Jeff Bezos on Monday announced that he and his brother, Mark Bezos, would be flying into space next month.
"Ever since I was five years old, I've dreamed of traveling to space," Bezos posted on Instagram. "On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother."
The brothers plan to fly on the first human flight of the New Shepard spacecraft, which is made by Jeff Bezos' space-exploration company, Blue Origin.
"I want to go on this flight because it's a thing I wanted to do all my life. It's an adventure — it's a big deal for me," Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram.
"I invited my brother to come on this first flight because we're closest friends," he added.
"I wasn't even expecting him to say that he was going to be on the first flight, and then when he asked me to go along I was just awe-struck," Mark Bezos said in the same video.
Blue Origin is auctioning a seat on the same flight. The bidding for one of six seats on Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft has reached $2.8 million with nearly 6,000 participants from 143 countries, the company told Insider in a statement.
Bidding is live on Blue Origin's website and is scheduled to finish with a live online auction on Saturday.
The planned 11-minute trip is the company's first scheduled space-tourism flight, set to blast the crew 62 miles above the Earth's surface.
A maximum of six people can fit into the capsule, which sits on top of the rocket booster. Once New Shepard reaches a high altitude, the capsule is designed to break away from the booster, reenter the atmosphere, and float back down to Earth with the help of parachutes.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, and he said in a 2018 interview that it was his "most important work."
Bezos is set to step down as Amazon CEO on July 5. When he announced in February that he would be leaving that role, he said Blue Origin was one of the projects to which he wanted to devote more of his attention.
