Blue Origin, the space travel company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has announced its next flight to suborbital space. This time around, the passengers include Pete Davidson who’s in the news for hosting one of Saturday Night Live’s best episodes and for dating billionaire Kim Kardashian, angel investor Marty Allen, Sharon Haigle and her husband – CEO of Tricor Marc Haigle, Dr George Nield – founder of Commercial Space Technologies, and entrepreneur Jim Kitchen.
Following the announcement, Pete Davidson will be the second star to visit space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard after William Shatner who visited space via Blue Origin’s space flight last year. Reports have it that Pete Davidson had been in talks with Blue Origin to visit space since early this month.
Unlike David, his other crewmates are individuals with high net worth and philanthropists with a connection to STEAM and space education. For instance, Dr George Nield of Commercial Space Technology isn’t only a founder of a space-related entity, he also once served at the FAA office and his responsibilities included licensing and regulating commercial space flight. His journey to space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard will give him a first-hand experience of space.
The flight is scheduled for March 23rd at a take-off time of 08:30 a.m. CDT (09:30 a.m EDT), according to the company’s website.
When completed, the flight scheduled for March 23rd will be Blue Origin’s third successful flight. The second flight made history for taking the oldest person to ever land in space, to space, and came three months after the first. The flight had William Shanter from Sci-fi movie series ‘Start Trek’; Blue Origin’s Vice President of New Shepard Operations Audrey Powers; Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of satellite imagery company Planet Labs and the co-founder of Medidata Solutions Glen de Vries. The New Shepard rocket (NS-18) took off from Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas at 10:49 a.m. ET. According to a tweet from the company, the rocket peaked at an estimated altitude of 107 kilometres, reached 2,235mph (3,597kph) and landed 10 minutes and 15 seconds after liftoff with the crew which were held in the crew capsule – RSS First Step, experiencing four minutes of weightlessness.
The company’s inaugural flight had the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, 82-year-old pioneering female aviator Wally Funk, and then high school graduate and space nerd Oliver Daemen, 18.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
