Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet thanks to Amazon, technically lost the (edges of) space race to another billionaire. But now it seems he’s hoping to make a different bit of history with his rocket launch.
As the New York Times detailed on Thursday, Bezos had sold off a seat on his spaceship to a man who somehow now has plans instead of being one of the few people in the history of humanity to reach the edges of Earth’s atmosphere. And so, a Dutch teen will go in his stead.
More than 7,600 people from 159 countries participated in the monthlong auction, which concluded on June 12. The winning bid was $28 million, and Blue Origin said it would reveal the bidder at a later date.
On Thursday, just five days before the flight, Blue Origin still did not reveal the winning bidder, but said in a news release that this person decided to defer his trip to a future New Shepard launch “due to scheduling conflicts.”
Instead, Mr. Daemen, the son of the chief executive of a private equity investment firm and one of the runners-up in the auction, will take the seat.
The teen, Oliver Daemen, is now set to be the youngest person to ever reach the edges of space. As Blue Origin PR explained, the also-wealthy teen was simply next in line for the seat and took over once it became clear that the first winner would not be able to make the flight 62 miles up to the edges of Earth’s atmosphere inside New Shepard.
In any case we wish everyone luck here, including whoever had a scheduling conflict on Earth simply too important not to escape the planet over.
[via NY Times]
Source: https://uproxx.com/viral/jeff-bezos-taking-dutch-teen-to-space/