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Blue Origin completes 4th flight to edge of space

Blue Origin Bezos
Posted at 6:54 AM, Mar 31, 2022
and last updated 2022-03-31 15:39:51-04

VAN HORN, Tex. — Six people were part of Blue Origin’s fourth crewed mission Thursday.

The mission was originally supposed to take off on March 23 from Blue Origin’s facilities near Van Horn, Texas.

It was then postponed to March 29, then postponed again to March 31, due to high winds.

Comedian Pete Davidson was also supposed to be on the crewed mission, but was “no longer able to join the NS-20 crew on this mission,” the company said in a tweet.

Davidson would have been just the latest celebrity to ride a Blue Origin rocket to space. In recent months, Good Morning America host and former NFL star Michael Strahan, Star Trek actor William Shatner and Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have all traveled outside of the Earth's atmosphere on the company's "New Shepard" rocket.

Blue Origin's space flights blasted travelers off from a launchpad in West Texas and took them about 60 miles above Earth's atmosphere for 10 minutes.

The NS-20 carried five paying customers, including businessman Marty Allen, philanthropists Sharon Hagle and Marc Hagle, teacher Jim Kitchen, and George Nield, the president of Commercial Space Technologies, LLC.

The sixth person on the mission was Gary Lai, the chief architect of the NS-20.