Blue Origin announced that the first seat on its New Shepard rocket sold for $28 million in an auction that included nearly 7,600 registered bidders from 159 countries. The winning bidder’s name will be revealed “in the weeks following the auction’s conclusion,” the company said.
The $28 million will go to the Club for the Future foundation Blue Origin created “to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM and to help invent the future of life in space” via “Postcards to Space, space-focused curriculum, and access to space on Blue Origin’s rockets.”
New Shepard’s first human flight is scheduled for July 20. The crew will include the winner of this auction, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, and a “fourth and final crew member” who will be announced when the auction winner’s identity is revealed ahead of the launch.
The auction for a seat on that flight ran for several weeks in May and June. The flight itself is the culmination of nearly a decade of research—Blue Origin started work on the rocket in 2012—and many unmanned flights whose findings informed the safety measures for this manned flight.
That flight is expected to last about 11 minutes. Blue Origin said in May that New Shepard’s crew will “float above the thin limb of the atmosphere and witness life-changing views of Earth through windows that take up more than one-third of the surface area of the capsule.”