Blue Origin achieves third manned space flight

A Blue Origin rocket completed a brief mission on Saturday, carrying six passengers into space, including Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of the first American to cross the final frontier in 1961.

It was the third manned flight for the space company of billionaire Jeff Bezos, who himself made the trip during the first launch in July.

The rocket took off at 9:01 a.m. local time from Texas for a flight that will last a few minutes. And its passengers landed at 9:12 a.m.

This is the first time that the New Shepard rocket capsule, aptly named after American space pioneer Alan Shepard, has operated to its maximum capacity. Previous flights had so far only counted four passengers.

Also on board were an American celebrity, television presenter and former professional American football player Michael Strahan, and four passengers who had paid for the trip: businessmen Dylan Taylor and Evan Dick, and a father and son. as a child, Lane and Cameron Bess, 23. The price of the ticket is not known.

They were only in space for a very short time, with Blue Origin’s suborbital flights lasting only about 11 minutes in total, from launch to landing.

The rocket takes off vertically and at about 75 km altitude, the capsule separates from the launcher, continuing its trajectory until reaching more than 100 km – the Karman line, which marks the beginning of space according to the convention. international.

Passengers can detach from their seats, float for a few moments in zero gravity, and admire the curvature of the Earth through very large portholes.

The launcher automatically returns to land on a runway, while the capsule begins a free fall to return to Earth, before being braked by parachutes, then retro rockets.

Alan Shepard had made a 15-minute space flight on May 5, 1961, 23 days after the historic flight of the Soviet Yuri Gagarin, who was the first human in space.

Alan Shepard is also the fifth of 12 men to have set foot on lunar soil to date. He died in 1998.