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Football star and television celebrity Michael Strahan caught up on space travel with Jeff Bezos’ rocket launch company on Saturday and shared the journey with the daughter of America’s first astronaut.
blue originThe New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and dispatched the capsule on a 10-minute flight with two VIP guests and four paying customers. Its capsules soared to an altitude of about 66 miles, providing several minutes of weightlessness before parachuting into the desert. The booster also successfully returned to land.
It was five minutes and 50 miles shorter than Alan Shepard’s May 5, 1961 flight of Mercury from Cape Canaveral. Her eldest daughter, Laura Shepard Churchley, received a small piece of the Freedom 7 capsule and memorabilia from Apollo 14 and golf balls in honor of her father who hit the lunar surface.
Overflowing with excitement in his “Good Morning America” updates all week, Strahan packed his Super Bowl ring and retired the New York Giants’ #92 jersey. “Pretty Surreal!” tweeted on the eve of the launch, two days late due to dangerously high winds. Bezos also hid a soccer ball in the capsule to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame after the flight.
Flying into space in the same capsule in July, Bezos escorted six passengers to the launch pad near Van Horn. “Light this candle,” he wrote on the bridge of the launch tower, borrowing from Alan Shepard’s famous complaint inside Freedom 7: “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”
Shepard Churchley volunteered blue originthird passenger flight. He chairs the board of trustees of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.
“It’s kind of funny to me to say that an original Shepard will fly in New Shepard,” he said at a preflight. blue origin video.
Bezos, who founded Amazon six years ago blue originwas at its first launch in July. The second in October featured actor William Shatner – Captain James Kirk from TV’s original “Star Trek.” The late Leonard Nimoy’s daughter sent a necklace with the “Vulcan Salute” amulet on this flight in honor of the show’s original Mr. Spock.
The reusable, automated capsule was particularly crowded this time. Instead of four, there were six flying.
Among the four space tourists, each paying indeterminate millions, was the first father-son combination: Financier Lane Bess and her son, Cameron. Also flying: Voyager Space president and CEO Dylan Taylor and investor Evan Dick.
blue origin Saturday’s launch is dedicated to Glen de Vries, who was sent into space with Shatner in October but died in a plane crash a month later.
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