Daemen will probably break the record of Soviet cosmonaut German Titov, who entered space in 1961 at the age of twenty-five.
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Blue Origin announced that their annonymous bidder will fly on a future flight due to scheduling conflicts.
The person who will replace him is 18-year old Oliver Daemen, who will be their first paying customer and the youngest person to go to space. pic.twitter.com/coPSo6jp1Y
– Emily Calandrelli (@TheSpaceGal) July 15, 2021
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The newly announced passenger of Tuesday’s flight in the lineup replaces the hitherto unknown winner of the auction, who paid $ 28 million (over 600 million crowns) for a place at the full-fledged premiere of the ship New Shepard.
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Blue Origin stated that the anonymous winner could not take part in the expedition in the end and planned to look into space on one of the other anticipated flights.
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The young man paid the second largest amount
According to the AP agency, Daemen offered the second highest amount in a charity auction. It is not clear exactly how much it was. The young man is the son of Joe Daemen, who founded the investment group Somerset Capital Partners.
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“I can’t wait to experience weightlessness and see the world from above,” says young Daemen in footage published by Dutch television RTL.
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Blue Origin said that Daemen had become a pilot after graduating from high school and that he was starting studies at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in September.
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It is Daemen that Blue Origin is now taking as its first paying customer.
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“It’s the beginning of commercial operations for New Shepard and Oliver is a representative of a new generation of people who will help us build a journey into space,” said Blue Origin chief Bob Smith.
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The New Shepard rocket is to take off from the desert in west Texas for the so-called suborbital flight with people on board. Originally, the American media reported that the flight would take about half an hour, but the AP now writes only about a ten-minute mission.
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Amazon founder of the Internet company and the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, announced in June that he would not miss the first space flight organized by his company and that he would take his brother Mark with him.
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Also invited was 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who is set to become the oldest man to ever look into space.
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