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The
company, in a brief notice first posted on Twitter, gave no
immediate explanation for the change or Davidson's withdrawal
from the manifest of Blue Origin's fourth commercial flight
since last summer.
Davidson, 28, the boyfriend of reality TV star and socialite Kim
Kardashian, had just been officially named on Monday as Blue
Origin's "honorary guest" to join five paying customers on the
flight initially set for March 23.
With "Davidson no longer able to join" the new flight, Blue
Origin said it would announce the sixth crew member "in the
coming days."
The five previously revealed are angel investor Marty Allen;
real estate veteran Marc Hagle and his wife Sharon Hagle;
University of North Carolina professor Jim Kitchen and George
Nield, founder-president of Commercial Space Technologies.
Like the first three groups of Blue Origin passengers, they will
ride to the edge on a six-story-tall, fully autonomous
spacecraft called the New Shepard, which will lift off from Blue
Origin's launch site near the rural west Texas town of Van Horn.
The suborbital joyride, lasting about 10 minutes from liftoff to
touchdown, will ascend to about 350,000 feet (106 km), treating
passengers to a few moments of weightlessness, before a descent
back to Earth for a parachute landing.
Bezos, the billionaire founder of online retail giant Amazon
tagged along himself on Blue Origin's inaugural crewed flight to
space last July.
He accompanied his brother, Mark Bezos, trailblazing
octogenarian female aviator Wally Funk and an 18-year-old Dutch
high school graduate.
Later passengers included 90-year-old "Star Trek" actor William
Shatner, who became the oldest person to fly to space, "Good
Morning America" co-host Michael Strahan, and the eldest
daughter of pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard, after whom Blue
Origin's spacecraft is named.
(Reporting Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by
Jahnavi Nidumolu and Rhea Binoy in Bengaluru; Editing by Robert
Birsel)
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