An 18-year-old is going to space with Jeff Bezos

The mystery bidder who put up a whopping $28 million for an 11-minute joy ride to the edge of space alongside Jeff Bezos will not make the trip, Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin announced Thursday.

Blue Origin said in a press release that the person, who asked to remain anonymous for the time being, had to bow out because of “scheduling conflicts.” The winner will instead take a spot on a future mission. Flying in their place — alongside Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pilot and one of the “Mercury 13” women — will be an 18-year old recent high school graduate named Oliver Daemen.
The flight is slated for July 20.

I have a bad feeling about this. If Jeff and his brother or even Ms. Funk are blown to bits, well, those are the breaks. Same deal if it happens with me. Getting a teenager killed is a whole order of magnitude less defensible. It would be like Challenger and the ill-conceived “Teacher in Space” PR program all over again. If they do survive, as seems likely, it could set off a lunatic “youngest in space” competition that would only end with Congress outlawing it, as they did when a similar craze for “youngest pilot” records ended in tragedy in when 7 year old Jessica Dubroff was killed in a hare-brained attempt to set such a record in 1996.