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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13 2021, @10:18PM (3 children)
SpaceX does receive government R&D subsidies. It also consistently delivers the services those subsidies were meant to pay for:
-Falcon 9 has long since paid for itself with CRS, and Crew Dragon means that NASA is no longer dependant on Russia for manned launches.
-Starlink is already providing rural areas with high speed internet service, which the government has been paying the telcos billions per year for thirty years with nothing to show for it.
-Moonship is an open question about who is subsidizing who since NASA and SpaceX are splitting the bill 50/50 and both stand to benefit: SpaceX gets $3B over three or four years, ~90% of which goes to Starship development, with the promise of future support contracts. NASA gets a fully mobile Moon base 1/4 the size (not including the rocket) of the ISS for only 1/30 the price and access to a supply chain that makes it practical to operate.
Colonizing Mars will be an exercise in sustainability research because every part of such a colony must become fully sustainable if it is to survive long term. Everything must be solar powered since that is the only power available and everything must be recycled because they can't afford to waste anything. Whether or not the colony works out that is going to pay huge dividends here on Earth.
The only Blue Origin subsidy that I'm aware of is the Cantwell amendment to fund an Apollo 11 reenactment. I can't think of any practical benefit from it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13 2021, @11:20PM
> Whether or not the colony works out that is going to pay huge dividends here on Eart
But we already have biro pens. What else?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14 2021, @01:48AM
So are you saying that the gov't can/will stop subsidizing and/or paying for rural internet now that Starlink is up?
I'm not sure what "huge dividends" a Mars colony will pay here on Earth beyond shoveling money to the rocket people who will have to ship the supplies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14 2021, @06:20AM
FTFY