Pete Davidson, the comedian and actor of “Saturday Night Live,” will no longer travel to the edge of space on the next Blue Origin spaceflight, the company said late Thursday.
The company announced this week that its New Shepard rocket would launch on Wednesday, March 23 with Mr. Davidson and five other passengers. But the launch, the company’s fourth with human passengers, has now been moved to March 29, Blue Origin said on Twitter†
The company, founded by Jeff Bezos, said Mr. Davidson, 28, was “no longer able to participate” in the mission and a replacement sixth crew member would be announced shortly. No further details were given.
Requests for comment from Blue Origin and Mr. Davidson were not immediately answered early Friday. A spokeswoman for “Saturday Night Live” said the show would not air any new episodes this week or next week.
A spokeswoman for Blue Origin said this week that Mr. Davidson would fly as “guest of honor” while the other five passengers were paying customers. They have been identified as Marty Allen, Sharon and Marc Hagle, Jim Kitchen and George Nield.
Although the group’s members come from different backgrounds, it’s unclear how much they each had to pay to participate in the flight.
Mr. Allen is a former president of Party America, the party store. Mr. Hagle is the president and chief executive of Tricor International, a residential and commercial real estate development company. Ms. Hagle founded the non-profit group SpaceKids Global. Mr. Kitchen is a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship practice at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. and dr. Nield is the president of Commercial Space Technologies and for 10 years was the associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, the body that regulates commercial launches like Blue Origin’s.
It’s unclear if Blue Origin will pick another celebrity to take Mr. Davidson to take.
The upcoming mission would be the company’s fourth flight with human passengers and the 20th in its history.
Last fall, 90-year-old actor William Shatner was on a Blue Origin flight when he became the oldest person to travel to space and cross the Karman line, the widely recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space that spans approximately 62 miles. miles above the planet’s surface. † Shatner and three other passengers shared the New Shepard rocket for a mission that lasted about 10 minutes.
In December, “Good Morning America” co-host Michael Strahan was aboard a Blue Origin flight with a handful of others.
“It’s a crazy feeling, like the feeling of weightlessness, the feeling when the booster goes off, the rocket goes off and it releases and you don’t know what’s down below,” Mr. Strahan told ABC after his mission was completed.
Last summer, actor Ashton Kutcher revealed that he was withdrawing from a Virgin Galactic space flight he had planned ten years earlier, at the behest of his wife, actress Mila Kunis. “When I got married and had kids, my wife encouraged me that it wasn’t a smart family decision to go into space if we have young children,” he told Cheddar News, a live-streaming financial news network.