Photo: Oliver Daemen/blue origin
Jeff Bezos' aerospace company Blue Origins has announced its history-making first paying customer.
Oliver Daemen, 18, will be the youngest person to travel to space after Blue Origins' first human flight on July 20. He will join Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, and pilot Wally Funk aboard the New Shepard rocket.
Daemen’s father Joes Daemen, CEO of Dutch private equity firm Somerset Capital Partners, paid for the seat but chose to send his son instead, CNBCreported. The price of the seat has not been disclosed.
The teen takes the place of ananonymous auction winnerwho was supposed to join the Bezos brothers on their first space flight, but had to opt for a future flight instead due to scheduling conflicts, Blue Origins said in apress release.
Funk is a member of what is known as Mercury 13, a group ofwomen who tested to become astronautsin the 1960s, before their program was later canceled, according toThe Washington Post.
“No one has waited longer,” Bezos said in asocial media postrevealing that Funk will be his “honored guest” come July 20.
“I have taught over 3,000 people to fly — private, commercial, instrument, flight engineer, airline transport, gliding — everything that the FAA has, I’ve got the license for,” she said in the Instagram clip, adding with a laugh, “And I can outrun you.”
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Funk said in Bezos' clip that during her time in the Mercury 13 program, she’d been told that she “had done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys.”
But still, her ultimate dream of traveling to space eluded her.
“I got a hold of NASA four times. I said, ‘I want to become an astronaut.’ But nobody would take me,” she said. “I didn’t think that I would ever get to go up.”
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According to theofficial website, the New Shepard is “fully autonomous,” as there is no pilot and everyone is a passenger. The reusable vehicle takes 11-minute flights into space, “designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line — the internationally recognized boundary of space.”
source: people.com
