In mid-June, Blue Origin auctioned off the fourth and final seat on RSS Next Step, for the astronomical sum of $28 million. Daemen was a later addition to the manifest the company revealed his participation just last Thursday (July 16). (Challenger's STS-8 flight, which launched that August, carried Guion Bluford, the first African American to reach space.)įunk takes the oldest-spaceflyer mantle from John Glenn, who launched at the age of 77 in October 1998 on the STS-95 mission of the shuttle Discovery, decades after becoming the first American to reach orbit.īlue Origin announced on July 1 that today's flight would include Funk. The agency didn't fly a female astronaut to space until June 1983, when Sally Ride reached orbit on the space shuttle Challenger's STS-7 mission. Passengers including Wally Funk exiting the New Shepard capsule on July 20, 2021. Back then, you had to be a man - and more specifically, a white military man - to be a NASA astronaut. She's one of the ' Mercury 13,' women who passed NASA's physiological screening tests in the early days of the space age but were never seriously considered for flight.

The off-Earth journey was a dose of long-overdue justice for Funk. In addition, Alan Shepard's daughters Laura and Julia were on hand to witness the flight.īlue Origin made some history of its own today, and not just for the company annals: Funk and Daemen became the oldest and youngest people, respectively, ever to reach the final frontier. Bezos and his crewmates carried with them a piece of canvas from the plane that the Wright Brothers flew for the first time in 1903 a medallion from the first hot-air balloon flight, in 1783 and a pair of goggles that once belonged to Amelia Earhart. There were many nods to history on the flight today as well. Both of those dates were chosen advisedly: May 5 was the 60th anniversary of Shepard's pioneering flight, and July 20 is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.īezos has often cited Apollo 11 as a big inspiration, saying that his dreams of spaceflight were born when he watched the historic lunar landing at the age of five. Related: Blue Origin's launch with Jeff Bezos: Everything you need to knowīlue Origin announced the July 20 target on May 5. On July 11, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson flew on the first fully crewed flight of the VSS Unity space plane, which is operated by Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin's chief rival in the suborbital space tourism business. I can hardly wait to go again.'īezos became the second billionaire to reach space in less than two weeks. 'My expectations were high, and they were dramatically exceeded.'įunk said that she 'loved every minute of it,' even though there wasn't quite enough room in New Shepard for all four of the passengers to do rolls and flips simultaneously. 'Oh my god!' Bezos said during a post-flight press conference today. But it was doubtless the experience of a lifetime for the four passengers.

Its descent was punctuated by a deafening sonic boom, along with raucous cheers from the Blue Origin workers here who watched the flight.Īll of this action, from liftoff to landings, took just over 10 minutes. The rocket also returned safely, making a vertical, powered touchdown at its designated landing zone.

The capsule carried Bezos, 57, his brother Mark, 53, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Dutch physics student Oliver Daemen 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) above Earth, then came down for a parachute-aided, dust-raising landing in the West Texas scrublands. Blue Origin’s New Shepard lifts-off from the launch pad carrying Jeff Bezos along with his brother Mark Bezos, 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, and 82-year-old Wally Funk on Jin Van Horn, Texas.

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