An 18-year-old young man is about to become the youngest person in space, flying away with an aviation pioneer who will become the oldest at the age of 82.
Blue Origin announced on Thursday that the winner of the $28 million auction jointly launched with founder Jeff Bezos on Tuesday will participate, and the Dutch son of another bidder will participate. The company said Oliver Daemen will be the first paying customer, but did not disclose the price of his ticket. But a family spokesperson said that this would be much lower than the winning bid.
After the auction winner abdicated due to schedule conflicts, Daemen grabbed the fourth and last seat in the space capsule. He said that last week Blue Origin made an unexpected call and made this proposal.
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“This is so cool!” Damen said in a statement. “It only takes 10 minutes to fly and get into space, but I already know that this will be the most special 10 minutes of my life.”
He added in a video posted by the Dutch broadcaster RTL: “I am very excited to experience zero gravity and see the world from above.”
Also in Blue Origin’s first launch with passengers: Bezos’ brother and Wally Funk, one of 13 female pilots who conducted the same tests with NASA’s Mercury 7 astronauts in the early 1960s, but only allowed The male enters space and therefore never enters space.
The four will take off from West Texas on a New Shepard rocket and fly for 10 minutes. The Amazon founder will become the second person to take his own rocket into space after Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson in nine days.
According to Blue Origin, the young tourist will participate in the second event for paying customers. But a spokesperson for the family pointed out that once the auction winner withdrew, the company captured the idea of letting the oldest and youngest people into space on the same plane.
His undisclosed ticket costs will be donated to charity, just as most of the $28 million won this week was distributed to various space education and advocacy groups.
“This marks the beginning of New Shepard’s commercial operations. Oliver represents a new generation of people who will help us build a path to space,” Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said in a statement.
Blue Origin has not yet opened ticket sales to the public or disclosed its expected prices. It is expected after the upcoming flight.
After graduating from high school last year, Daimen took a year off to obtain a private pilot’s license. He will study at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in September.
His father is Joes Daemen, founder and CEO of Somerset Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Oisterwijk, the Netherlands. According to their spokesperson, both father and son were preparing for the launch on their way to Texas on Thursday.
Old Gate said that he bid for this seat at the June 12 auction. “But when bids started to soar during the auction, we withdrew,” he said in a statement.
Blue Origin stated that the unidentified auction winner will take a future flight.
Daemen has received some good space travel advice from Dutch astronaut and two-time spaceflight Andre Kuipers. According to the statement, Kuipers told him “Don’t make the classic mistake of taking pictures within a short time when he gets up, but to fully appreciate the view of our beautiful planet.”
Soviet astronaut Ghermon Titov holds the record for the youngest space flight. Four months after the first person to enter space, Yuri Gagarin, he was only 25 years old. John Glenn was 77 years old when he launched on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998, 37 years after he became the first American to orbit the Earth.
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Mike Corder, an Associated Press correspondent in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.
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