Dutch teenager is set to join billionaire Jeff Bezos in his first space tourism flight

An 18-year-old physics student whose father heads aninvestment management firm in the Netherlandsis set to fly to space with U.S. billionaire Jeff Bezos on Tuesday takingthe place of a person who put up $28 million US in an auction to join the inaugural space tourism flight for Bezos's Blue Origin company.

Oliver Daemenis settojoin the four-member all-civilian crew for Tuesday's scheduled flight and become the youngest person to go to spaceafter the auction winner, whose name had not been made public, dropped out due to unspecified "scheduling conflicts,"Blue Origin said Thursday.The news makesDaementhe company's first paying customer.

It also means that the flight is set to include the oldest person ever to go to space 82-year-old trailblazing female aviator Wally Funk and the youngest, according to Blue Origin.

Joining them for Blue Origin's suborbital launch will be Bezos and his brother Mark Bezos.

Daemen is working to obtain his pilot's license and is planningto attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to study physics and innovation management in September, Blue Origin said. His father, Joe Daemen, isCEO and founder of Dutch investment company Somerset Capital Partners, based inOisterwijk, Netherlands.

The elder Daemen "paid for the seat and chose to fly Oliver," Blue Origin said. The company declined to say how much was paid.

"Flying on New Shepard will fulfill a lifelong dream for Oliver, who has been fascinated by space, the Moonand rockets since he was four," the company said in a news release.

Bezos has been locked in a race with billionaire rivals Richard Branson and Elon Musk as they seek to usher in a new era of commercial space travel in a tourism market that Swiss bank UBS estimates could be worth $3 billion annually in a decade.

New Shepard is an 18.3-metres-tall, fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. The launch is set for a site in West Texas.

Branson, the British billionaire businessman, was aboard his company Virgin Galactic's rocket plane for its pioneering suborbital flight from New Mexico on Sunday.