An unnamed winner was announced on Saturday in the auction to win a trip into space alongside Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark Bezos. Bidding began at $4.8 million but quickly skyrocketed, reaching escape velocity at $28 million in six minutes, according to CBS News.
Bezos, Amazon founder and world's richest man, will lead the trip on the New Shepard, a capsule manufactured by his company Blue Origin. In addition to the Bezos brothers and the auction winner, whose name will be released in the upcoming weeks, a fourth and final crew member has yet to be announced. They will take a 10 to 12-minute suborbital flight.
The auction money is not lining Bezos's pockets. It will go to Club For The Future, a Blue Origin-led initiative for STEM education. (Whether the winner has to pay in imperial credits, quatloos, or gold-pressed latinum is unknown.)
Approximately 76 people from 159 countries were part of the bidding, according to PEOPLE. “The whole Blue Origin team cannot wait to meet our first customer,” said Ariane Cornell, a Blue Origin employee with the out-of-this-world title: director of astronaut and orbital sales.
The New Shepard aims to launch on July 20. A recent report in the Guardian suggests that the billionaire space race may soon get hotter than liquid hydrogen, as Richard Branson also eyes a July 4 launch for his Virgin Galactic spacecraft. Fellow interplanetary capitalist Elon Musk is, for now, remaining on Terran soil.
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