Joe Skipper and Steve Gorman

VAN HORN (Reuters) – The eldest child of U.S. pioneer astronaut Alan Shepard will take a trip to space on Saturday aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin commercial rocketship. This is 60 years since her father’s famous suborbital NASA flight in the early days of the Space Age.

Laura Shepard Churchley is 74 years old and was in school when her father flew into space. She will liftoff on April 5, at 8:45 am Central (1445 GMT), from Blue Origin’s launch site near Van Horn, West Texas.

The crew will fly aboard the six-story tall, fully autonomous spacecraft New Shepard. It is designed to reach an altitude approximately 350,000 feet (106km) and then return to Earth via parachute landings on the desert floor.

Expect the entire flight to take just over 10 minutes from liftoff until touchdown. Crew members will experience a brief period of weightlessness near the top of the suborbital flight.

Alan Shepard is the name of the spacecraft. He was the first American and second person to go into space. The 15 minute suborbital flight was made by one NASA’s original “Mercury Seven” astronauts.

Shepard was commander of Apollo 14’s Apollo 14 mission ten years later. Shepard is famous for his two golf shots on the lunar surface.

Blue Origin chose Churchley to be one of its honorary guests, who are non-paying and will travel with Blue Origin on Saturday. Michael Strahan (50), a former star of the National Football League and co-anchor on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Four other wealthy, less-known customers paid an undisclosed, but likely substantial sum for the New Shepard seats. They include space executive Dylan Taylor and Evan Dick as well as Lane Bess, a venture capitalist, Lane Bess, his son Cameron Bess, and Lane Dick, a businessman. According to Blue Origin, the Besses will be history’s first parent-child tandem to fly together in space.

Saturday’s flight will reach 65-miles in height, just above the international boundary of space known as the Karman Line. This line is approximately 62 miles above Earth.

Blue Origin is the launch company for space tourism. It was formed by Bezos (founder and executive chairman, Amazon.com) two decades ago. This company also launched the first flight with six passengers.

Bezos accompanied his brother Mark Bezos and Oliver Daeman (a Dutch high school graduate, who was the winner of a $28million auction sweepstakes), on Blue Origin’s inaugural flight.

Actor William Shatner, who embodied the promise of space travel in his role as Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise on the 1960s TV series “Star Trek,” joined https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/star-trek-actor-shatner-poised-blue-origin-space-jaunt-2021-10-13 the second New Shepard crew in October to become the oldest person in space at age 90.

Richard Branson of the British Billionaire was nine days ahead of Bezos when he rode on the inaugural fully-crewed journey of Virgin Galactic Holding Inc’s space tourism venture, flying to the edge and over New Mexico with a rocket plane that had been released from a carrier aircraft at high altitude.

Elon Musk, another billionaire entrepreneur, launched SpaceX’s citizen-astronaut program in September. This included the launch of the first Earth-orbiting crew made up entirely of civilians.

(Repotting by Joe Skipper, Texas; Steve Gorman, Los Angeles; Editing By Rosalba Obrien