Pete Davidson No Longer Going to Space, Blue Origin Says

According to the company, the comedian is “no longer able to join” its coming mission. It was unclear whether another celebrity would take his seat.

Pete Davidson, the “Saturday Night Live” comedian and actor, will no longer travel to the edge of space on the next Blue Origin spaceflight, the company said late Thursday.

The company had 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 rescheduled for March 29, Blue Origin said on Twitter.

Blue Origin's 20th flight of New Shepard has shifted to Tuesday, March 29. Pete Davidson is no longer able to join the NS-20 crew on this mission. We will announce the sixth crew member in the coming days.

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) March 18, 2022

The company, founded by Jeff Bezos, said that Mr. Davidson, 28, was “no longer able to join” the mission and that a replacement sixth crew member would be announced soon. No further details were given.

Requests for comment from Blue Origin and Mr. Davidson were not immediately returned early Friday. A spokeswoman for “Saturday Night Live” said the show would not be airing new episodes this week or next.

A Blue Origin spokeswoman had said this week that Mr. Davidson would fly as an “honorary guest,” while the remaining five passengers were paying customers. They have been identified as Marty Allen, Sharon and Marc Hagle, Jim Kitchen and George Nield.

While the members of the group come from a variety of backgrounds, it’s unclear how much they were each charged to join the flight.

Mr. Allen is a former chief executive of Party America, the party-supply store. Mr. Hagle is the president and chief executive of Tricor International, a residential and commercial property development company. Ms. Hagle founded the nonprofit group SpaceKids Global. Mr. Kitchen is a professor of the practice of strategy and entrepreneurship 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 agency that regulates commercial launches like Blue Origin’s.

It’s unclear if Blue Origin will select another celebrity to take Mr. Davidson’s seat.

The coming mission would be the company’s fourth flight with human passengers and the 20th in its history.

Last fall, the actor William Shatner, 90, 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 is about 62 miles above the planet’s surface. Mr. Shatner and three other passengers shared the New Shepard rocket on a mission that lasted about 10 minutes.

In December, Michael Strahan, who co-hosts “Good Morning America,” 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 detaches and you don’t know what’s up from down,” Mr. Strahan told ABC after his mission was completed.

Last summer, the actor Ashton Kutcher recounted pulling out of a Virgin Galactic spaceflight he had planned a decade earlier, at the behest of his wife, the actress Mila Kunis. “When I got married and had kids, my wife basically encouraged that it was not a smart family decision to be heading into space when we have young children,” he told Cheddar News, a livestreaming financial news network.

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