Pete Davidson and five paying customers to fly on Jeff Bezos’ suborbital rocket

Blue Origin’s goal is to make these suborbital spaceflights a mainstay of pop culture, giving a 10-minute supersonic joy ride to welcomed guests — which thus far have mostly been celebrities — and anyone else who can afford it.

The crew will spend a few days training at Blue Origin’s facilities in West Texas before the flight day, when they’ll climb into the New Shepard crew capsule that sits atop the rocket. After liftoff, the rocket will tear past the speed of sound, and near the top of its flight path, will detach from the capsule. As the rocket booster heads back toward the Earth for an upright landing, the crewed capsule will continue soaring higher into the atmosphere to more than 60 miles above the surface where the blackness of space is visible and the capsule’s windows will offer sweeping views of the Earth.

As gravity begins to pull the capsule back toward the ground, the passengers will again experience intense g-forces before sets of parachutes are deployed to slow the vehicle down. It will then touch down at less than 20 miles per hour in the Texas desert.

Because the flights are suborbital — meaning the don’t generate enough speed or take the right trajectory to avoid being immediately dragged back down by Earth’s gravity — the whole show will last only about 10 minutes.

Blue Origin is the first company to begin offering regular suborbital space tourism flights. Its chief competitor, Virgin Galactic, notably had its first crewed flight — which included founder Richard Branson — before Bezos’ flight last…