Blue Origin announced on Monday that it had found a replacement for Davidson on its upcoming space flight after the Saturday Night Live star improbably backed out on an opportunity to orbit the Earth due to a shift in schedule.
The company said that Davidson’s seat will instead go to Gary Lai, the chief architect of the New Shepard rocket that will blast them into suborbital space. It will be the 20th mission on a New Shepard rocket.
Lai will fly up with five other passengers in the capsule, including investor Marty Allen; entrepreneur Jim Kitchen, former US Federal Aviation Administration associate administrator George Nield, and Marc and Sharon Hagle, a husband-wife duo with a Florida real estate company. All bought their tickets at an auction that last year saw one ticket go for $28 million.
The rocket was originally scheduled to blast off with Davidson on March 23, but after Blue Origin delayed the launch by six days out of a desire to carry out several more tests, the SNL actor had to back out for reasons that have not been made clear.
The flight has no purpose apart from space tourism: the 10-minute voyage will take the passengers on a hypersonic trip up to just over the 62-mile boundary of space, giving the passengers an exhilarating trip up and several minutes of weightlessness before plummeting back down to Earth, deploying parachutes, and touching down in the Texas desert at about 20 miles per hour.
Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon founder and world’s richest man Jeff Bezos, began offering commercial flights last year, and hopes in 2022 to double its flights to six per year. The passengers have so far been a mix of celebrities, wealthy buyers, and Blue Origin figures.
Some have criticized the New Shepard rocket alongside others, such as SpaceX’s StarShip, for their unmistakably phallic shape, suggesting that they’re an expression of masculine competition between billionaire men who run space firms. A German feminist group called “Who Needs Feminism?” has pitched the novel idea of developing a vulva-shaped rocket “to restore gender equality to the cosmos.” They note that their design has superior aerodynamic capabilities to other spacecraft.
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