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WASHINGTON: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company successfully completed the third human spaceflight – the first with six astronauts on board, including the daughter of the first American astronaut.
“We had a great flight today. This was our sixth flight in what has been a great year for the New Shepard program. We flew 14 astronauts to space, flew a NASA payload flight that tested lunar landing sensors and completed our certification test flights,” said Bob Smith, CEO Blue Origin.
The stubby white spacecraft with a round tip blasted off into clear blue skies over West Texas for a roughly 11-minute trip to just beyond the internationally recognized boundary of space, 62 miles (100 kilometres) high.
The six-member crew hooted with glee as they unbuckled to enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness, looking out at space through tall windows in the capsule. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” one unidentified crew member said as Blue Origin live-streamed the flight.
The capsule quickly returned to Earth for a gentle parachute landing in the desert, kicking up a cloud of dust as it touched down. Bezos and other company officials rushed to greet the crew members as they emerged smiling from the capsule. The booster rocket touched down separately and also safely.
Laura Shepard-Churchley, whose father Alan Shepard became the first American to travel to space in 1961, flew as a guest of Blue Origin. The company’s suborbital rocket is in fact named “New Shepard” in honour of the pioneering astronaut.
Michael Strahan, an American football Hall of Famer turned TV personality, was also a guest, while there were four paying customers: space industry executive and philanthropist Dylan Taylor, investor Evan Dick, Bess Ventures founder Lane Bess, and Cameron Bess.
Lane and Cameron Bess became the first parent-child pair to fly in space. Ticket prices have not been disclosed.
Previous Blue Origin flights took the company’s billionaire founder Bezos as well as Star Trek actor William Shatner to space. Bezos, who made his fortune with Amazon, envisages a future in which humanity disperses throughout the solar system, living and working in giant space colonies with artificial gravity.
The year 2021 has been significant for the space tourism sector, with Virgin Galactic also flying its founder Richard Branson to the final frontier, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX sending four private citizens on a three-day orbital mission for charity.
