Cape Canaveral: In a first, an 18-year-old will become the youngest customer of Blue Origin to fly to space on its reusable rocket on July 20, announced Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s space company on Thursday.
The space company had auctioned a spaceship berth for a whopping $28 million but the winner, assumed to be an ultra-wealthy space aficionado, will be flying on a future New Shepard flight because of scheduling conflicts. Blue Origin announced on Thursday that instead of the auction winner it will be a Dutch runner-up Oliver Daemen who will be launching with founder Jeff Bezos on Tuesday.
The company announced the name of first paying customer, but did not disclose the price of the teenager’s ticket, according to AP.
"I am super excited to experience zero-g and see the world from above," Daemen said in a video posted by Dutch broadcaster RTL. Jeff Bezos will be joined by his brother Mark Bezos and Wally Funk, an aviation pioneer, who will become the oldest person ever to do so at age 82. The first flight will also mark the beginning of commercial operations for the program.
The four will take off from West Texas atop a New Shepard rocket and remain in space a 10-minute flight.
Who’s Oliver Daemen?
Daemen, who will join the elite members on the space odyssey, took a year off after graduating from high school last year to obtain his private pilot's license.
The eight-year-old will be going to the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in September. He is son of Joes Daemen, founder and CEO of Somerset Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Oisterwijk, Netherlands.
The father-son duo are already in the US preparing for the launch, according to a company representative.
Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov holds the record for the youngest to fly in space at the age of 25 when he blasted into orbit four months after Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space.
John Glenn was 77 when he launched aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998, 37 years after becoming the first American to orbit the world.