Daughter of US astronaut rockets into space aboard Blue Origin spacecraft
The eldest daughter of pioneering US astronaut Alan Shepard took a joyride to the edge of space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket on Saturday, 60 years after her late father’s famed suborbital Nasa flight at the dawn of the Space Age.
Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into space, was one of six passengers buckled into the cabin of Blue Origin‘s New Shepard spacecraft as it lifted off from a launch site outside the west Texas town of Van Horn.
The crew capsule at the top of the fully autonomous, six-story-tall spaceship soared to an altitude of about 350,000ft (106km) before falling back to Earth, descending under a canopy of parachutes to the desert floor for a gentle landing.
The entire flight, from liftoff to touchdown, lasted a little over 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness at the apex of the suborbital flight.
Voices of Churchley and her crewmates exclaiming excitement at the ride could be heard in audio transmissions from the capsule played during a live launch webcast by Blue Origin as the vehicle neared the climax of its flight.
The spacecraft itself is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 made history as the second person, and the first American, to travel into space – a 15minute suborbital flight as one of Nasa’s original “Mercury Seven” astronauts. A decade later, Shepard walked on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, famously hitting two golf balls on the lunar surface.
Churchley was one of two honorary, non-paying guest passengers chosen by Blue Origin for Saturday’s flight. The other is Michael Strahan, 50, a retired National Football League star and coanchor of ABC television’s Good Morning America show.
They were joined by four lesserknown, wealthy customers who paid undisclosed but presumably hefty sums for their New Shepard seats: space industry executive Dylan Taylor, engineer-investor Evan Dick, venture capitalist Lane Bess and his 23-year-old son, Cameron Bess. The Besses made history as the first parent-child pair to fly in space together, according to Blue Origin.
Saturday’s flight was expected to reach a maximum height of about 65 miles – just above the internationally recognized boundary of space known as the Karman Line, roughly 62 miles (100 km) above Earth.
The launch marks the third space tourism flight for Blue Origin, the company Bezos, founder and executive chairman of retail giant Amazon.com, formed two decades ago, and the company’s first with a crew of six passengers.