Bidder wins Bezos’ auction to fly to space — for $28M
How much would you pay to go to space with Jeff Bezos?
For at least one person, the answer is $28 million, an astounding sum that won a live auction Saturday for a seat on the first human spaceflight for Bezos’s Blue Origin space company.
The identity of the winner won’t be made public for a couple of weeks, the company said.
Whoever it is, the person will get to strap into New Shepard’s capsule alongside Bezos, his brother Mark and a fourth, yet-tobe-named crew member, for a rollicking ride to the edge of space that lasts all of 10 minutes. The flight is scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, from the company’s launch site in West Texas.
Blue Origin promises that the trip will be profound — allowing the passengers to see the Earth from a distance, view the dark sky above and marvel at the curvature of the Earth. And it will pave the way for more flights to come, as the company begins to ramp up commercial service, routinely flying paying customers out of the atmosphere.
In all, nearly 7,600 bidders from 159 countries participated in the auction, driving the price to a level well beyond what some company officials had anticipated. Blue Origin flies its New Shepard capsule to an altitude of about 65 miles, where passengers can then unbuckle from their seats and experience about four minutes of weightlessness. The $28 million is about half the cost of what some private citizens are paying for a trip to the International Space Station, where they’ll live and work for about a week before flying home on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.
The money raised in Blue Origin’s auction is to go to support the company’s foundation, Club for the Future, which encourages future generations to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math to “help invent the future of life in space.”
Blue Origin officials had said they expected bidders to pay a premium for the seat. It’s the company’s first human spaceflight mission, after 15 test flights without people on board. And flying alongside Bezos may have been an attractive prospect for some. The company has not said what it will charge the public for seats once tickets go on sale.