The Conversation (0)
The Dutch teen who blasted off into space with Jeff Bezos this week has made a surprising admission.
Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old physics student, accompanied Bezos, his brother Mark and 82-year-old legend Wally Funk on the 11-minute Blue Origin trip up to the stars.
The historic voyage has made Daemen officially the youngest space traveller in history, so you’d think he’d be bowing and scraping with gratitude to his billionaire host.
However, in an interview three days after Tuesday’s historic trip he revealed that he’d never bought anything from Amazon – and had told Bezos so.
"I told Jeff, like, I’ve actually never bought something from Amazon," the teen told Reuters at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on Friday.
"And he was like, ‘oh, wow, it’s a long time ago I heard someone say that’.”
Bezos has funded his exploration company Blue Origin by selling billions of dollars’ worth of stock in his online delivery business.
Among the many people the world’s richest man thanked after the mission was "every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer. Because you guys paid for all this."
In Friday’s interview, Daemen also recounted the moment he found out he would be joining the four-person crew while on a family holiday in Italy.
"They called and said: Are you still interested?’ and we were like ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’"
Daemen (far left) with his four-person crewGetty Images
Daemen, who secured his pilot’s licence at a young age, said he had dreamt of space travel since he was a kid and had followed the every move of space exploration companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
He secured his place on the four-person crew after his father paid an undisclosed price at a charity auction, and after another candidate, who bid $26 million, dropped out at the last minute.
"We didn’t pay even close to $28 million, but they chose me because I was the youngest and I was also a pilot and I also knew quite a lot about it already," the 18-year-old said.
More than 72 hours after the journey, he admitted that reality still hadn’t sunk in.
"I don’t think I realised it until I was in the rocket: ‘wow, it’s really happening’," he said. "It was my ultimate, ultimate goal ... but I never thought it was going to be this soon."
The crew received two days of safety training, but nothing very hard, Daemen said. Footage from the capsule shows him tossing ping-pong balls with Bezos as the crew made the most of their brief spell in zero gravity.
"That was super cool. It’s so weird to be weightless. It was easier than I had expected. It was kind of like being in water,” he said.
Footage taken inside the capsule showed the passengers goofing aroundAFP via Getty Images
Daemen, who is set to start at Utrecht University in September, said he was not sure what he wanted to do later in life, but would seriously consider a career in space travel.
Asked what it was like travelling in a rocket ship with a billionaire, he answered with a wide smile: "They were super fun and all down to earth, as funny as that may sound."
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