Blue Origin announces the replacement of Pete Davidson for its upcoming space tourism mission

Davidson, who became a A prop of intrigue entertainment Amid his relationship with Kim Kardashian and feud with Kanye West, he was scheduled to travel as an invited guest alongside five paying clients aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. But when Blue Origin announced last week that it had to postpone that flight — from March 23 to March 29 — for additional ground tests on the rocket, the company also announced that Davidson could no longer join the mission.

Lai, who has been out of Blue for 18 years and holds several patents related to New Shepard’s rocket design, will fly alongside five previously announced paying customers. Among them is Marty Allen, an investor and Former CEO of Party Supply Store; Jim Kitchen, businessman and business professor; George Nield Former Co-Director for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation; Mark Hagel, Ann Orlando real estate developer and his wife, Sharon Hagel, who founded a non-profit organization focused on space.

After years of quiet development, the Blue Origin space tourism rocket took off for the first time last year with Bezos, flying alongside Space Society heroine Wally Funk, as well as his brother Mark Bezos and a. Customer pays.

Blue Origin’s goal is to make these suborbital spaceflights a mainstay of pop culture, giving invited guests – who were hitherto mostly celebrities – a 10-minute supersonic entertainment flight – and anyone else who could afford it.

Prior to this month’s flight, Blue Origin passengers will spend a few days training at Blue Origin’s facilities in West Texas prior to flight day, where they will board the New Shepard crew capsule atop the rocket. After takeoff, the missile will exceed the speed of sound, and will separate from the capsule near the top of its flight path. As the booster rocket returns toward Earth for an upright landing, the manned capsule will continue to rise 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 provide panoramic views of Earth.

As gravity begins to pull the capsule back toward the ground, occupants will once again experience intense G forces before deploying sets of parachutes to slow the vehicle. Then it will descend at less than 20 mph in the Texas desert.

Since flights are sub-orbital – meaning they don’t generate enough speed or take the correct trajectory to avoid instantaneous erosion downward by Earth’s gravity – the entire flight will only take about 10 minutes.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of the name Gary Lai.