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The richest man on earth briefly lost this title on Tuesday morning, but only because he was no longer on earth for a few floating minutes. Jeff Bezos spent two decades using his Amazon fortune to draw a rocket company called Blue Origin. On Tuesday, the company started its first manned flight into space with Bezos on board.
After Bezos drove the New Shepard rocket to Mach 3, experienced weightlessness and parachuted back into the Texas desert, Bezos thanked the engineers and crew along with them “Every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer” there “You paid for all of this.”
It is easy to dismiss this as a joy ride that it partially was, or as a rich man’s indulgence. But for billionaire hobbies, this is more productive than owning the Washington Post. “The architecture and the technology that we have chosen”,î Bezos said “Is completely exaggerated for a suborbital tourism mission.”Because the mission is not limited to expensive thrills.
Tourism is only the first rung on the space ladder. Blue Origin has two more manned flights scheduled for this year, and Bezos said the company is nearing $ 100 million in private sales. Virgin Galactic has pre-sold hundreds of tickets for its space plane, which its founder Richard Branson flew into zero gravity last week. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has put NASA astronauts into orbit, but private flights are also on the calendar.
It’s not clear how big this tourism market will be, but competition is clearly well underway as Blue Origin brags that their capsule has larger windows than the other’s. As these companies try to outperform each other, costs will come down. Advances in technology, such as reusable rockets that land vertically, have already lowered the price of shipping cargo into space.
The money paid by wealthy passengers will also help these companies go higher. Blue Origin has other projects in the works including a rocket large enough to launch satellites into orbit. Musk aims at Mars. The benefits of all of this are difficult to pinpoint, but that is in the nature of exploration and entrepreneurial risk taking.
Several companies are working on constellations of small satellites that could broadcast high-speed Internet to remote areas. Novel uses of technology are harder to predict, but surprises happen when bright minds try to be the first to reach a milestone. No one who worked on America’s first satellite missions in the 1950s and 1960s could have imagined that the Global Positioning System, or GPS, would one day save millions of people from lost their way.
Bezos has reportedly invested around $ 1 billion annually in Blue Origin, not a small amount. But it will pay off when another competitor reaches for the stars. It might seem like a little foray for Bezos, but it’s another big leap for America’s commercial space business.
* Editorial from the Wall Street Journal
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