Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, a space venture, auctioned a seat in its upcoming first crewed flight. The spaceflight seat was auctioned for $28 million on Saturday.
The bidder who won will fly with the Amazon founder and his brother Mark to the edge of the space. They will fly on Blue Origin’s New Shepard Rock that is set to release on July 20. The winner’s name is not yet announced, but the company will soon release it.
The bidding of the seat opened at $4.8 million and reached $20 million within a few minutes of the auction. The funding of the auction will be donated to Blue Origin’s education-centered club for the Future; this organization supports kids who are interested in STEM careers.
Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s director of astronaut and orbital sales, told during the auction webcast that the first flight of New Shepherd would carry four people. These four people are Bezos, his brother, the auction winner, and one person who will be revealed later.
New Shepard, which can carry the capsule to an altitude of over 340,000 feet, had run dozens of successful flights without passengers. These test runs include the one at the company’s facility in the Texas desert in April. Spaceflight is designed to carry as many as six people and flies autonomously without a pilot. The capsule also contains a large window that will show the passengers a view of the earth for about three minutes in zero gravity before the capsule returns to the earth.
The system of the Blue Origin launches vertically, and both the rocket and capsule can be reused. The boosters of the capsule land vertically on concrete pads in the company facility, and the capsule lands using parachutes.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and still is the owner of the company. He funds the company using Amazon’s stock share sales. The spaceflight will be released on Jun 20 because it marks the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson, Bezos’s fellow billionaires, are in a race with him to get to space, but all three have used different ways. Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’s Blue Origin compete to take passengers for their suborbital tourism, taking passengers on a small flight to the edge of space. At the same time, Musk’s SpaceX is launching private passengers on multi-day flights to space, known as orbital tourism.
Follow us on Google News Asia Times Now page for faster updates.