Celebrities! In! Space!

Just when we thought that celebrities couldn’t try to be more out of this world, they literally are going out of this world! Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spacecraft has some higher tax bracket fliers scheduled to board the newest journey, as well as a well-known celebrity that may have come off as a bit surprising.

What is the Blue Origin?

The Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, and, according toBusiness Insider, it aims to “transform space travel and colonize the solar system.” Sounds pretty ambitious! Blue Origin is the biggest competitor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, with both battling to get civilians into space.

The company works toward continuing to build rockets and engines to launch people beyond Earth's orbit, and the goal they started their company with was to make space travel cheap, frequent, and more accessible by using something called reusable launch systems. According to the Blue Origin website, their reusable rockets demand high performance engines that are capable of soft landings. They are powering the next generation of rockets for many uses including commercial, national security, and human spaceflight. 

NASA greenlighted Blue Origin in December for any future Earth-observing missions, planet expedition, and satellite rockets with its New Glenn rocket. Back in July 2021, Bezos flew to space with three crewmates: his brother Mark; 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk; and 18-year-old Oliver Daeman from the Netherlands. Later this month (March 23rd, to be exact), Blue Origin is planning to send people into space again for a brief suborbital flight. Earlier this week, the company announced that "Saturday Night Live" star, Pete Davidson, will fly alongside five other paying customers on the new 60-foot-tall New Shepard rocket. Davidson was confirmed this week to take a flight, which will launch from a rural Texas launch pad. This ship will also include: Marty Allen, an investor and former CEO of a party supply store; Jim Kitchen, an entrepreneur and business professor; George Neild, 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 the company’s facilities in Texas before the day of take-off. The rocket will launch at top speeds and reach the peak flight path where the capsule, with everyone in it. will break off and continue to fly towards where you can only see the darkness of space and the beauty of our planet. Once they reach the “edge of space”, they will experience some weightlessness and then begin their descent right back to the Texas desert. It’s more or less a 10-minute viewing gallery, but an unforgettable one for sure. 

While Davidson is the most talked about, he is not the first celebrity to have taken a spot aboard a space-bound rocket -- Michael Strahan and William Shatner have also taken part in a Blue Origin mission before.