near van horn, lindsey riser in our own mission control with a closer look at the new shepherd rocket, dr. may gemson, a former nasa astronaut and the first black woman in space and back with us, leroy chiou the former commander of the international space station, and garrett riseman and dr. jose hernandez. let s start with tom, good morning, tom, do we know anything about this delay, why the delay? reporter: hang on one second. i m going to give you an answer. it looks like the it looks like we ve resumed the countdown, guys. so they were going through the checklist, pardon me for listening to the voice of mission control, which is actually blue origin. this was a vehicle readiness issue. it was not weather-related. it was not atc-related. this was vehicle readiness, something on that checklist kind of had them pause for a while, but they just as you came to me, they were picking up the countdown again, so i think
to get the best solutions for climate change, for people working together by bringing diverse minds, colors, genders, races together, we ll solve these problems. dr. gemson, let me bring you into the conversation again. folks that aren t space geeks may not recall that it was you in 1992 who broke the color barrier, there s a fantastic picture from september of 1992. and it was also, we should point out, the first group of astronauts selected to travel out of this world after the challenger, ploegs. explosion. so after you land, you come back down to earth. you re all amped up. what do you feel like when you return from space? how do you return to some semblance of normalcy? i m going to clean some stuff
billionaires love space, it would be great to see billionaires take this kind of will and competitive spirit to solving something else like climate change. solve it, rich boys. stephanie, great to have you as always live there in west texas. i know we ll see more of you throughout our coverage. we ll get to the news conference as soon as it begins. we expect it to start at any minute. until we do, i want to bring in a couple expert who is know everything about this. dr. may gemson is back with us, a former nasa astronaut, the first african-american woman to have traveled to space. also leading that starship project working toward human flight. it s great to see both of you on this big morning. let me start with you here. what s the message jeff bezos needs to deliver when he takes to the podium at the news conference moments from now that you haven t heard from him so far? what do you think?
he said we re going to probably detach at 40,000 feet. it ended up 45,000 to 50,000 feet. he s the big picture guy who has been just so excited about putting this all together. and what you re hearing behind me is the voice, the show that virgin is putting on as they approach that 45,000 level where they detach from the mothership. may gemson, you trained for this thing, you know the only way peter remembers whether tom or i were on the flight with him if you threw up. humans are trying not to throw up. you trained for this stuff. these six people on the flight are going to go through this motion. they ll be weightlessness and then that craft will start to come down toward earth literally as peter described with the help of gravity. what does it feel like? think about being on a big rollercoaster. as you re going up, as you ve