Davidson No Longer Going to Space, Blue Origin Says

A Blue Origin spokeswoman had said this week that Davidson would fly as an “honorary guest,” while the remaining five passengers were paying customers. They have been identified as Marty Allen, Sharon and Marc Hagle, Jim Kitchen and George Nield.

While the members of the group come from a variety of backgrounds, it is unclear how much they were each charged to join the flight.

Allen is a former CEO of Party America, the party-supply store. Marc Hagle is the president and CEO of Tricor International, a residential and commercial property development company. Sharon Hagle founded the nonprofit group SpaceKids Global. Kitchen is a professor of the practice of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And Nield is the president of Commercial Space Technologies and for 10 years was the associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency that regulates commercial launches like Blue Origin’s.

It is unclear if Blue Origin will select another celebrity to take Davidson’s seat.

The coming mission would be the company’s fourth flight with human passengers and the 20th in its history.

Last fall, actor William Shatner, 90, was on a Blue Origin flight when he became the oldest person to travel to space and cross the Karman line, the widely recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space that is about 62 miles above the planet’s surface. Shatner and three other passengers shared the New Shepard rocket on a mission that lasted about 10 minutes.

In December, Michael Strahan, who co-hosts “Good Morning America,” was aboard a Blue Origin flight with a handful of others.

“It’s a crazy feeling, like the feeling of weightlessness, the feeling when the booster goes off, the rocket goes off, and it detaches and you don’t know what’s up from down,” Strahan told ABC after his mission was completed.

Last summer, actor Ashton Kutcher recounted pulling out of a Virgin Galactic spaceflight he had planned a decade earlier, at the behest of his wife, actress Mila Kunis.

“When I got married and had kids, my wife basically encouraged that it was not a smart family decision to be heading into space when we have young children,” he told Cheddar News, a livestreaming financial news network.

(Author: Derrick Bryson Taylor)/(c.2021 The New York Times Company)