Jeff Bezos will be aboard for Blue Origin's first human space flight next month.
In an Instagram post early Monday, Bezos said he, his brother, and the winner of an ongoing auction, will be aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft during its scheduled launch on July 20.
July 20 is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The trip will be a brief hop to space from Texas.
Bezos said in early February that he was stepping down as CEO of Amazon to spend more time, among other things, focused on Blue Origin.
“To see the Earth from space, it changes you, changes your relationship with this planet. It’s one Earth,” Bezos said in the Instagram post. “I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me.”
The auction for an open seat on New Shepard ends Saturday. The winning bid right now stands at $2.8 million, with almost 6,000 participants from 143 countries. The winning bid amount will be donated to Blue Origin’s foundation, Club for the Future, whose mission is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM and to help invent the future of life in space.
Social media platform Reddit has sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that it is illegally “scraping” the comments of Reddit users to train its chatbot Claude.
President Donald Trump wants his “big, beautiful” bill of tax breaks and spending cuts on his desk to be singed into law by Independence Day. And he’s pushing the slow-rolling Senate to make it happen sooner rather than later. Trump met with Senate Majority Leader John Thune at the White House early this week and has been dialing senators for one-on-one chats, using both the carrot and stick to encourage them to act. But it’s still a long road ahead for the bill. Senators want to make changes to protect Medicaid and to make sure some tax breaks become permanent. Elon Musk called the whole bill a "disgusting abomination.”
