The daughter of pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard ascends into space aboard the Blue Origin rocket

By Joe Skipper and Steve Gorman

VAN HORN, Texas (Reuters) – The eldest daughter of pioneering US astronaut Alan Shepard took a trip to the edge of space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spacecraft on Saturday, 60 years after the dawn of his late father’s famous NASA suborbital flight. Space Age.

Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, was a schoolgirl when her father first entered space when she was a schoolgirl, one of six passengers aboard the cabin of the fully-fledged New Shepard spacecraft in Blue Origin as it rose from a take-off site outside the city of West Texas. Horn.

The crew capsule separated from the top of the six-story rocket as it rose to a height of at least 62 miles (100 km) before falling to Earth, under a three-parachute grease, to land safely on the desert floor. .

The entire flight, from take-off to touch, lasted just over 10 minutes, and the crew had a few minutes of weightlessness at the apex of the suborbital flight.

The reusable New Shepard rocket propeller flew to Earth and touched the capsule a short distance from where it landed.

Bezos arrived with members of the Blue Origin recovery team to greet and embrace the renewed urban astronauts as they stepped out of the capsule, smiling, with their blue jets. He then placed the wings of the astronauts on each necklace, amid applause and encouragement.

While chatting with Bezos, Churchley briefly recounted his astonishment at the blackness of the space inside the capsule.

The voices of Churchley and his teammates shouted excitement on the ride as Blue Origin was heard on the audio transmissions of the capsule played on the live launch webcast as the vehicle approached the top of the flight.

The spacecraft is named after Alan Shepard, the second person to make history in 1961, and the first American to travel into space with a 15-minute suborbital flight as one of NASA’s original “Mercury Seven” astronauts. A decade later, Shepard flew to the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, and became famous for hitting two golf guns on the moon’s surface.

“I feel like I’m following in my father’s footsteps,” Churchley said in pre-recorded notes before the flight. “I feel like he’s here with me.”

CITIZEN ASTRONAUTS

Churchley Blue Origin was one of two honorary and unpaid passengers selected for Saturday’s flight. The other was Michael Strahan, 50, a retired National Football League star and contributor to ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

They were joined by four wealthy clients who paid large sums for their New Shepard seats: space industry director Dylan Taylor, engineer-investor Evan Dick, venture capitalist Lane Bess and 23-year-old son Cameron Bess. Besses made history as the first parent-child couple to fly into space together, according to Blue Origin.

The flight set a record number of people in space at a time – 19 in total – including seven crew members and three visitors from the International Space Station and three newly built Chinese taikonauts on its newly built space station, according to Harvard-Smithsonian. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell.

The launch is the third flight of Blue Origin, a company founded two decades ago by Bezos – the founder and CEO of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ :). It was the company’s first with a crew of six passengers.

No mention was made of the deadly partial collapse of the roof on the Blue Origin launch webcast https://www.reuters.com/world/us/injuries-reported-after-roof-collapse-amazon-warehouse-illinois-ap-2021- 12-11 At an Amazon.com warehouse, a tornado was struck by a tornado in Edwardsville, Illinois on Friday night or searched for people trapped in the rubble.

Bezos himself was tagged on the original flight of Blue Origin https://www.reuters.com/technology/jeff-bezos-worlds-richest-man-set-inaugural-space-voyage-2021-07-20 in July with his brother doing. , Mark Bezos, octogenarian female aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daeman, a Dutch high school graduate and winner of a $ 28 million auction draw.

Actor William Shatner, who starred in the 1960s Star Trek TV series and starred in the 1960s “Star Trek” TV series as Captain T. T. Kirk, was introduced to https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/star . -trek-actor-shatner-poised-blue-origin-space-jaunt-2021-10-13 The second crew of the New Shepard group became the oldest person in space in October at the age of 90.

British billionaire Richard Branson beats Bezos in a fistfight for nine days https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/virgin-galactics-branson-ready-space-launch-aboard-rocket-plane-2021- 07-11 Virgin Galactic Holding Inc on its first space tourism company trip on a high-altitude rocket launcher from a high-altitude aircraft to the edge of space in New Mexico.

A third player in the growing space tourism sector, a millionaire businessman Elon Musk, inaugurated his SpaceX citizen-astronaut service in September, launching the first full-civilian crew https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/spacex -capsule- with-worlds-first-all-civilian-orbital-crew-set-splashdown-2021-09-18 ever to reach Earth orbit.

(Report by Joe Skipper in Van Horn, Texas, and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Edited by Daniel Wallis and Bill Berkrot)