Blue Origin’s 4th flight set to launch without big names

(NewsNation) — The fourth commercial flight of Jeff Bezos’ space tourism venture Blue Origin has been delayed by two days because of poor weather conditions, the company said.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft was scheduled for liftoff on Tuesday from the company’s launch site in rural west Texas at 8:30 a.m. CT with six would-be citizen astronauts strapped into the crew cabin atop the fully autonomous launch vehicle, standing nearly six stories tall.

The company said on Monday it had postponed the launch of the NS-20 mission to March 31 due to forecasts of high winds during the launch and recovery of the spacecraft. Blue Origin has said the vehicle met all mission requirements for flight and weather is the only factor stalling launch.

Unlike the first three commercial flights with William Shatner, Michael Strahan and even Bezos himself, nobody among the latest group of passengers are celebrities.

Pete Davidson of “Saturday Night Live” was set to be a non-paying promotional guest, but he dropped out earlier this month when the planned launch was postponed for six days from its original March 23 date to allow time for additional pre-flight tests.

Days later the company announced that Davidson, 28, had been replaced on the latest “crew” manifest by veteran Blue Origin designer Gary Lai, architect of the New Shepard reusable launch system.

Lai is flying for free. He joins five previously announced paying customers: angel investor Marty Allen, real estate veteran Marc Hagle and his wife Sharon Hagle, entrepreneur and University of North Carolina professor Jim Kitchen and George Nield, founder-president of Commercial Space Technologies.

The entire flight, from liftoff to touchdown, is expected to last just over 10 minutes. The crew will experience a few minutes of weightlessness at the very apex of their suborbital ride, some 350,000 feet high, before their capsule falls back to Earth for a parachute landing on the desert floor.

Founder Bezos joined Blue Origin’s inaugural crewed flight to the edge of space last July. He accompanied his brother, Mark Bezos, trailblazing octogenarian female aviator Wally Funk and an 18-year-old Dutch high school graduate.

Other passengers included Shatner, who became the oldest person to fly to space at age 90, “Good Morning America” co-host and retired NFL star Strahan and the eldest daughter of pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard, for whom Blue Origin’s spacecraft is named.