Going to space like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos comes with a hefty price tag.
Bezos – the richest person in the world – will participate in the first passenger flight his space company, Blue Origin, is making, he announced Monday. The voyage will take place on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
“I want to go on this flight because it’s the thing I’ve wanted to do all my life,” Bezos said in a video posted on social media. His brother, Mark Bezos, will also be on board, according to the video.
A price tag out of this world
The third seat on the July 20 Blue Origin flight will go to whoever wins an ongoing auction for the ticket.
The current high bid for a ticket on the flight with Bezos is up to $2.8 million, according to Blue Origin’s website. Online bidding for the seat will continue until June 10, and a live auction will be held on June 12.
Blue Origin hasn’t said what tickets on their spaceflights will cost in the future, but it likely won’t be as high as the auction bids.
A few other companies are also on pace to soon offer flights to space, and all have given different pricing information.
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In the earliest days of ticket sales, Virgin Galactic charged between $200,000 and $250,000 for people to reserve a spot on a flight.
The company, owned by billionaire Richard Branson, sold 600 tickets in this price range. While the company hasn’t released any further ticket sales, it has indicated that in the future the tickets will likely cost more than $250,000. Just to be on the waiting list to reserve a spot when sales reopen costs $1,000 alone.
Elon Musk’s space company, SpaceX, also hasn’t disclosed pricing information for any potential flights. Recently, Axiom, a private spaceflight specialist, announced that it had expanded a deal with SpaceX to add three more crewed flights to the International Space Station.
A potential free option
Some lucky individuals may be selected to go to space without being an astronaut or paying hefty ticket prices.
Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and the first confirmed private passenger of SpaceX’s first moon flight scheduled to take place in 2023, said he’d take 8 individuals on the trip with him and started an application for the spots in March.
He said he’ll pick up the entire tab for the trip.
The project, called dearMoon, received about 1 million applications from people around the world, Maezawa said in a March 15 tweet. In the next phase of the process, space travel hopefuls have to submit a more detailed application about themselves and why they want to go.
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