You've heard of Blue Origin — maybe. It's a space company owned by Jeff Bezos. It's not as important in his life as Amazon, but it's near and dear to his heart, because he's been a space buff all his life. He told us last year, “What we want to have happen is millions of people living and working in space.” He said it again Tuesday in a phone interview with my colleague Chris Davenport: “The thing I’m most excited about is humans in space, and the vision for me is millions of people living and working in space.”
For years, the company provided almost no information about its operations. Occasionally the company would release a video clip showing a rocket engine test. The company developed a space vehicle called New Shepard that is designed to take people and payloads on suborbital flights — someday. It has flown, unmanned, in a test flight to about 58 miles up, close to the edge of space as it is customarily defined.
While Blue Origin operated quietly, Elon Musk's SpaceX took bold steps to win NASA contracts and generate publicity. Musk, like Bezos, is a tech tycoon who has used his fortune to follow his passions. (Musk splits his time between Tesla, the electric-car maker, and SpaceX.) Musk has not been shy of making a ruckus as he's tried to pry open the lucrative national-security space business.
Musk is the hare, Bezos is the tortoise. They are both dreamers, but with sharply different strategies. Bezos seems to be exceedingly patient with his company. You might say he has given Blue Origin an unusually long runway (borrowing the term he used when discussing his purchase in 2013 of The Washington Post).
Musk has prodded Bezos about the glacial pace of his company's progress. During a dispute over a lease of Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Musk flamed Blue Origin in a statement given to......
"(Blue Origin) has not yet succeeded in creating a reliable suborbital spacecraft, despite spending 10 years in development. ... If they do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA's human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs. Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct."
Musk told me in an interview two years ago: “[Bezos] doesn’t want people to think he’s getting distracted from Amazon. Every time I talk to Jeff I tell him to spend more time on Blue Origin."
Musk suggested that what Amazon does is not essential to the future of humanity.
"Advancing space flight is more important," Musk said.
So now Bezos has answered the bell. First came the announcement last September that Blue Origin had inked a deal with United Launch Alliance (a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture) to develop a new rocket engine. Those engines could potentially be used on the next generation of rockets used to launch military and spy satellites. As Davenport reports today, there are some potential wrinkles in that plan, not least of which is that engine-maker Aerojet wants to buy ULA.
Then, on Tuesday, Bezos was joined by the governor of Florida and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson at Cape Canaveral for the announcement that Blue Origin will begin operating out of Pad 36. SpaceX operates on Pad 40. That's right up the street. Hi, neighbor!
Bezos announced that his company would build spacecraft designed for going into low earth orbit. Many details remain vague.
Bezos said the vehicle, which doesn’t yet have an official name, is designed for launching satellites as well as people. He declined, though, to specify its payload capacity, saying the company would release more details about the vehicle next year.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. The potential revenue from space tourism is a big unknown, and that will be a competitive field at some point. Musk said years ago that the rocket business is a great way to turn a large fortune into a small one. Blue Origin would obviously benefit from a lucrative engine contract. These dreamers talk of living in space and (in Musk's cases) colonizing Mars, but the big money right now is still in national security and military payloads.
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