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from the buying-your-way-into-the-history-books dept.
Sold! Bidder pays $28m for spare seat on space flight with Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has sold the spare seat of the company's 20 July New Shepard space rocket blast-off for $28m, the company announced on Saturday.
With 20 active bidders starting at $4.8m during the 10-minute auction, bids escalated in the final three minutes of the sale. Initially, some 7,600 people registered to bid from 159 countries, the company said. The winner, whose identity has not been announced, will join the Amazon founder Bezos and his brother Mark on the flight.
The 11-minute, automated flight – the company's 16th but first carrying humans – will lift off from Van Horn, Texas. The capsule will carry as many as six passengers, though the company has not yet revealed who else will be onboard.
[...] The company has said the auction price will be donated to Blue Origin's foundation, Club for the Future, whose stated mission "is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in Stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) and to help invent the future of life in space".
Previously: Jeff Bezos' Vision for Space: One Trillion Population in the Solar System
Jeff Bezos Will Fly on Blue Origin's First Human Spaceflight
Related: Branson May Make a Last-Ditch Effort to Beat Bezos Into Space
(Score: 2, Informative) by John Bresnahan on Sunday June 13 2021, @02:51PM (4 children)
Back in the 1990s, you could spend a whole week on the International Space Station for $20m.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism#Successful_projects_2 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13 2021, @07:30PM
Masturbating mice to pass time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13 2021, @10:41PM (2 children)
MirCorp started looking in the 1990's but the flight itself didn't happen until 2001. $20 million in 2001 is worth $30.2 in 2021. Axiom reportedly charges $55 million for 10 days, which works out to 45% more per day adjusted for inflation.
(Score: 1) by John Bresnahan on Monday June 14 2021, @11:47AM (1 child)
I wasn't trying to compare the cost of the same trip in 2000 vs 2021. I was comparing the cost of a week in orbit on the ISS vs the cost of a few minutes of freefall in an overblown cannon shell. If I had the money to take a ride with Bezos, I thinkk I would keep saving so as to afford a real space flight.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Monday June 14 2021, @03:02PM
He's paying for posterity.
Whoever made the winning bid will now go down in history as the first passenger on a private commercial sub-orbital space flight. You may never have heard of Abram C. Pheil [space.com] but his name is, nonetheless, now immortal. He was the first commercial airplane passenger - a 23 minute flight in a 2-seater across a bay in Florida for about $11,000 inflation adjusted - though that inflation adjusted figure is misleadingly small. Comparing prices inflation adjusted over a century is bordering on meaningless. For instance that $400 he paid (in dollars of the time) was equal to years of labor for many workers of the time.
There's probably also the Bezos time, but I think posterity is the main factor. Buffet auctions a lunch with himself each year for charity and the highest price paid (from this year) was about $4.5 million.