Pete Davidson will become the latest celebrity to fly to space with Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, in a brief, suborbital flight slated for later this month.
As gravity begins to pull the capsule back toward the ground, the passengers will again experience intense g-forces before sets of parachutes are deployed to slow the vehicle down. It will then touch down at less than 20 miles per hour in the Texas desert.
Because the flights are suborbital — meaning the don't generate enough speed or take the right trajectory to avoid being immediately dragged back down by Earth's gravity — the whole show will last only about 10 minutes. Blue Origin is the first company to begin offering regular suborbital space tourism flights. Its chief competitor, Virgin Galactic, notably had its first crewed flight — which included founder Richard Branson — before Bezos' flight last July. But Virgin Galactic has yet to follow up that flight with another crewed flight after it later became clear that the company's space plane had traveled out of its designated flight path.
SpaceX is the only private company that offers trips to orbit. The company completed the first-ever all-civilian flight to orbit last September, taking a billionaire and three chosen crewmates on a three-day trip. And later this month, the company plans to take four paying customers on a flight to the International Space Station, which orbits about 200 miles above Earth.
Blue Origin does have plans to build a rocket powerful enough to reach orbit, called New Glenn. And, in light of the, those plans are more pressing than ever. The engines Blue Origin plans to use for New Glenn, the BE-4, will also be used on an upcoming launch vehicle designed by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing that is responsible for significant US national security launches. ULA currently relies on Russian RD-180 engines.
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