule separately returned to the base—the latter using giant parachutes—completing the mission around 11 minutes after lift-off.

NASA has yet to get its next-generation moon rocket off the ground, but this week announced a shift in how it plans to pay for future launches while also falling under a new directive from Congress to increase the number of flights each year.

Artemis I, a combination of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, is set to roll out from Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building on Aug. 18 to Launch Pad 39-B ahead of a potential liftoff as early as Aug. 29. The uncrewed test flight will send Orion on a mission that could last up to 42 days traveling more than 1 million miles including several orbits around the moon.

The primary goal is to sign off on Orion's ability to support crew for future missions, including testing a heat shield that can endure the stresses of an intense re-entry.

"Orion will come home faster and hotter than any spacecraft has before," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during a press conference Wednesday. "It's going to hit the Earth's atmosphere at 32 times the speed of sound.