San Francisco : Blue Origin on Monday announced that its fourth human flight for the New Shepard programme will include Saturday Night Live fame Pete Davidson.
This NS-20 flight, which is the 20th in the Jeff Bezos-owned company’s history, is tentatively slated for liftoff at 8.30 a.m. CDT (7 p.m. IST) on March 23, from Launch Site One in west Texas.
Besides Davidson, the crew flying includes angel investor Marty Allen, nonprofit founder Sharon and her husband Tricor CEO Marc Hagle, entrepreneur Jim Kitchen, and Dr. Commercial Space Technologies founder George Nield.
Davidson is Blue Origin’s second star passenger, after Star Trek fame William Shatner took a trip with the commercial space company last year.
The typical 11-minute flight will carry the crew members far above the Karman line – an internationally recognised boundary of space that lies 62 miles (100 km) above the Earth’s surface.
The company stated that each astronaut on board NS-20 will carry a postcard to space on behalf of Blue Origin’s foundation Club for the Future, whose Postcards to Space programme gives students access to space on its rockets.
The Club’s mission is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM for the benefit of Earth.
Blue Origin’s third flight to suborbital space took place in December, last year. It was the first to carry six astronauts to space, as the last two missions carried only four.
The company blasted off its first human flight on July 20, while the second flight to space occurred on October 13, last year.
–IANS