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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. CDT (1330 GMT) 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 said the vehicle has met all mission requirements
for flight and weather is the only factor stalling launch.
Unlike Blue Origin's first three commercial flights, with
passenger rosters including "Star Trek" actor William Shatner,
morning TV host Michael Strahan and even Bezos himself, nobody
among the latest group of customers even comes close to being
famous.
The most recent household name confirmed as a non-paying
promotional guest, "Saturday Night Live" comic Pete Davidson,
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, the
boyfriend of reality TV star Kim Kardashian, 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.
Kitchen's journey to the final frontier caps a lifelong
dedication to travel that has taken him to all 193
U.N.-recognized countries, according to biographical material
from Blue Origin.
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 (106,680 metres) high, before their
capsule falls back to Earth for a parachute landing on the
desert floor.
Bezos, the billionaire founder of online retail giant Amazon,
tagged along himself on 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.
Later 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.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Akash Sriram in
Bengaluru; Editing by Sam Holmes and Krishna Chandra Eluri)
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