Winner of $28 million bid for seat drops out, Blue Origin to make history with unpiloted civilian space flight
An 18-year-old physics student whose father heads an investment management firm is set to take the place of a person who put up $28 million in an auction to take part in the inaugural space tourism flight for billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company.
Blue Origin said on Thursday Oliver Daemen will join the four-member all-civilian crew for Tuesday’s scheduled 11-minute ride to the edge of space after the auction winner, whose name had not been made public, dropped out due to unspecified “scheduling conflicts.” Daemen becomes the company’s first paying customer.
His addition means that the flight is set to include the oldest person ever to go to space – 82-year-old trailblazing female aviator Wally Funk – and the youngest, Daemen, according to Blue Origin. Joining them for Blue Origin’s suborbital launch will be Bezos and his brother Mark Bezos.
Jeff Bezos may have been beaten to space by rival Richard Branson, but the billionaire American businessman is poised to make history next week aboard what would be the world’s first unpiloted suborbital flight with an all-civilian crew.
Daemen is working to obtain his pilot’s license and is set to attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to study physics and innovation management in September, Blue Origin said. His father is Somerset Capital Partners CEO and founder Joes Daemen.
The elder Daemen “paid for the seat and chose to fly Oliver,” Blue Origin said. The company declined to say how much was paid.
“Flying on New Shepard will fulfil a lifelong dream for Oliver, who has been fascinated by space, the Moon, and rockets since he was four,” the company said in a news release.
Blue Origin’s fourth astronaut will be NASA space shuttle veteran Nicholas Patrick.
New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall (18.3-meters-tall) and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. The crew is set to include only civilians and none of Blue Origin’s employees or staff astronauts, three people familiar with the company’s plans told Reuters.
There has never before been a fully autonomous suborbital or orbital flight with an all-civilian crew, Teal Group space industry analyst Marco Caceres said.
Branson, the British billionaire businessman, was aboard his company Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane for its pioneering suborbital flight from New Mexico on Sunday. The Virgin Galactic flight included two pilots, as well as the company’s chief astronaut instructor and its lead operations engineer.
New Shepard lifts off from a standing position on a launch pad, like traditional rocket launches. With Virgin Galactic, a rocket-powered spaceplane was dropped from a carrier plane in mid-air.
New Shepard, like Virgin Galactic’s flight, will not enter into orbit around Earth, but will take the passengers some 62 miles up (100 km) before the capsule returns by parachute. Virgin Galactic’s flight reached 53 miles (86 km) above Earth.
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk’s space transportation company SpaceX is planning an even-more-ambitious mission in September, sending an all-civilian crew for a several-day orbital flight aboard its Crew Dragon capsule.
‘SIMPLE MATH’
Blue Origin’s flight is two decades in the making. Bezos founded the company in 2000. A pilotless craft was a financial strategy adopted by Blue Origin executives years ago.
“It’s simple math,” said one of the people familiar with the company’s thinking. “If you design a system so that you don’t need a pilot or a co-pilot you can have more paying customers.”
New Shepard can accommodate six people. Blue Origin and industry insiders had previously discussed company employees going up on the first flight.
A Blue Origin spokesperson confirmed the decision was made for four seats to offer an enhanced customer experience for the first flight.
The decision to skip over Blue Origin’s staff astronauts and technical experts has caused frustration for some company insiders who viewed the first crewed flight as a crucial opportunity to gather data and technical feedback for a program in its infancy, and to evaluate the experience for future paying customers, the sources said.
A seasoned astronaut would provide a calming presence for civilian crew members as New Shepard blasts off at speeds upwards of 2,200 miles (3,540 km) per hour, the sources added.
The crew members will receive two days of training. Blue Origin has assigned two staff members, on the ground, to help the passengers strap in and to provide point-by-point instructions over headsets during the mission.
“It’s kind of like getting on a ride at an amusement park,” Caceres said. “You just trust that everything has been checked out, is in good working order … and you just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
Some industry sources have expressed concerns that passengers – overwhelmed by the experience or in a state of euphoria – could be rattled by routine noises, miss key instructions, pass out or injure themselves floating around the cabin, potentially dangerous scenarios a trained astronaut could respond to.
Funk, 82, was one of 13 women who passed the same rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in NASA’s 1960s space program but were denied the chance to become astronauts because of their gender.
Proving the safety of space travel is important to developing what Swiss investment bank UBS estimates will be a $3 billion annual tourism market a decade from now.
“One of the main goals of the New Shepard mission is to demonstrate that going to suborbital space is perfectly safe for the average person,” Caceres said. “So there is a benefit to having as many average people on these flights as possible.” (Reuters)
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