Oliver Daemen, The Dutch teenager who became the world’s youngest space traveller surprised billionaire Jeff Bezos on the flight by telling him he’d never purchased anything on Amazon.com. Let us tell you that an 18-year-old physics student, accompanied Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos and 82-year-old female aviator Wally Funk – the oldest person to go to space – on a 10-minute trip beyond Earth’s atmosphere
Bezos founded the exploration company Blue Origin by selling billions of dollars worth of stock in his online delivery business Amazon.
“I told Jeff, like, I’ve actually never bought something from Amazon,” he said in an interview on Friday at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. “And he was like, ‘oh, wow, it’s a long time ago I heard someone say that.”
Blue Origin had released footage of the newly minted astronauts performing somersaults in near-zero gravity and throwing Skittles which Dutch teen Oliver Daemen caught in his .
Daemen had dreamt of space travel since he was a kid, followed every development by space exploration companies like Blue Origin and got his pilot’s license at a young age.
The crew received two days of safety training, but nothing very hard said Daemen, who can be seen in a video of the trip tossing ping-pong balls in weightlessness with Jeff Bezos. “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.”
Daemen’s ticket was paid for by his father, the CEO of a private equity firm,
He plans to attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to study physics and innovation management this September.
One Journalist 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.”
