Michael Strahan and Alan Shepard’s daughter rocket to the edge of space

news7g12/12/2021

1 4 minutes read

Michael Strahan and Alan Shepard's daughter rocket to the edge of space

The team launched a Blue Origin suborbital space tourism rocket at 9:01 a.m. CT from the company’s launch facilities near the rural town of Van Horn, Texas, where Bezos owns a large ranch, and made a supersonic flight, lasting 10 minutes. more than 60 miles above the Earth’s surface before parachuting to land.

Strahan emerged beaming from the bedroom where he was greeted by Bezos.

“I want to go back,” he said. “Gs…not a facelift but a facelift. I know what I’ll look like at 85.”

Strahan and Laura Shepard Churchley, whose father Alan Shepard took a suborbital flight in 1961 and later walked on the moon, were accompanied by investors Dylan Taylor, Evan Dick and Lane Bess, as well as their child Bess’s adult, Cameron Bess – all the people who paid customers. Blue Origin states that Strahan and Shepard Churchley are “guests of honor”, like the last celebrity Blue Origin was sent to the edge of space, William Shatner, and not pay their way.

This flight marks the first time Blue Origin has filled all six seats on the New Shepard rocket and capsule, named after Alan Shepard. In the company’s two previous flights – including the July flight that launched Bezos into space – only four seats were used.

That means the passengers have slightly less cluttered seats than previous customers, especially Strahan, who is 6 feet, 5 inches tall.

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Strahan announced plans to join the flight in a segment above Good Morning America last month, noted that Blue Origin had him measure his flight suit and asked him to try on one of the New Shepard capsule seats to make sure he fit.

Strahan spent 15 seasons in the NFL, all with the New York Giants, where he won the Super Bowl with them in 2007. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014.

Going under orbit

The flight played out similarly to the one Shatner and Bezos took before him, spending less time on the ground than most people going to work in the morning.

Suborbital flights are vastly different from orbital flights of the kind most of us think of when we think of spaceflight. Blue Origin’s New Shepard flights are short trips, up and down, though they travel more than 62 miles above Earth, which some scientists see as marking the edge of outer space.

Orbital rockets need to generate enough power to reach at least 17,000 miles per hour, aka Mean orbital velocity, which essentially gives a spacecraft enough energy to continue orbiting the Earth instead of being immediately pulled down by gravity.

Suborbital flights require much less power and speed. That means less time for rockets to ignite, lower temperatures scorching the outside of the spacecraft, less force and compression to tear apart the spacecraft, and generally less chance of something going wrong.

New Shepard’s suborbital flights reached about three times the speed of sound – about 2,300 miles per hour – and flew upwards until the rocket consumed most of its fuel. The crew capsule then detaches from the rocket at the top of the orbit and continues upward briefly before the capsule nearly hovers at the top of the flight path, leaving the passengers with a few minutes of weightlessness.

The New Shepard capsule then deployed a large number of parachutes to reduce its landing speed to less than 20 mph before hitting the ground.

Big picture

This flight marks the third leg of what Blue Origin hopes will be more space tourism launches, sending wealthy clients to the edge of space. That could be a business that helps fund Blue Origin’s other, more ambitious space projects, including developing a 300-foot-tall rocket powerful enough to put satellites into orbit and landers. moon.

It’s unclear how much customers paying on Saturday’s flight spent on their seats. Blue Origin has not made the ticket prices public, although the company held an auction earlier this year to sell an extra seat with Bezos on his July flight.

The winner of that auction agreed to share a huge sum of money $28 million for the chair, but that still-anonymous individual opted out of the trip. Oliver Daemen, then 18, whose father was the runner-up in the ticket auction, entered instead.

Jeff Bezos & # 39; rocket company, Blue Origin, to take Michael Strahan to the edge of space

Taylor, who was traveling with Strahan and Shepard on today’s flight, told CNN Business he also entered the auction but didn’t win. However, Blue Origin later contacted him to offer him a seat. He declined to say how much he ended up paying for his ticket, noting that Blue Origin requires its passengers to sign non-disclosure agreements that prevent customers from talking about certain aspects of their tickets. launch episode.

But Taylor, chairman and chief executive officer of space investment firm Voyager, is committed Donate an equal amount to charity – including donations to organizations that promote space access for people with disabilities and provide scholarships to women and people of color in the aerospace industry.

Taylor wants other wealthy people who buy space flights to do the same, following the decision of billionaire Jared Isaacman, Shift4 CEO, to take a three-day trip to space on a rocket. SpaceX into a charity fundraiser for St. Jude to which Isaacman donated $200 million. .

That’s the model Taylor hopes people will follow. He said he would encourage his paying customers on Saturday’s Blue Origin flight to do the same.

“My guess is it’s going to be $300 or $400 million on commercial spaceflight over the next few years,” Taylor said. “And the people who can afford these tickets can buy twice as much, right? I mean, it’s not like they’ve spent their last dollar for a space ticket. So that’s why why? I want to make a call to action.”

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