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Daughter of the first US astronaut, Alan Shepard, blasted into space 60-years after her father did it. Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, was in school when her father Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. an American astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot, and businessman, in 1961, he became the second person and the first American to travel into space, and in 1971, he walked on the Moon.
Laura was one of six people to make the trip on board a commercial spacecraft launched by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company from a launch site outside the west Texas town of Van Horn. The passengers were briefly able to experience zero gravity on the sub-orbital flight.The flight was the third launched by Blue Origin in 2021 as it seeks to capture the space tourism market. Shepard Churchley’s father died in 1998. His Mercury flight took off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on 5 May 1961.
Having been delayed for two days by fierce winds, the flight finally blasted off from the company’s launch facility near the rural town of Van Horn, Texas.
The flight followed a similar path to previous rockets launched by the company, before landing in the Texas desert where the tourists were greeted.
Lasting for just over 10 minutes and reaching an altitude of around 62 miles (100km), it was five minutes and 116 miles shorter than Alan Shepard’s inaugural flight.
His daughter brought along a small piece of his capsule, as well as some mementos from his later trip to the lunar surface aboard Apollo 14 in 1971.
“I thought about Daddy coming down and thought, gosh he didn’t even get to enjoy any of what I’m getting to enjoy,” Shepard Churchley said.
The crew capsule was carried aloft atop the fully autonomous, six-story-tall spaceship and separated from the rocket booster as it soared to an altitude of about 350,000 feet (106 km) before falling back to Earth, descending under a canopy of parachutes to the desert floor for a safe landing.
The entire flight, from liftoff to touchdown, lasted a little over 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness at the apex of the suborbital flight.
The launch vehicle’s reusable rocket booster flew itself back to Earth and touched down in an open field of scrub a short distance from where the capsule landed moments later.
