First daughter of American astronaut Alan Shepard booked for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceflight
Alan Shepard, father of Laura Shepard Churchley, was the first American to go into space in 1961.
USA:
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is set to send his third private crew to space on Saturday, this time including the daughter of the first American astronaut.
Cosmic light will lasted about 11 minutes, launched from the company’s base in Texas and ascended just beyond the internationally recognized boundaries of space, to an altitude of 62 miles (100 km).
The six-member crew will relax and enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness before the spacecraft returns to Earth for a gentle parachute landing in the desert.
The launch date has been pushed back due to high winds, but has now been set for 8:45 a.m. local time (1445 GMT) on Saturday.
Laura Shepard Churchley, whose father Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space in 1961, will fly as a guest on Blue Origin.
The company’s suborbital rocket is in fact named “New Shepard” in honor of the pioneering astronaut.
Michael Strahan, a TV personality of American football’s Hall of Famer, is also a guest, while there are four paying clients: space industry executive and philanthropist Dylan Taylor, investor Evan Dick, founder of Bess Ventures Lane Bess and Cameron Bess.
Lane and Cameron Bess will become the first father-son duo to fly into space. Ticket prices have not been disclosed.
Shepard Churchley, who runs a science promotion and fundraiser for college students, said in a video: “It’s fun when I say that an original Shepard will fly over New Shepard. “I’m very proud of my father’s legacy.”
Alan Shepard performed a 15-minute suborbital space flight on May 5, 1961, less than a month after the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the planet.
Shepard, who died in 1998, was the fifth of twelve men to have set foot on the Moon.
Previous Blue Origin flights have carried the company’s billionaire founder Bezos as well as Star Trek actor William Shatner into space.
Bezos, who has made his fortune with Amazon, envisions a future in which humanity is dispersed throughout the solar system, living and working in giant space colonies with artificial gravity.
According to him, this will make the Earth a pristine tourist destination like the national parks today.
2021 is significant for space tourism, with Virgin Galactic also taking founder Richard Branson to its final frontier and Elon Musk’s SpaceX sending four private citizens on an extended orbital mission three days for charity.
The industry’s growth projections mean that, starting next year, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Friday that it will stop giving out astronaut wing badges to commercial astronauts. trade, although they will continue to recognize them on their website.
“The Astronaut Wings Program, created in 2004, served its original purpose of drawing additional attention to this exciting endeavor,” said FAA Deputy Administrator Wayne Monteith. in a statement.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
