18-year-old to blast into space with Jeff Bezos

Eighteen-year-old Oliver Daemen is Blue Origin's first paying customer on a trip to space.

Bezos and his brother Mark Bezos will be joined in the all-civilian crew by 82-year-old pioneering female aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, a recent high school graduate set to attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to study physics and innovation management in September.

Daemen is the company's first paying customer. His father heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners.

American billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos said on Monday he is excited and curious but not very nervous on the eve of taking part in his company Blue Origin's inaugural suborbital flight alongside the oldest and youngest people ever bound for space.

The world's richest person and three crewmates are due to fly from a desert site in West Texas on an 11-minute trip to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard, a 60-foot-tall (18.3 meters) and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo. The flight represents an important milestone in the establishment of the space tourism industry.

Bezos did a round of televised interviews ahead of the launch, set for 5pm GST from Blue Origin's Launch Site One facility some 32 km outside the rural Texas town of Van Horn.

"People keep asking if I'm nervous. I'm not really nervous, I'm excited. I'm curious. I want to know what we're going to learn," Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc, told the "CBS This Morning" program.

"We've been training. This vehicle is ready. This crew is ready. This team is amazing," Bezos said. "We just feel really good about it."

The flight comes nine days after Richard Branson, the British billionaire businessman, was aboard his company Virgin Galactic's rocket plane
for its pioneering suborbital flight from New Mexico.

Funk was one of the so-called Mercury 13 group of women who trained to become astronauts for the first U.S. human spaceflight program in the early 1960s. She passed the same rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in NASA's space program, though the women were denied the chance to become astronauts because of their gender.

"Back when Wally was part of the Mercury 13, all the testing that she did, she outperformed all of the men," Bezos said, adding, "we can confirm at 82 years old, she can still outperform all of the men. We've been doing the training with Wally. She can outrun all of us."