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Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

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  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen
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Blue Origin’s latest launch brings it close to sending humans to space Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2274834-blue-origins-latest-launch-brings-it-close-to-sending-humans-to-space/#ixzz6sqYvIQ59

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 SPACE 15 April 2021

By Leah Crane

New Scientist Default Image

The New Shepard booster after returning to the landing pad on 14 April

Blue Origin

Blue Origin, the space flight company founded by Jeff Bezos, has completed what may be its last test flight before attempting to put astronauts aboard its New Shepard rocket. On 14 April, the US-based company launched the spacecraft – without a crew – to just past the edge of space and then returned it to the ground.

This marked the second successful Blue Origin test flight in 2021. Before the launch, four of the company’s executives acted as “stand-in astronauts”, doing everything that actual passengers would do before flying aboard New Shepard.

They climbed to the top of the launch tower, got into the capsule, buckled in and checked the communications systems. Then they closed the hatch briefly before reopening it and getting out before the launch. For the flight, a test dummy nicknamed Mannequin Skywalker sat in the capsule.

Read more: Blue Origin assembles space industry dream team to build moon lander

The rocket flew about 100 kilometres up before releasing the crew capsule and returning to a landing pad near the launch site in Texas. The capsule spent about 3 minutes in microgravity before coming back down, its descent slowed by a set of parachutes.

Blue Origin hasn’t announced when the first crewed New Shepard flight will be, only saying that it will bring passengers to space “soon” during an online livestream of the launch. “Even if it’s not the next flight, it seems like they will have people onboard in the next few,” says space analyst Laura Forczyk. “We’ve all been wondering what’s been holding them up with their crewed flights, and maybe nothing is now.”

Those first passengers will probably be Blue Origin employees rather than paying customers until the company establishes a track record of safety with crewed flights, she says. “Eventually the crew will be tourists and researchers, and astronauts may be able to train for missions in lower gravity in one of these suborbital vehicles.”

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Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2274834-blue-origins-latest-launch-brings-it-close-to-sending-humans-to-space/#ixzz6sqZ0oGem

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