By Obinna Ezenwa
Jeff Bezos’ Jeff Bezos’ rocket company announced on Monday that Pete Davidson, the Saturday Night Live Star who has become a pillar of entertainment intrigue amid his relationship with Kim Kardashian, will fly alongside five paying customers on Blue Origin’s 60-foot-tall New Shepard rocket.
The launch is slated for March 23 at 8:30 am CT, according to Blue Origin. The announcement came after it was confirmed earlier that Davidson was in talks with the company for a seat aboard its supersonic rocket, which launches vertically from a rural Texas launch pad on Bezos’ ranch.
After years of quiet development, Blue Origin’s space tourism rocket made its crewed launch debut last year with Bezos, flying alongside a heroine of the space community, Wally Funk, his brother Mark Bezos and a paying customer.
Since then, Blue Origin has been making headlines for flying other well-known names on two subsequent flights, including Star Trek star William Shatner and Good Morning America host Michael Strahan.
Blue Origin’s goal is to make these suborbital spaceflights a mainstay of pop culture, giving a 10-minute supersonic joy ride to welcomed guests which thus far have mostly been celebrities and anyone else who can afford it.
Davidson will be joined on his flight by five paying customers. They include Marty Allen, an investor and the former CEO of a party supply store; Jim Kitchen, an entrepreneur and business professor; George Nield, a former associate administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration Office of Commercial Space Transportation; Marc Hagle, an Orlando real estate developer and his wife, Sharon Hagle, who founded a space-focused nonprofit.
The crew will spend a few days training at Blue Origin’s facilities in West Texas before the flight day, when they will climb into the New Shepard crew capsule that sits atop the rocket. After liftoff, the rocket will tear past the speed of sound, and near the top of its flight path, will detach from the capsule. As the rocket booster heads back toward the Earth for an upright landing, the crewed capsule will continue soaring higher into the atmosphere to more than 60 miles above the surface where the blackness of space is visible and the capsule’s windows will offer sweeping views of the Earth.
