The eldest daughter of pioneering U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard blasted off aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin industrial area tourism rocket on Saturday, 60 years after her late father’s famed suborbital NASA flight on the daybreak of the House Age.
Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into area, was considered one of six passengers buckled into the cabin of Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft because it lifted off from a launch website exterior the west Texas city of Van Horn.
The crew capsule on the high of the absolutely autonomous, six-story-tall spaceship is designed to soar to an altitude of about 350,000 ft (106 km) earlier than falling again to Earth, descending beneath a cover of parachutes to the desert ground for a delicate touchdown.
The whole flight, from liftoff to landing, was anticipated to final a little bit greater than 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a couple of minutes of weightlessness on the very apex of the suborbital flight.
The spacecraft itself is known as for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 made historical past because the second particular person, and the primary American, to journey into area—a 15-minute suborbital flight as considered one of NASA’s authentic “Mercury Seven” astronauts. A decade later, Shepard walked on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, famously hitting two golf galls on the lunar floor.
Churchley was considered one of two honorary, non-paying visitor passengers chosen by Blue Origin for Saturday’s flight. The opposite is Michael Strahan, 50, a retired Nationwide Soccer League star and co-anchor of ABC tv’s “Good Morning America” present.
They had been joined by 4 lesser-known, rich prospects who paid undisclosed however presumably hefty sums for his or her New Shepard seats—area trade government Dylan Taylor, engineer-investor Evan Dick, enterprise capitalist Lane Bess and his 23-year-old son, Cameron Bess. The Besses made historical past as the primary parent-child pair to fly in area collectively, in accordance with Blue Origin.