Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, takes Good Morning America host to the edge of space
Liftoff is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on December 9 from Blue Origin launch facilities near the rural town of Van Horn, Texas.
This flight will mark the first time Blue Origin has filled all six seats on the rocket and the New Shepard capsule. In the company’s two previous flights – including the July flight that launched Bezos into space – only four seats were used.
That means passengers will have a little less room to mess around than previous customers, especially Strahan, who is 6 feet, 5 inches tall.
Strahan spent 15 seasons in the NFL, all with the New York Giants, where he won the Super Bowl with them in 2007. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014.
The flight will follow a similar configuration to that of Shatner and Bezos’ flight before him, taking just 10 minutes to land.
Suborbital flights are vastly different from orbital flights of the kind most of us think of when we think of spaceflight. Blue Origin’s New Shepard flights will be short trips, up and down, though they will travel more than 62 miles above Earth, which is considered by many to be the edge of outer space.
Suborbital flights require much less power and speed. That means less time for rockets to ignite, lower temperatures scorching the outside of the spacecraft, less force and compression to tear apart the spacecraft, and generally less chance of something going wrong.
The New Shepard capsule then deployed a large number of parachutes to reduce its landing speed to less than 20 mph before hitting the ground.
