Space and Physics
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Pete Davidson, Saturday Night Live star and newly found nemesis of Kanye West, will be blasted into space later this month by Jeff Bezos’ space tourism venture Blue Origin.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Blue Origin announced today the crew flying on its upcoming NS-20 flight, set to take off from Launch Site One in West Texas on March 23. The comedian will be joined by five other crew members: Marty Allen, husband and wife duo Sharon and Marc Hagle, Jim Kitchen, and Dr George Nield.
Blue Origin keeps quiet about the price for a ticket to fly on New Shepard (it’s likely to be in the millions of dollars) but Davidson is reportedly flying for free as “an honorary guest,” according to Gizmodo.
This will be Blue Origin’s fourth human suborbital flight. Their first human flight rocketed off in July 2021, with Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos onboard alongside his brother, plus legendary aviator Wally Funk. Since then, a number of big names have joined their ranks, including Captain Kirk himself: William Shatner.
The flight will last around 11 minutes. Onboard a New Shepard launch vehicle, the crew will travel over three times the speed of sound to pass the Kármán Line at 100 kilometers (62 miles) above Earth's surface, where it will depart from the reusable rocket and float weightless for several minutes. The crew will descend back to Earth with the help of a parachute attached to their vehicle, while the rocket will return to the ground with a vertical landing.
Davidson has made the headlines with various highly publicized romances, but he initially rose to fame for his work as a comedian on the US late-night show SNL. In a bizarre moment of art imitating life, Davidson’s character Chad played the role of a SpaceX astronaut on Mars when Elon Musk hosted the show in May 2021.
Unfortunately for Chad, this fictional space mission ended with a disastrous depressurization accident and an exploding skull. Here's hoping this month's Blue Origin mission goes a little more smoothly.
