Jeff Bezos Is Selling $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space

Jeff Bezos Is Selling $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space

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“If we can make access to space low-cost, then entrepreneurs will be unleashed,” he said. “You will see creativity, you will see dynamism, you will see the same thing in space that I’ve witnessed on the internet in the last 20 years.”

Last month, Mr. Bezos announced the first-paying customer, Eutelstat, a satellite company, for New Glenn, whose commercial flights would help offset costs. New Glenn is expected to fly by 2020, he said, but humans will not be passengers on the heavy-lift rocket until many years after that.

Mr. Bezos has repeatedly expressed caution about setting timetables for the start of Blue Origin’s commercial or passenger trips, and he did not diverge from that on Wednesday. He would not say when New Shepard would undergo its next round of test flights, or set a specific date as a goal, merely mentioning next year for possible tourist trips.

Blasting Off With Blue Origin

At the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado, Times reporter got a close up look at the Blue Origin crew capsule for passengers to travel to suborbital space.

“It’s a mistake to race to a deadline when you’re talking about a flying vehicle, especially one that you’re going to put people on,” he said. “I still think we can do commercial paying passengers in 2018.”

Asked how much passengers would pay, Mr. Bezos said he did not know yet, but he predicted ticket prices would decline as spaceflight became more common. (Hundreds of people have already put down deposits to reserve places on similar commercial trips on Virgin Galactic that could cost $250,000 a ticket, although that company’s spaceplane has yet to take anyone up.)

New Shepard is a modest start for Mr. Bezos’s ambitions to tap into the nascent space tourism market. It is a single-stage booster with a capsule on top that is designed to carry six passengers at a time on trips of about 10 to 11 minutes.

There will not be a Blue Origin crew on the spacecraft. Passengers wearing sleek jumpsuits will be able to peer out what the company says will be the largest windows in space, taking up about one-third of the surface area of the dome.

About 12 feet in diameter, the passenger capsule holds six black seats that resemble recliners, with panels offering details about altitude and other features of a trip.

The engine that powers the booster produces up to about 110,000 pounds of thrust.

On ascent, passengers will experience forces of about 3 Gs, about three times the normal force of gravity that humans experience on earth. When the booster reaches a certain altitude, the capsule will detach and coast above the Karman line, which is 62 miles above sea level, officially entering into space.

There, the passengers will experience about four to five minutes of weightlessness. They can unbuckle their harnesses and do somersaults, if desired, in the padded-dome interior.

On descent, they will encounter forces of 5 Gs.

The capsule will parachute back to the plains of West Texas, slowing to a coasting speed of about 20 miles per hour, while the booster drops and fires its engine to slow down and make a vertical landing. The capsule slows to 3 m.p.h. before touching down. Both pieces are reusable to make the trips more economical.

Photo

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and Amazon, stepped out of Blue Origin’s New Shepard space system during the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs on Wednesday.

Credit
Nick Cote for The New York Times

“Reusability is the key to getting millions of people living and working in space,” Mr. Bezos said.

While the concept is similar to the procedures SpaceX has used to recover the boosters for its Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX’s endeavors have been far more challenging, because the boosters must accelerate to speeds of thousands of miles per hour in order to put payloads on a trajectory to reach orbit. Just last week, SpaceX successfully launched a satellite into space with a reused booster, a first for commercial spaceflight.

New Shepard has a simpler flight path: just up and down, almost like a big roller coaster that slows to a stop at the top of its arc.

However, Mr. Bezos and his Blue Origin team believe that New Shepard, which is expected to fly many times, will give the company ample practice and experience that can be applied to New Glenn, which will be manufactured and launched in Florida.

The New Shepard booster on display at the Colorado symposium made five successful up-and-down flights beginning in November 2015.

Its last flight, in October, included a test of an emergency-abort system that is designed to blast the capsule — and, eventually, passengers — to safety in case something goes wrong with the booster.

The abort system worked. To the pleasant surprise of the engineers, the booster survived the force of separation, righted itself and descended to a landing. (It would have still been considered a successful test if the booster had crashed.)

A Virgin Galactic test flight in 2014 crashed, killing one pilot and severely injuring the other.

Both Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk have much more ambitious goals beyond their current rockets. Mr. Musk wants to send settlers to Mars. Mr. Bezos has said his long-term vision involves having millions of people living and working in space.

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