History was made high above Earth’s atmosphere on June 29, 2025, as Chief Owolabi Salis, a distinguished Nigerian philanthropist and legal practitioner, became the first Nigerian to travel into space.

Salis was one of six passengers aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard NS-33 mission, which successfully launched from the company’s West Texas facility. The suborbital flight lasted just over 10 minutes but reached past the Kármán line — the internationally recognized boundary of space, 100 kilometers above sea level — cementing Salis’s place in both Nigerian and global aerospace history.

A proud Yorùbá man, Chief Salis has long been a vocal advocate for education, equity, and youth empowerment. His journey into space is a symbolic leap not only for Nigeria but for the African continent at large — where representation in space exploration has remained limited.

The New Shepard NS-33 mission, developed by Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company Blue Origin, is part of a growing movement in commercial space travel, opening access to non-career astronauts for the first time in history. While previous space milestones have typically featured astronauts from national space agencies, Salis’s participation signals a new era of civilian and African involvement in spaceflight.