An open spot on the first-ever crew to fly on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship was auctioned off today for $28 million, which is millions more than the International Space Station’s first paying tourist reportedly paid 20 years ago.
It took about eight minutes for RR Auction to wind up the bidding at its Boston headquarters. That’s a couple of minutes less than the expected duration of the New Shepard mission, set for July 20 at Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceport in West Texas. And it’s a few minutes more than the yet-to-be-identified winner is expected to spend in zero-G during the flight.
The winner, currently known only as Bidder No. 107, will experience about three minutes of weightlessness and a big-picture view of the curving Earth below the black sky of space. It’ll be one of the priciest per-minute trips in history. But it’ll also go down in the space history books, in part because Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and Amazon, will be one of the crewmates.
It didn’t take long for speculation about the winner’s identity to begin — with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Bezos’ biggest billionaire space rival, thrown into the mix.
