Jeff Bezos’ space venture Blue Origin will take six people to the Final Frontier on Thursday morning (March 31), and you can watch the action live.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle is scheduled to take off Thursday at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1:30 p.m. GMT; 8:30 a.m. Texas local time) from the company’s launch pad in West Texas. Watch it live here on Space.com courtesy of Blue Origin or directly through the company beginning at 8:20 am EDT (1220 GMT).
The mission is known as NS-20 because it will be the 20th spaceflight by a New Shepard vehicle. But it will be only Blue Origin’s fourth manned spaceflight, after three flights on New Shepard in 2021.
Related: Meet the 6 spaceplanes on Blue Origin’s NS-20 mission
Blue Origin will launch six space tourists on March 31, 2022 on its New Shepard rocket. Mission crew includes: (from left) Gary Lai; Jim Kitchen; Martin Allen; Sharon Hagle; Marc Hagle; and George Nield. (Image credit: Blue Origin)
Five paying customers will fly into space on Thursday. You are businessman Marty Allen; philanthropic couple Sharon Hagle and Marc Hagle; teacher and entrepreneur Jim Kitchen; and George Nield, President of Commercial Space Technologies, LLC. Nield has a long history in the space field, having previously served as Assistant Administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation and Manager of the Flight Integration Office for NASA’s Space Shuttle program.
These five are joined by longtime Blue Origin collaborator Gary Lai, the chief architect of the New Shepard vehicle. Lai took the place of “Saturday Night Live” star Pete Davidson, who resigned after the NS-20 start date was pushed back from March 23 to Tuesday (March 29).
Tuesday had been the target, but forecast high winds on Tuesday and Wednesday (March 30) pushed the start date to Thursday.
Davidson’s original inclusion continued a trend established by Blue Origin on its first three flights, all of which celebrities flew (presumably to generate public interest and media coverage). Bezos and aviation pioneer Wally Funk flew on the company’s first manned mission in July 2021. “Star Trek” star William Shatner flew in October, and NFL Hall of Famer and “Good Morning America” co-host Michael Strahan was new to Shepard’s mission in December.
New Shepard consists of a rocket and a capsule, both of which are reusable. New Shepard passengers experience three to four minutes of zero gravity during each suborbital mission, which takes about 11 minutes from launch to parachute-assisted capsule touchdown.
Mike Wall is the author of Out There (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaelwall. Follow us on Twitter @spacedotcom or on Facebook.