A dream of spaceflight comes true
Jim Kitchen, a Carolina alumnus and a professor of the practice of strategy and entrepreneurship at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, went to space as part of Blue Origin’s NS-20 flight.
It lasted just 13 minutes, but it’s a trip Professor Jim Kitchen has been waiting for his entire life.
He was selected to be part of the six-person crew of Blue Origin’s next flight to space. It’s the 20th in the New Shepard program’s history and just the fourth with people on board for Blue Origin, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Kitchen ’87 is a professor of the practice of strategy and entrepreneurship at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.
His flight took off March 31 in West Texas. Blue Origin’s NS-20 flight took Kitchen 65 miles up — 10 times higher than a plane — at 2,300 miles per hour and then 2,600 miles per hour on the way back down.
It took him to a place he has long dreamed of.
“One of my earliest childhood memories was sitting in my mom’s lap at the beach in Florida and watching an Apollo mission launch, just looking up and seeing that rocket go up to space,” says Kitchen. “Now I’m on the cusp of being able to actually go to space, and I think about that.”
John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and Neil Armstrong have always been Kitchen’s heroes. Space was on his mind when he enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill. He started a marketing business his junior year and helped promote a startup in Seattle that was trying to sell low-earth-orbit space trips. He wasn’t successful, but it helped keep his space dreams alive for 40 years.
Now, Kitchen’s name is on a space flight’s official uniform patch. The design includes two orbital rings, in part to reflect Kitchen’s early promotion of such low orbit trips.
His crewmates include Party America CEO Marty Allen, Commercial Space Technologies President George Nield, SpaceKids Global founder Sharon Hagle and Marc Hagle, CEO and president of Tricor International.
When his wife recently asked him how he was feeling about the trip, he said he was 0% nervous or scared, 80% excited and 20% in utter and sheer denial.
“I think I’m going through the stages of actually finding out that you’re going into outer space,” says Kitchen. “I don’t know what the other stages are, but I know what stages I’m in right now.”
He took a few things with him.
Jim Kitchen has visited all 193 of the UN-recognized countries in the world. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)
There’s a collection of passports from his previous travels to all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations — and a giant flag emblazoned in red with “194.”
He also packed flags from several countries and stickers that he will later give to his UNC Kenan-Flagler students that say, “My professor went to space, and all I got was this lousy sticker.”
He has been sharing his space experience on his Instagram page, where he typically documents his travels.
And when he’s up in space, Kitchen planned to mostly do just one thing.
“My plan is just to look out the window and check out the beautiful, borderless planet that we call home. That’s what I want to see,” says Kitchen. “I want to see the blackness of the universe. I want to see the curvature of the earth. I want to see all of that.”
Kitchen’s students at UNC Kenan-Flagler have long heard about his dreams of space travel. He uses it in the context of fostering an entrepreneurial spirit, reminding students they can and should dream big.
For several years, as the space tourism industry started to kick off, Kitchen tried to land a place on several early tourist spaceflights and lost several contests to do so. A few years ago, he added “would-be astronaut” on his LinkedIn profile title, right after “entrepreneur” and “world-explorer.”
He relentlessly contacted Blue Origin, shared his story, described himself as an explorer, a traveler and a teacher — and waited. Then he got the call and had what he called a “knee-buckling conversation.”
“Given everything that’s going on right now in the world, seeing this borderless planet from space is really important to me,” says Kitchen.
Kitchen’s lifelong travels have been guided by a tireless entrepreneurial spirit. When he was a child, his schoolteacher parents would pack up their wood-panel station wagon, leave the tip of Florida in June and travel to Washington state and back through August.
The first international trip he ever took was during his junior in high school to Valparaíso, Chile, as an American Field Service exchange student. He completed his 193 U.N.-country journeys in 2019 when he traveled to Syria.
He has often been asked if he will write a book about his travels, but always says he’s not interested in that because he rather just experience it all.
He feels the same way about going to space.
“When you ask me how I prepare for this emotionally, what I’m trying to remember is this is for fun,” says Kitchen. “But it also means you can still push boundaries and reach your dreams and that I can share that with my students.
“But I’m also thinking about my parents. And I’m thinking about that little boy who was watching that rocket.”
