The American company Blue Origin announced this Saturday the closing of its auction to occupy one of the four seats of its first manned trip to space, with a winning bid of 28 million dollars that will be donated to a foundation of the company.
The auction winner, whose name will be released in the coming weeks, competed against nearly 7,600 people from 159 countries for one of the seats on the flight that will also feature Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his brother, Mark.
The auction began more than a month ago on the company’s website and concluded this Saturday with a final phase, which started from a base of 4.8 million dollars, but immediately surpassed 20 million and closed in just seven minutes. .
The space trip is expected to take about 11 minutes, so the auction winner has agreed to pay $ 2.5 million per minute, or more than 42,000 per second, US public broadcaster NPR calculated.
That amount will be donated to the Blue Origin foundation, called Club for the Future, which seeks to inspire young people to study scientific careers and dedicate themselves to space exploration, the company said in a statement.
The manned flight is scheduled for July 20 and will take place aboard the Blue Origin suborbital rocket, called Blue Shepard and designed as a commercial system for space tourism.
In addition to Bezos, his brother and the auction winner, a fourth person will travel aboard the rocket, whose name will also be announced in the coming weeks, Blue Origin said in its statement.
The founder of Amazon revealed last Monday that he would travel with his brother aboard the first manned space trip of his company, and assured that all his life he has wanted to live that adventure.
Bezos shares his obsession with space with other billionaires, such as Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX) and Richard Branson (Virgin and Virgin Gallactic).
Musk has expressed wishes to found a city on Mars with one million inhabitants by 2050; while Branson intends to transfer the current model of air travel to space, with very high speed journeys and transport to hotels on other planets.