Category Archives: Blue Origin

First Black astronaut candidate, now 90, reaches space in Blue Origin flight

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Ex-air force captain Ed Dwight, passed over by Nasa in 1961, now oldest person to reach edge of space with Jeff Bezo’s space firm

Sixty-one years since he was selected but ultimately passed over to become the first Black astronaut, Ed Dwight finally reached space in a Blue Origin rocket – and set a different record.

At 10.37am on Sunday, Jeff Bezos’s space company launched its NS-25 mission from west Texas, marking Blue Origin’s first crewed spaceflight since 2022 when its New Shepard rocket was grounded due to a mid-flight failure.

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‘We’ve experienced an anomaly’: Bezos’s latest Blue Origin launch fails

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New Shepard rocket fails shortly after launch, but uncrewed capsule jettisons successfully

An uncrewed rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, failed shortly after launch in Texas on Monday morning, a potential setback for the Amazon founder’s wider ambitions of sending humans into orbit.

The malfunction of the New Shepard booster, a type of rocket that is similar to the one Blue Origin has used this year to send three crews of up to six people on suborbital flights, came 1min 4sec after launch and just as the vehicle was reaching its maximum dynamic pressure, known as “max q”.

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To the moon and beyond: what 2022 holds for space travel

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From lunar missions to anti-asteroid defence systems, there are plenty of exciting scientific developments to look forward to

This year promises to be an important one for space exploration, with several major programmes reaching the launch pad over the next 12 months. The US is to return to the moon, undertaking a set of missions intended to establish a lunar colony there in a few years. China is expected to complete its Tiangong space station while Europe and Russia will attempt to land spacecraft on Mars, having failed at every previous attempt. India, South Korea and Japan are also scheduled to put a number of missions into space.

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Daughter of US astronaut rockets into space aboard Blue Origin spacecraft

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Laura Shepard Churchley, whose father, Alan Shepard, made history in 1961 as the first American to travel into space, was among the crew of six

The eldest daughter of pioneering US astronaut Alan Shepard took a joyride to the edge of space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket on Saturday, 60 years after her late father’s famed suborbital Nasa flight at the dawn of the Space Age.

Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into space, was one of six passengers buckled into the cabin of Blue Origin‘s New Shepard spacecraft as it lifted off from a launch site outside the west Texas town of Van Horn.

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Tech mogul who joined William Shatner in space on Blue Origin dies in air crash

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Glen de Vries and Thomas Fischer were aboard a single-engine Cessna that went down Thursday in northern New Jersey

A wealthy tech mogul who traveled to space with William Shatner last month was killed along with another person when a small plane crashed in northern New Jersey, according to state police.

Glen de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, New Jersey, were aboard a single-engine Cessna 172 that went down Thursday in a wooded area of Hampton Township.

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‘What a fool’: fellow actors criticise William Shatner’s space flight

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Dame Joan Collins and Brian Cox unimpressed by historic trip, saying ‘let’s take care of this planet first’

The Star Trek actor William Shatner’s recent historic space flight saw him boldly go where some fellow actors refuse to follow, as the nonagenarian was labelled a “fool” for taking part in his record-breaking jaunt.

Dame Joan Collins, who once appeared in an episode of the science fiction series, and the Succession star Brian Cox, are both unimpressed by Shatner, at 90, becoming the oldest person to travel into space when earlier this month he flew in a rocket built by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

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