The first seat on Jeff Bezos’ rocket to space is selling for a record high of $2.8 million

• One of the first seats aboard Blue Origin’s first space tourism spacecraft is selling for $2.8 million.
• The bid for the seat has more than doubled within a span of less than 24 hours and is likely to rise further before the auction closes on June 10.
• The identity of the highest bidder will only be revealed after the final 24-hour bidding phase of the auction concludes on June 12.

Being the first person to ride into space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is going to cost someone at least $2.8 million.

The Jeff Bezos-owned aerospace company launched the public auction for one of the first seats on New Shepard on Wednesday, May 19. And within a few hours the highest bid recorded was $2.4 million. That soon increased to $2.6 million.

At the time of writing this article, the highest bid was at a whopping $2.8 million. This is double the highest bid of $1.4 million seen during the first phase of auction, which was sealed and ran from May 5 to May 19.

Considering that the auction will remain open to other interested parties until June 10, it’s likely the bids will get higher within the span of the next 20 days. And new records will further be breached during the third phase of the auction — the live phase — which is set to kick off on June 12.

The winner of the coveted seat will be one of the six people onboard the first ever crewed flight of Blue Origin’s suborbital spacecraft scheduled to lift-off on July 20.


New Shepard will take off from the Blue Origin spaceport in west Texas and bolt towards the Karman line — considered to be the edge of the atmosphere, 100 kilometres over the surface of Earth. Before dropping back down towards the planet, the passenger will have a few moments to experience weightlessness of space and peer out the window.


What remains to be seen is how much a single seat on board the shuttle will cost, once regular space flights are operational. Blue Origin’s main competitor, billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, has set the price at $250,000 per seat of its yet-to-launch space tourism service. And Blue Origin has promised to price its ticket competitively.

The company is not revealing who is behind the bids yet. For all we know, it could be Tesla boss Elon Musk’s idea of a huge prank. But everything will be revealed on June 12, after the final phase of the auction is complete. Until then, you can follow the auction here.

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