UNC professor and entrepreneur will soon travel to space with ‘SNL’ star Pete Davidson
UNC-Chapel Hill business professor and entrepreneur Jim Kitchen has traveled to all 193 United Nations-recognized countries. Soon he’ll be able to see them from a different view — outer space.
Kitchen, 57, is part of the crew of astronauts flying on Blue Origin’s upcoming New Shepard mission to space. His crew members on the NS-20 flight include “Saturday Night Live” comedian Pete Davidson, Marty Allen, Dr. George Nield and husband and wife Sharon and Marc Hagle.
“It’s been a lifelong dream to go to space,” Kitchen said.
After completing his travels around the world in 2019 just before COVID-19 hit, he sees this trip to “see that big, beautiful earth from space” as an important part of that journey.
This will be Blue Origin’s fourth human spaceflight and will take off from Launch Site One in West Texas on March 23.
The group of astronauts will travel up to 2,600 miles per hour and go about 65 miles above the earth to see the curvature of the planet and the blackness of the universe, Kitchen said. They’ll pass the Kármán line, which is the official international border line between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, making them official astronauts.
The entire duration of the flight is around 13 minutes.
“What a privilege and an honor it is to see that whole spectacle,” he said.
His students and college-age children are stoked for him to go, he said, but they’re even more excited that he gets to go with Davidson, whose romance with Kim Kardashian will be featured in the upcoming Hulu reality series, “The Kardashians.”
“I’m just looking forward to meeting the crew and it’ll just be so fun,” Kitchen said.
Preparing for space
Kitchen leaves for his official training Friday, but he’s been preparing for a spaceflight for years. He’s done centrifugal force training, two zero gravity flights and has participated in multiple space contests.
He thought, “I don’t know if I’m going to get the opportunity ... but let’s get ready,” he said.
Kitchen filled out the online application to fly to space with Blue Origin, which anyone can do, about six months ago and found out earlier this year that he’d be going.
He can’t talk about the cost, but said “it’s worth every penny.”
Kitchen has documented some of his preparation for space travel on Twitter, where he recently posted a video floating in zero gravity.
He brought a Carolina blue baseball cap along with him for the ride and watched clumps of water float in midair.
Kitchen also trained at The NASTAR Center, an aviation and space training facility, that prepares astronauts for different situations they might face during a trip to space, including significant g-forces during takeoff.
He said it was one of the most intense experiences of his life.
“You get difficulty in breathing, it’s like a baby elephant sitting on your chest,” Kitchen said in a video he posted on Twitter.
That’s also accompanied by spatial disorientation, balance issues and distorted vision, he said.
An entrepreneurial spirit at UNC
Kitchen has had his sights set on spaceflight for decades, and this isn’t the first time he’s tried to get there.
As an undergraduate student at UNC-CH in 1985, he started a marketing company promoting low-earth orbit space trips for a Seattle-based company in hopes of selling enough space trips to take one himself one day. That venture never took off because of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, but Kitchen didn’t give up on his dream.
He also started a travel company called SBT Travel that specialized in group tours to the Caribbean while he was a student. He then sold that company to global travel conglomerate TUI PLC and helped grow it into one of the largest student travel companies in North America, according to his university bio. He has extensively chronicled his own trips around the world over the past 30 years.
Kitchen graduated as valedictorian when he earned an MBA from the University of Tennessee and then a master’s degree in political management from George Washington University.
In 2010, Kitchen joined UNC-CH’s Kenan-Flagler Business School as a professor of the practice of strategy and entrepreneurship, teaching students “how to start for-profit, non-profit and social entrepreneurial ventures and raise funding.” Kitchen teaches two classes of undergrad entrepreneurship, and any student at UNC-CH can sign up.
Since then, he’s helped build “a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem in downtown Chapel Hill” as an angel investor and mentor, Kitchen’s personal business website says.
He opened a student startup incubator in his office and grew that effort into business accelerator Launch Chapel Hill in collaboration with the Town of Chapel Hill, Orange County, Downtown partnership and the university. Kitchen also founded 1789 Venture Lab to help UNC students grow their businesses.
“It’s really special for me to be able to take this experience and translate that into my classroom,” Kitchen said.
He wants to impart the message that “anything is possible, the dream is alive and you can push boundaries,” he said.
Not everyone’s dream is going to space or traveling the world, but there are big things that people want to do, Kitchen said.
“I hope people can see me as an inspiration of ‘you know I’m going to get started on that today,’” he said.
People can follow Kitchen’s journey to space on his Twitter account and watch the liftoff, which is scheduled for March 23 at 9:30am EST.
This story was originally published March 14, 2022 at 1:43 PM with the headline "UNC professor and entrepreneur will soon travel to space with ‘SNL’ star Pete Davidson."
