![]() ![]() ![]() The former 600-foot cargo ship has been harboured in Pensacola since 2018, waiting for a retrofit. Pensacola Ship Jacklyn for Rocket Landing However, now Blue Origin is re-evaluating whether the ship will be as cost-effective for New Glenn booster recovery as the company thought at first. Jeff Bezos renamed the ship, which has been waiting for a retrofit since 2018, after his mother back in December 2020. Kirk of the starship Enterprise on the 1960s TV series Star Trek, joined the second New Shepard crew in October to become the oldest person in space at age 90.īritish billionaire Richard Branson beat Bezos to the punch by nine days when he rode along on the first fully crewed voyage of his own space tourism venture Virgin Galactic Holding Inc, soaring to the edge of space over New Mexico in a rocket plane released at high altitude from a carrier jet.Ī third player in the burgeoning space tourism sector, fellow billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, inaugurated his SpaceX citizen-astronaut service in September with the launch of the first all-civilian crew ever to reach Earth orbit.Blue Origin may reconsider using Pensacola ship Jacklyn for New Glenn rocket landing. The launch marks the third space tourism flight for Blue Origin, the company Bezos - founder and executive chairman of retail giant Amazon - formed two decades ago, and the company's first with a crew of six passengers.īezos himself tagged along on Blue Origin's inaugural flight in July, joining his brother, Mark Bezos, trailblazing octogenarian female aviator Wally Funk, and 18-year-old Oliver Daeman, a Dutch high school graduate and beneficiary of a $28 million auction sweepstakes.Īctor William Shatner, who embodied the promise of space travel in his role as Captain James T. Saturday's flight is expected to reach a maximum height of about 106 kilometers - just above the internationally recognized boundary of space, the Karman Line, which is roughly 100 kilometers above Earth. The Besses are set to make history as the first parent-child pair to fly in space together, according to Blue Origin. They are joined by four lesser-known, 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 other is Michael Strahan, 50, a retired National Football League star and co-anchor of ABC television's Good Morning America show. 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 15-minute suborbital flight as one of NASA's original 'Mercury Seven' astronauts.Ī decade later, Shepard walked on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, famously hitting two golf galls on the lunar surface.Ĭhurchley is one of two honorary, non-paying guest passengers chosen by Blue Origin for Saturday's flight. The entire flight, from liftoff to touchdown, is expected to last a little over 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness at the very apex of the suborbital flight. They will be flying aboard the crew capsule of a fully autonomous, 6-story-tall spacecraft dubbed New Shepard, designed to soar to an altitude of about 106 kilometers before falling back to Earth for a parachute landing on the desert floor. Central time (1445 GMT) from Blue Origin's launch site outside the rural west Texas town of Van Horn. Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into space, is one of six individuals due for liftoff at 8:45 a.m. astronaut Alan Shepard is set for a ride to the edge of space aboard Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin commercial rocket ship on Saturday, 60 years after her late father's famed suborbital NASA flight at the dawn of the Space Age. ![]()
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