Pictured here are the New Shepard Mission NS-16 passengers (left to right): Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, Oliver Daemen and Wally Funk. Prior to New Shepard's launch, a petition suggesting that billionaires "should not exist" and if they go to space "they should stay there" gathered more than 160,000 signatures on the website. Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic has stated that it will offer tickets on upcoming commercial space flights at a cost of $250,000 per seat, according to Live Science sister site. Daemen's seat on New Shepard was originally awarded at auction to an unnamed bidder for $28 million when the winner was unable to attend the launch due to a scheduling conflict, the auction's runner-up, Dutch CEO Joes Daemen, paid an undisclosed amount for his son to visit space, Live Science reported July 15. However, some have raised concerns that this so-called new age of privately operated space programs will primarily serve to fuel the rise of space tourism - a luxury that would be accessible only to the exceptionally wealthy. "Welcome to the dawn of a new space age," Branson said on July 11, at a ceremony after the Virgin Galactic flight.
The previous record-holder was Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who was 26 years old when he completed 17 orbits around Earth in the 1961 Vostok II mission, NASA says. Glenn was 77 years old when he spent almost nine days on the space shuttle orbiter Discovery in 1998, according to NASA.Īnd at age 18, Daemon just became the youngest human space traveler. At age 82, Funk is now the oldest person to have visited space, supplanting U.S. While Unity 22 was a piloted flight, New Shepard was the first fully automated craft to carry civilians to space, and two of those passengers helped the mission break even more spaceflight records. Earlier this month, on July 11, Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson flew with three passengers and two pilots in a suborbital mission aboard the company's Unity 22 spacecraft, Live Science previously reported. Bezos is now the second billionaire to self-finance a personal trip to the edge of space.
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