Blue Origin successfully launched its 60-foot-tall New Shepard rocket into suborbital space, 66.5 miles above the Earth. (Image Credit: Blue Origin)
On July 20th, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and three other crewmates successfully reached suborbital space aboard the New Shepard rocket, setting a landmark for the space tourism industry. At 9:11 a.m. EDT, the autonomous 60-foot-tall New Shepard rocket, carrying a capsule, launched from Launch Site One near Van Horn, West Texas. The entire journey, from liftoff to landing, took only ten minutes.
Along with Jeff and Mark Bezos, those aboard the capsule included 82-year-old Mercury 13 aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old Dutch physics student Oliver Daemen. They ascended 66.5 miles above the Earth, more than nine miles higher than Branson's July 11th launch, before landing in the West Texas scrublands. The rocket also accelerated to Mach 3 before separating and making a safe vertical landing at its specified landing zone.
Bezos and his guests experienced several minutes of weightlessness, allowing them to float inside the window-filled capsule. The capsules landed safely with the help of parachutes, with Bezos and the three others experiencing 6G's on their descent.
The parachute-aided capsule safely landed back on Earth with Jeff Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen. (Image Credit: Blue Origin)
Two crewmates also made history during today's launch: Funk and Daemon became the oldest and youngest to reach space. For Funk, this ambition was long overdue. In 1969, Funk joined the Women in the Space program, which aimed to launch women in space but never actually happened. This ran alongside NASA's mercury program that trained seven men who reached space and put women through the same tests to determine how they fared. Funk was one of the women who passed the tests but wasn't considered for the flight. That's because you had to be male for NASA astronaut considerations. Then, in 1979, NASA announced it accepted female astronaut candidates.
However, after applying four times, NASA denied Funk because they felt she was too old. This didn't stop her from reaching space. In 2010, she put down a deposit to fly aboard Richard Bensons's Virgin Galactic spacecraft. Instead, she flew with Bezos. Funk set the new oldest-person-to-reach-space record, a feat originally held by John Glenn, who launched in October 1998 aboard the shuttle Discovery when he was 77 years old.
Daemon was meant to participate in the second flight. In mid-June, the fourth and final seat was auctioned off for $28 million, but the winner had to drop out due to a scheduling conflict. Daemen's father, Somerset Capital Partners CEO Joes Damien, paid for the seat, allowing his son to fly. It's unclear how much the ticket cost.
Sanjal Gavande, a system engineer at Blue Origins, is among the team of engineers who developed the New Shepard rocket. The 30-year-old woman from Maharashtra's Kalyan graduated from the University of Mumbai, where she studied mechanical engineering. In 2011, she moved to the US to obtain her master's degree in mechanical engineering from Michigan Technological University. She chose aerospace as a subject in her master's, clearing it with a first-class. Ultimately, her goal was to build a spacecraft. Later on, Sanjal Gavande applied for a space engineering job at NASA but got denied due to citizenship issues. Then, in April 2021, she began working for Blue Origin as a systems engineer.
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