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Justin Sun Books $28 Million Seat on Blue Origin’s Next New Shepard Flight
- Jeff Bezos’ space tourism company, Blue Origin, has announced Tron founder, Justin Sun, will be part of the crew of the company’s next flight, to be known as NS-34.
- According to Blue Origin, Sun paid US$28 million in 2021 for his spot on the flight. The launch date for the mission hasn’t been announced but it’s expected to take off in the next few weeks.
Tron to the moon! Well, maybe just low Earth orbit, but it’s something, right?
According to an announcement from the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket company, Blue Origin — accused fraudster and founder of the Tron blockchain, Justin Sun, will be boldly going where Katy Perry has gone before.
Sun has been named along with five other crew members to man Blue Origin’s 34th New Shepard mission aboard the eye-catchingly phallic-shaped space craft. Blue Origin said Sun had successfully bid for the first Blue Origin seat in 2021 for the price of US$28 million (AU$42.9m).
In addition to Sun, the other members of the crew are Indian-American real estate investor Arvi Bahal, Turkish businessman Gökhan Erdem, Puerto Rican meteorologist and journalist Deborah Martorell, English teacher and translator Lionel Pitchford, and serial entrepreneur J.D. Russell.
Posting on X following Blue Origin’s announcement, Sun boasted he is now “the youngest Chinese commercial astronaut.”
The launch date for Sun’s fantastic voyage hasn’t been announced yet, but based on the timeline of previous missions, it’s expected to happen in the next few weeks.
Sun has something of a history of pulling high-profile stunts to draw attention to himself and his cryptocurrency network. For instance, last November he paid around US$6 million for that stupid banana-taped-to-a-wall artwork.
Related: Justin Sun’s Tron Strikes Reverse Merger Deal to Go Public via SRM Entertainment
Justin Sun Goes Full Trump-a-maniac to Avoid Prosecution
Sun has had a troubled history when it comes to not breaking US law, which had seen him avoid entering the US for several years. Fortunately for Sun though, his US legal troubles largely went away after he became the largest single investor in the Trump family’s DeFi project, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), earlier this year. Funny how that works.
Sun’s US legal woes began in March 2023 when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a raft of charges against him and three companies he was involved with. Sun, along with the Tron Foundation Limited, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Rainberry Inc. (formerly BitTorrent), were charged with unregistered offering and sale of securities.
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Related: Justin Sun’s $100M TRUMP Token Bet Signals Deepening Crypto-Political Tie-Up
Sun was also charged with “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market for TRX through extensive wash trading” and with “orchestrating a scheme to pay celebrities to tout TRX and BTT without disclosing their compensation.” Some of the celebrities embroiled in Sun’s scheme included Jake Paul, Lindsay Lohan and porn star Michele Mason (known professionally as Kendra Lust).
However, all these charges suddenly got put on hold earlier this year after Sun and the SEC jointly filed to have the charges against the Tron founder paused. This joint filing came after Sun ‘invested’ around US$75 million (AU$115m) into WLFI and became an ‘advisor’ to the project.
Author
Jody McDonald
Jody is a Brisbane-based freelance writer who specialises in writing about business, technology, and the future of work.
