Jeff Bezos’ Space Tourism Company Blue Origin Opens Up Ticket Sales

Blue Origin, the space travel company created and owned by Jeff Bezos, unveiled ticket sales for the first time on Wednesday. From May 5-19 the company will have open but sealed online bidding (meaning anybody can bid whatever they want but no bids are visible) for one seat on its July 20th trip. Then on May 19 the bids are unveiled and, the company says, “participants must exceed the highest bid to continue in the auction.” On June 12 a live online auction will be held for a final round of bidding, and the winning bid’s money will go to the company’s foundation. The trip will be on the company’s New Shepard spaceship and will be a suborbital journey. Previous reporting from Reuters claimed that the company was hoping for at least $200,000 per passenger. The autonomous ship is designed to carry six people just past 62 miles above Earth, which Reuters notes is “high enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the planet before the pressurized capsule returns to earth under parachutes.” The other five seats on the July 20 launch will be an astronaut crew.