Mini '2001' monoliths fly into space on first flight of Blue Origin's 2nd crew ship

At left, a photo of a white rocket launching into a blue sky; at right, a closeup of a black monolith with the words "2001: a space odyssey" and a picture of a saturn-like planet on it.

A small stack of miniature black slabs modeled after the monoliths in the epic "2001: A Space Odyssey" have made the trip into space and back on the first flight of Blue Origin's second human-rated launch vehicle.

The blocks, which were flown for Spacemanic, a satellite mission integrator, in partnership with the Croatian publisher Amaranthine Books, lifted off and landed on Wednesday (Oct. 23), packed on board the New Shepard capsule "RSS Kármán Line." Flying atop a new booster, the uncrewed craft and its sci-fi-inspired payload flew above the 62-mile (100 kilometers) boundary between Earth and space, which was first proposed by Hungarian-American aerospace engineer Theodore von Kármán.

"As the pages of '2001: A Space Odyssey' unfold, so too does a cosmic journey that transcends the confines of Earth and literature, reaching for the stars in a way only possible through the imaginative collaboration of Spacemanic and Amaranthine Books," the companies stated in a release.