Photo: MARK RALSTON / AFP / Getty Images
This Saturday Jeff Bezos’s space company , Blue Origin, auctioned a seat for its first manned space flight for the amount of $ 28 millions of dollars.
The winner of the auction, was not revealed but will fly to the edge of space in the company of the founder of Amazon and his brother Mark on the New Shepard rocket scheduled to launch on 20 of July.
Bid opened at $ 4.8 million, but exceeded $ 20 million in the first minutes of the auction. The proceeds of the auction will be donated to the organization Club for the Future from Blue Origin, which supports children interested in science careers.
Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, will reveal the name of the auction winner in the coming weeks when he will unveil a fourth person who will also form part of the crew.
The New Shepard is a rocket that carries a capsule at a height of more than 340, 000 feet and has performed more than a dozen successful test flights without passengers from the company’s facilities in the Texas desert.
The capsule is designed to transport up to six people , flies autonomously and has huge windows so that passengers can see the Earth for about three minutes and experience zero gravity before returning to Earth. Both the rocket and the capsule are recovered by the company, the first lands vertically on a platform and the capsule does so through a parachute.
The launch of Your first flight is planned for 20 of July, date marking the 52 anniversary of the Apollo moon landing 11.
As that Bezos, Sir Richard Branson is competing to carry short-haul travelers reaching the edge of space while Elon Musk’s company SpaceX is committed to taking adventurers on flights of several days. In less than a year the company has sent 10 astronauts .
The ship Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity is piloted by two pilots and in May conducted a test space flight with its first passenger on board who experienced microgravity upon reaching the edge of space. However, he still has three more tests left before taking tourists on commercial flights that are expected to start in 2022.
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