Strahan joins the 66-mile-high club
It’s one small step for Blue Origin; one Giant leap for Michael Strahan.
The former football star-turnedTV personality was launched into space Saturday on Jeff Bezos’ commercial spacecraft, along with the daughter of one of NASA’s pioneers.
The headliners on the flight were Strahan and Laura Shepard Churchley, the eldest daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Four others paid their way on the Amazon head’s space project.
The craft lifted off from Van Allen, Texas, went 66 miles in the air and glided to a desert landing on parachutes 10 minutes later.
“TOUCHDOWN has a new meaning now!!!” Strahan tweeted after landing. The defensive standout scored two TDs in his Hall of Fame career that focused on keeping the opponent out of the end zone.
The flight was originally supposed to leave Thursday, but high winds sacked those plans the way Strahan sacked quarterbacks in his sterling Giants career.
Strahan retired after helping the Giants stun the 18-0 New England Patriots in Super Bowl
XLII in 2008.
The jock-turned-“Good Morning America” host posted a video after the flight, saying, “Wow! That’s all I can say. Wow!”
Shepard Churchley is used to “wow” moments in her family. Her dad became the first American in space on May 5, 1961, a 15-minute suborbital flight on the Project Mercury craft he called Freedom 7.
On Saturday, his 74-year-old daughter invoked her dad’s phrase “Let’s light this candle” before she and her fellow travelers blasted off.
“I thought about Daddy coming down and thought, ‘Gosh he didn’t even get to enjoy any of what I’m getting to enjoy,’” Shepard Churchley said back on Mother Earth. “He was working. He had to do it himself. I went up for the ride!”
The paying customers on Saturday’s flight were financier Lane Bess and his son Cameron, Voyager Space Chairman and CEO Dylan Taylor and investor Evan Dick.
It was the last scheduled launch of a year that has seen deep-pocketed entrepreneurs Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Bezos all get their commercial-launch businesses off the ground.