Daughter of groundbreaking astronaut Alan Shepard soars to place aboard Blue Origin rocket

VAN HORN, Texas, Dec 11 (Reuters) – The eldest daughter of revolutionary U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard took a joyride to the edge of space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocketship on Saturday, 60 yrs following her late father’s famed suborbital NASA flight at the dawn of the House Age.

Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into place, was a single of six travellers buckled into the cabin of Blue Origin’s entirely autonomous New Shepard spacecraft as it lifted off from a start web site exterior the west Texas city of Van Horn.

The crew capsule divided from the best of 6-story-tall rocket as it soared to an altitude of at least 62 miles (100 km) prior to falling again to Earth to descend underneath a canopy of three parachutes to the desert floor for a safe and sound landing.

The entire flight, from liftoff to landing, lasted just over 10 minutes, with the crew enduring a several minutes of weightlessness at the apex of the suborbital flight.

New Shepard’s reusable rocket booster flew alone back to Earth and touched down a brief distance from where by the capsule landed moments afterwards.

Bezos arrived with members of Blue Origin’s restoration group to greet and embrace the freshly minted citizen astronauts as they emerged from the capsule, all smiles, in their blue flight suits. He then pinned astronaut wings to each and every of their collars amid a flurry of applause and cheers.

As she chatted with Bezos, Churchley briefly recounted her question at seeing the blackness of area from within the capsule.

Voices of Churchley and her crewmates exclaiming pleasure at the ride could be listened to in audio transmissions from the capsule played all through a live launch webcast by Blue Origin as the car neared the climax of its flight.

The spacecraft by itself is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 created record as the second particular person, and to start with American, to travel into place – a 15-moment suborbital flight as a single of NASA’s unique “Mercury Seven” astronauts. A 10 years later on, Shepard walked on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, famously hitting two golfing galls on the lunar area.

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