The first ticket for a tourist flight on the New Shepard rocket was auctioned. Also included: a jaunt with the richest man in the world. On July 20, 2021, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take off for the first time with four people on board. With it are Jeff Bezos, whose brother and two previously unknown passengers. A ticket has now been auctioned in a multi-stage process at a live auction. The price rose from the original $ 4.2 million to a final bid of $ 28 million.
The names of the auction winner and the fourth passenger onboard the capsule will initially remain anonymous and will only be announced later. Converted to the approximately three minutes of weightlessness that can be expected during the flight, the bid corresponds to about 150,000 US dollars for every single second. “The higher the bid, the more you will enjoy it!” The auctioneer promised.
The announcement that the richest man in the world would be on board the rocket himself may have played a major role in the auction. In any case, a bigger role than the fact that the offered 28 million US dollars will go to the “Club for the Future” founded by Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin. Bezos is spending around 500 million US dollars on his new yacht alone, which means that the importance of the “Club for the Future” in the minds of the richest man in the world can be classified.
Tourist flights to the space station offer more for the money
The flight together with Jeff Bezos is about six times as expensive as a dinner with the famous investor Warren Buffet, or half as expensive as a tourist ticket on board a Crew Dragon in earth orbit. Some of the first space tourists were able to get a seat on board a Soyuz spaceship for as little as 20 million US dollars. Dennis Tito’s flight lasted 684,240 seconds (a little over a week) and was a real bargain with zero gravity under 30 US dollars per second, space sickness included.
In the bizarre world of billionaires with space ambitions, the announcement of Jeff Bezos’ flight at least led Virgin Galactic to consider a Starship Two flight with Richard Branson on board on July 4th, American Independence Day. He would forestall Jeff Bezos with that. Elon Musk does not participate in the billionaire race into space and instead continues to work on the Starship and his dream of a flight to Mars.