New Shephard: Tourists To Space:
Last week, Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos’s space company called Blue Origin concluded the online auction for the first seat on New Shephard, a rocket system meant to take tourists to space. The seat went for a winning bid of $28 million.
- Blue Origin is an American privately-funded aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company headquartered in Kent, Washington.
- It was founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the founder, and chief executive officer of Amazon.
New Shephard
- New Shepard is blue origin’s reusable suborbital rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line – the internationally recognized boundary of space.
- New Shephard has been named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shephard – the first American to go to space.
- Alan Shepard was an American astronaut.
- In 1961, he became the second man and the first American to travel into space, and in 1971, he walked on the Moon.
- Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States, running from 1958 through 1963.
