The company announced on Monday that it would replace Davidson with its ballistic rocket chief architect, Gary Lei.
Davidson, who became a pillar of the entertainment plot in his relationship with Kim Kardashian and his feud with Kanye West, will fly as an invited guest on a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket with five paying customers. did. But when Blue Origin announced last week that its flight had to be postponed from March 23 to March 29 for additional ground testing of the rocket, the company also said that Davidson could no longer participate in the mission. I announced that. Ray, who has been with Blue Origin for 18 years and holds several patents related to the design of the New Shepard rocket, will fly with five previously announced paying customers. They include Marty Allen, an investor and former CEO of a party goods store. Jim Kitchen, an entrepreneur and business professor. George Neild, former Deputy Director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transport Authority. Orlando real estate developer Mark Hagle, his wife Sharon Hagle Space Community Wally Funk, who founded a space-focused nonprofit, and his brother Mark Bezos and paid customers. Since then, Blue Origin has been talked about by flying other well-known names on two flights, such as Star Trek star William Shatner and Good Morning America host Michael Strahan.
Blue Origin’s goal is to make these orbital space flights the mainstay of pop culture, giving invited guests (previously mostly celebrities) and those who can afford it 10 minutes of supersonic joy. am.
The crew change between Ray and Davidson is not the first. Last year, the company held an auction of one ticket to fly with Bezos, and the unnamed winner of the auction agreed to pay an astonishing $ 28 million seat. But then the winner opted out and chose to fly in a later mission, and the auction runner-up Dutch investor handed the ticket to his 18-year-old son Oliver Damen. rice field.
Prior to this month’s flight, Blue Origin passengers will be training for several days at the Blue Origin facility in western Texas before the flight day to climb the New Shepard crew capsule on the rocket. After launch, the rocket will be torn above the speed of sound and out of the capsule near the top of the flight path. As the rocket boosters return to Earth for an upright landing, the crew’s capsules will continue to rise more than 60 miles above the dark surface of the universe, with a panoramic view of the Earth from the capsule’s window. ..
When the flight reaches its peak, passengers will be weightless for a few minutes. Bezos spent his time throwing skittles and flipping inside the cabin, especially in weightlessness. Others are glued to the windows.
As gravity begins to pull the capsule back towards the ground, passengers will experience a strong g-force again before the parachute set is deployed and the vehicle slows down. Then land in the Texas Desert at less than 20 mph.
The entire trip lasts only about 10 minutes because the flight is in orbit, that is, it does not generate enough speed or take the correct orbit to avoid being pulled back quickly by the Earth’s gravity.