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Jeff Bezos' 'last meal' includes chicken wings and mac 'n' cheese hours before Blue Origin launch

Jeff Bezos is set to take flight from Texas alongside his brother Mark, announced his company Blue Origin

Jeff Bezos is ready to fly into space as his company Blue Origin announced Monday night, July 19, they were "a go for launch". The Amazon founder joked with journalists about having "his last meal" just hours before blasting off from Earth.

Bezos, 57, is set to take flight from Texas later today alongside his brother Mark, Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen and former NASA trainee Wally Funk, 82, who will become the oldest person in space. Meanwhile, Daemen will be the youngest to visit space at 18 and Bezos will be the richest with his staggering $203 billion fortune. This will be Blue Origin's first crewed flight and will take off from 'Launch Site One' in Van Horn, Texas, with a live stream of the event starting at 7.30 EDT.

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Bezos took to Instagram to share footage of his last-minute preparation before spaceflight. The four passengers appeared relaxed and smiling as they entered the capsule.

The billionaire handed out food items to journalists at the launch site of his New Shepard space rocket on Monday afternoon. He joked with one reporter who asked it was going to be "his last meal."

"Did somebody say last meal?" the business magnate responded as he laid out the food on a table. "I don't think you have to put it that way!' he quipped. "Let's talk about it in a different way!" he added as the reporters laughed.

According to the Daily Mail, the menu was a "family favorite" of Bezos, consisting chicken thighs, mac 'n' cheese and black-eyed peas. The "last meal" joke came just hours before the billionaire would launch in his Blue Origin spacecraft for an 11-minute ride to the edge of space in the company's first manned flight. 

However, while Bezos might have cracked up journalists, critics accused the media of "lionizing" the billionaire's "vanity project". "Billionaires personally testing the viability of leaving humanity & earth behind once they’ve rendered the planet unlivable for personal gain is indeed historic," one Twitter user wrote.

"Corporate media lionising of the vanity project of a tax avoiding billionaire who runs slave labour mills. Cool," another added. "Just tax him accordingly and he would probably not have so much money for foolish, environment unfriendly things to do," a comment read. "Or he could have fed warehouse workers and their families with the money he is wasting on this rich man’s vanity project," another wrote.

Bezos previously agreed with critics who described such flights as "joyrides" for the elite. In an interview with CNN, the billionaire addressed critics who argued he should be spending his money to focus on pressing issues down on Earth instead of blowing tens of millions of dollars on such projects.

"There have been a chorus of critics saying that these flights to space are just joyrides for the wealthy and that you should be spending your time and your money and energy trying to solve problems here on Earth. So what do you say to those critics?" CNN’s Rachel Crane asked the Amazon founder.

"Well, I say they're largely right. We have to do both," Bezos said in response. "We have lots of problems here and now on Earth and we need to work on those, and we always need to look to the future. We've always done that as a species, as a civilization. We have to do both," he added.