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Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin is preparing to take actor William Shatner, best known for his role as Captain James T. Kirk in the original “Star Trek,” and three others on a short journey to the edge of space on Wednesday morning.

It will be the company’s second mission with space tourists on board.

Launching Mr. Shatner, who has crossed space aboard the USS Enterprise for years, could be a moment of symbolism for Blue Origin, one of a handful of billionaire-backed space companies racing to make what once seemed like science fiction a reality. rich adventure seekers to space and beyond.

“There seems to be a lot of curiosity about this fictional character, Captain Kirk, going into space,” Mr. Shatner said in a promotional video posted by the company on Twitter. “Then let’s go with him. Driving pleasure.”

When and how can I watch the launch?

The liftoff is scheduled for 10:00 ET on Wednesday, and Blue Origin will broadcast the flight live. Youtube channel. The video will start approximately 90 minutes before the flight.

The launch was originally scheduled for Tuesday morning, but windy conditions in West Texas pushed Blue Origin back 24 hours. If stronger winds emerge on Wednesday, the company may choose to delay the flight for another 24 hours until Thursday.

Who are the passengers other than William Shatner?

Three more passengers will join Mr Shatner on Wednesday’s flight:

• Audrey Powers, vice president of Blue Origin, managing New Shepard flight operations; Like Mr Shatner, he didn’t have to pay for his seat.

• Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of Planet Labs, which builds tiny satellites, also known as CubeSats, that are used by various customers to orbit the Earth.

• Glen de Vries, CEO and co-founder of Medidata Solutions, a company that develops software for clinical trials.

Dr. Boshuizen or Mr. de Vries are the second and third paying passengers on the Blue Origin flight. The first was Oliver Daemen, Dutch 18 year old man. The company did not say how much these customers paid for their seats on the flights.

As customers who buy tickets, they are like the first investors an industry executives hope will one day be cheap enough for the wider public to benefit.

What will happen during the flight?

The full task takes about 10 minutes. New Shepard is launched to an altitude of about 63 miles, a widely recognized marker where space begins and known as the Kármán line.

At its highest altitude, the booster rocket, about six stories high, releases the capsule where the crew sits. The booster then begins a low to the ground and re-ignites its single engine to land vertically on a concrete slab five miles from where it was launched.

Simultaneously in space, the crew capsule is suspended in free fall. Alongside the experience of nearly four minutes of weightlessness in microgravity, passengers also experience views of Earth’s gently curved horizon, where its atmosphere meets space. Each seat has its own window of 3.5 feet by 2.3 feet.

“I’m excited and worried, a little nervous and a little scared about this brand new adventure,” Mr. Shatner said in an interview with NBC’s “Today” on Monday.

During the capsule’s free fall to land, it opens an initial set of parachutes to curb its speed, followed by three large sets of parachutes to smoothly descend the capsule at around 15 miles per hour.

What is mayhem in Blue Origin?

In September, Alexandra Abrams, former head of employee communications at Blue Origin, said: Published an article with 20 unnamed current and former employees An official from Blue Origin said that the company’s work culture is riddled with sexism and that internal security concerns are often ignored by management.

In an interview after publishing the article, Ms. Abrams said she had received supportive messages from current Blue Origin employees and engineers. She also said she heard him talk about workplace difficulties from employees at other companies. This response surprised him as he expected an attack from others in the small aerospace industry. “Personally, I was very encouraged to see the responses from everyone except Blue Origin,” Abrams said.

Blue Origin disputed the allegations in the article, saying the company has an internal hotline for sexual harassment complaints and that New Shepard is “the safest spacecraft ever designed or built”. The company also said Ms. Abrams was fired due to “repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations”.

Ms Abrams said this was wrong and she was fired in 2019 over her disagreement with a new policy in which she was asked to assist the presentation to ban employees from meeting to take legal action over workplace issues and force them to resolve disputes privately. arbitration with the company.