Laura Shepard Churchley, the eldest daughter of pioneering U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard, blasted off aboard Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin commercial space tourism rocket on Saturday, 60 years after her late father's famed suborbital NASA flight at the dawn of the Space Age.
Shepard Churchley was one of six passengers buckled into the cabin of the New Shepard spacecraft as it lifted off from a launch site in west Texas, including Michael Strahan, a National Football League (NFL) Hall-of-Famer and co-anchor of ABC's "Good Morning America" show.
The entire flight from liftoff to touchdown was expected to last a little over 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness at the very apex of the suborbital flight.
The spacecraft itself is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 made history as the second person, and the first American, to travel into space - a 15-minute suborbital flight as one of NASA's original "Mercury Seven" astronauts. A decade later, Shepard walked on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, famously hitting two golf balls on the lunar surface.
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