Pete Davidson's spaceflight replacement is Blue Origin's Gary Lai
Lai is chief architect of Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle, which will take him to suborbital space on March 31.
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Update for March 28:Blue Origin has delayed the planned launch of the NS-20 mission to Thursday (March 31) at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT), citing predicted high winds on Tuesday and Wednesday (March 29 and March 30).
Blue Origin is going with one of its own employees as Pete Davidson's spaceflight replacement.
Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company has tapped Gary Lai as the sixth crewmember on its upcoming NS-20 suborbital mission, which is scheduled to lift off from West Texas on March 29. That slot had been reserved for Davidson, but the "Saturday Night Live" starbacked out after the mission was delayed from its original target date of March 23.
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NS-20 will be the 20th suborbital spaceflight of Blue Origin's autonomousNew Shepard vehicle, a reusable rocket-capsule combo, and its fourth to carry people to the final frontier. The mission will doubtless be extraordinarily meaningful for Lai, for he'll be riding in a spacecraft that he designed.
In photos:Blue Origin's 1st New Shepard passenger launch with Jeff Bezos
"Gary is best known as the architect of the New Shepard system, including leading the team responsible for the design and development of many of the key safety systems on the crew capsule," Blue Origin representativessaid in a statement today (March 21). "He joined Blue Origin in 2004 and was among the first 20 employees."
Lai is currently the senior director and chief architect of New Shepard, "responsible for all next-generation designs, upgrades and new product development for the New Shepard business," according to the statement.
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The other five crewmembers on NS-20 are businessman and angel investor Marty Allen; philanthropic couple Sharon Hagle and Marc Hagle; entrepreneur and teacher Jim Kitchen; and George Nield, the president of Commercial Space Technologies, LLC, who formerly served as associate administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
Allen, the Hagles, Kitchen and Nield are paying customers. Lai likely doesn't have to pay, since he's a company employee and he's inheriting Davidson's seat, which was apparently given away for free.
The gift to Davidson continued a trend. Blue Origin launched at least one celebrity gratis on each of its first three flights, likely to help generate interest and media coverage. Bezos and aviation pioneer Wally Funk flew in July 2021, "Star Trek" starWilliam Shatner launched in October and NFL hall of famer and "Good Morning America" hostMichael Strahan lifted off in December.
Blue Origin has not disclosed how much it costs to ride New Shepard, which offers a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of Earth against the blackness of space during each roughly 11-minute flight. The company's chief competitor in the suborbital space tourism industry,Virgin Galactic, is currently charging $450,000 for a seat on its VSS Unity space plane, which is expected to begin flying customers later this year.
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter@michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcomor onFacebook.
Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
