Blue Origin capsule with fliers
Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew capsule is designed to send up to six people to the edge of space and back. (Blue Origin Photoillustration)

You had to know the first open seat on a spacecraft built by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture would be sold online — but auctioning it off for charity is an added twist.

After a week of buildup, Blue Origin today unveiled an auction site that will sell off a reservation on its New Shepard suborbital spaceship for its first-ever crewed flight on July 20. That date is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

To add to the sense of history, today marks the 60th anniversary of Project Mercury’s first crewed spaceflight — a suborbital trip taken by New Shepard’s namesake, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, in 1961.

“In the decades since, fewer than 600 astronauts have been to space above the Kármán Line to see the borderless Earth and the thin limb of our atmosphere,” Blue Origin said in today’s announcement, referring to the 100-kilometer line that serves as the internationally accepted boundary of outer space. “They all say this experience changes them.”

Blue Origin says its passengers will go through three days of training before they climb into New Shepard’s crew capsule and blast off from the company’s West Texas spaceport. They’ll experience a few minutes of weightlessness and an astronaut’s-eye view of the curving Earth beneath the black sky of space.

At the end of a roughly 10-minute flight, the crew capsule will settle down to a parachute-aided touchdown, while the rocket booster will make its own autonomous landing separately.

Blue Origin has been putting its autonomously controlled New Shepard suborbital system through uncrewed tests for nearly six years, and after last month’s test flight, Bezos declared that “it’s time” to think about putting people on board.

“We’re ready to go,” Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s director of astronaut and orbital sales, said today at a news briefing. Cornell told GeekWire that July’s flight would be considered an operational mission rather than a test flight.

There are six seats in the crew capsule, and Blue Origin employees or VIPs are likely to fill at least some of those seats. For the first flight, just one of the seats is being held for a paying passenger.

After registering for the auction, would-be spacefliers can place sealed online bids. Bids are unsealed starting May 19, and then the process transitions to a live online auction at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT) on June 12.

Proceeds from the winning bid will be donated to the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s nonprofit educational foundation.

The winner will have to be 18 or older, weigh between 110 and 223 pounds, have a height between 5 feet and 6-foot-4, be capable of climbing seven flights of stairs in less than 90 seconds, and handle up to 5.5 G’s of acceleration during the flight. They’ll also have to sign an informed-consent form acknowledging the risks, plus a document waiving the right to bring claims against anyone involved in the flight.

Last week’s announcement that Blue Origin would be starting ticket sales kicked off days of speculation about the price point. One report suggested that the purchase price would be “well north” of $500,000.

That would be twice as much as what early purchasers were paying for reservations on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital space plane. (Virgin Galactic says the price will go up for the next round of sales.)

The more-than-$500,000 figure raised some eyebrows, but considering that only one seat is being auctioned off, that projection is likely to be on the money.

“The sky’s the limit,” Cornell said.

Cornell said Blue Origin is planning to launch a couple of additional crewed flights between July and the end of the year, but had nothing to share about the plan for selling seats for those trips.

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