A UNC-Chapel Hill professor and entrepreneur is about to add “astronaut” to his title.
Prof. Jim Kitchen has been picked to go to space alongside the likes of "Saturday Night Live" comedian Pete Davidson. Kitchen will be a passenger on a Blue Origin flight scheduled for March 23. Blue Origin is the brainchild of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos.
Kitchen did not return a request to comment on the news, but he tweeted about it Monday.
Also on the flight will be angel investor Marty Allen, SpaceKids Global founder Sharon Hagle, Tricor International CEO Marc Hagle and Commercial Space Technologies President George Nield.
The mission will be Blue Origin’s fourth flight with human passengers. Bezos first went up in a flight in July 2021.
Kitchen, a professor of the practice of strategy and entrepreneurship, is among those who helped conceptualize and open startup accelerator and coworking space Launch Chapel Hill and 1789 Venture Lab. At UNC, Kitchen teaches students how to start for-profit, nonprofit and social entrepreneurial ventures. He has taught there since 2010.
A serial entrepreneur in his own right, he started his first company while a student at UNC. He sold that company, a travel firm, to multinational travel conglomerate TUI PLC in 2007.
Kitchen's love of space is also lifelong. In 1985, he began promoting low-earth orbit space trips for a Seattle company, according to his personal website.
“Hoping to sell enough space trips to go himself, he was ridiculed mercilessly by his friends,” the website reads. “However, he was a believer in space travel way back then. Unfortunately, this space venture became unviable post Challenger.”
