Just days before Sunday’s successful eighth test launch of the New Shepard reusable launch system, billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, held a wide-ranging interview with Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (Business Insider’s parent company) on April 24 in Berlin.
On Sunday, New Shepard took off from the company’s Van Horn, Texas launch site at 1:06 p.m. EDT, reaching an altitude of 347,485 feet (nearly 66 miles) — New Shepard’s highest flight to date. Inside the capsule was a test dummy, “Mannequin Skywalker,” recording data about the flight from a comfortable leather-lined seat.
Highlights from today’s mission. Don’t miss the Nerf ball doing a few backflips in zero gravity. GradatimFerociter BlueOrigin YxlJRt0MXc
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) April 30, 2018
Interestingly, during the interview, Bezos revealed what his most important business venture really was. While Amazon is obviously important to him, as well as his other business ventures, nothing will ever be as important to him as Blue Origin, his aerospace startup in the Texas desert.
Beyond opening the doors to space tourism, like his closest competitor, Elon Musk and SpaceX, Bezos also has a dream. He is spending billions of dollars to design, build and launch a massive reusable rocket called the New Glenn that will compete with SpaceX and its launch systems beginning around 2020.
“This is super important to me, and I believe on the longest time-frame — and really here I’m thinking of a time-frame of a couple of hundred years, so over many decades — I believe and I get increasing conviction with every passing year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important work I’m doing,” Bezos told Döpfner.
From a childhood dream, Blue Origin was born
Bezos spent his summers as a child on his grandparent’s ranch in south Texas. There he learned to work with and appreciate the intricacies of the machinery he sometimes had to repair. And Bezos loved to read, especially about space travel, he said.
All this led to Bezos secretly founding the space company in 2000, after he became a billionaire through Amazon. And he had a worthwhile goal: help make travel to space cheap, routine and frequent.
According to a story in 2016 in Digital Journal, Blue Origin also has a motto – ‘Gradatim Ferociter’ — step by step, ferociously.
And that is exactly what the new billionaire did, taking it step by step. In 2004, he bought a 30,000-acre ranch outside of Van Horn, Texas. He would eventually buy over 330,000 acres in the region, an area half as large as Rhode Island, according to the book “The Space Barons” by Christian Davenport.
Up to very recently, Blue Origin has remained tight-lipped about what the company is working on, for the most part. But after earning millions in contracts from NASA, Bezos has opened up about what the company is working on.
The New Glenn orbital launch vehicle
In September 2016, Blue Origin released the design for its New Glenn launch vehicle. After only the smallest of hints over the last few years, the announcement comes as a welcome surprise to rocket fanatics. The New Glenn rocket continues the Blue Origin tradition of naming its boosters after American Mercury astronauts.
New Glenn is named for famed NASA astronaut John Glenn. It was Glenn who made the first American orbital flight in 1963 and who returned to orbit in 1998, at age 78, for a space shuttle mission. Glenn was not only the first American to orbit in space, but also the oldest person to fly in space.
Size-wise, New Glenn is a behemoth — although not quite as big as NASA’s Saturn 5 rocket that took astronauts to the moon. New Glenn is 23 feet [7 meters] in diameter and lifts off with 3.85 million pounds of thrust from seven BE-4 engines. Burning liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen, these are the same BE-4 engines that will power United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket. The rocket comes in two versions, a two-stage, and three-stage.
Height-wise, the two-stage version is 270 feet (82 meters) tall. The three-stage version is 313 feet (95 meters) tall. The New Glenn two-stage version can lift 14 tons (13 metric tons) to geostationary transfer orbit, and 50 tons (45 metric tons) to low Earth orbit. They are overshadowed by the Saturn V, which stood at 363 feet (111 m), taller than the Statue of Liberty or Big Ben.
Blue Origin says that if you think SpaceX landing a rocket booster on a drone ship at sea is cool, just wait until you see what Blue Origin plans, because you’re going to love their landing technique. It involves a seafaring ship that’ll catch a returning booster without stopping.
Jeff Bezos revealed Sunday that Blue Origin hopes to gain a competitive advantage over Elon Musk and his SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets by keeping some “motion in the ocean.” During the webcast of the New Shepard launch on Sunday, host Ariane Cornell explained a bit about the new technique for catching a returning booster.
“It’s actually more stable than a barge out there, which means that we can actually launch and land in higher sea states,” Cornell explained. “It means we can have a more reliable schedule for our customers.” Cornell works for Blue Origin in business development and strategy.
The reference to high seas and drone ship landings was a not so subtle shot across SpaceX’s bow, or so it appeared. But as this writer as said before, some healthy competition is always good for an industry, and commercial space flight is certainly getting to be interesting.
