Let me show you something.
Up until now, Jeff Bezos is said to have spent only one day a week at Blue Origin.
But that is about to change. For 27 years, Bezos has been steering what is now the
world's largest online retailer. But he recently announced he'll be
stepping down as Amazon's CEO later this year
writing to staff: when you have a responsibility like that
it's hard to put attention on anything else. He'll transition to Executive Chair
of the company's Board while turning his focus toward
higher pursuits. Blue Origin has never been a hobby or a side project for Jeff
Bezos. Space is where his heart is. He's been
obsessed with it since he was a little boy.
You don't choose your passions. Your passions choose you.
His high school girlfriend once told reporters the reason he wanted to get
rich off Amazon was so he'd have the cash to pursue
his dream. Yet his rocket venture lags far behind SpaceX.
Elon Musk's aerospace firm has already sent astronauts to the International
Space Station, launched satellites for a new internet
service, and is developing the giant Starship to send people to Mars one day.
In comparison, Blue Origin still hasn't even orbited the Earth
despite being two years older. Its New Shepard launch vehicle has flown
more than a dozen times but it only goes to the edge of space,
with the plan of providing a fun suborbital flight for tourists in the
near future. Musk has called Bezos too old and his
rocket company too slow to achieve anything great but freed
from his duties at Amazon, Blue Origin will most certainly get a
substantial boost from the billionaire who knows a thing
or two about building a successful company.
All eyes are now on New Glenn. The heavy lift rocket is supposed to reach orbit
for the first time this year. It's partially reusable. The
first stage booster lands back on Earth just like SpaceX's Falcon 9 does.
New Glenn already has contracts to launch internet satellites for the
Canadian telecommunications company Telesat
and the UK's OneWeb. With Bezos's business acumen,
Blue Origin is hoping to go after more customers and can even overcome its late
start to help bring Amazon's internet satellites into service.
Project Kuiper could give SpaceX's Starlink a run for its money.
Both are trying to beam high-speed internet to remote places where it's
currently too expensive or simply unavailable. SpaceX is clearly
well ahead. Over a thousand of its satellites are
already in space with a planned 12,000-strong constellation at the very
least whereas Kuiper still exists only on paper.
Despite Amazon not having launched a single satellite yet,
the rivalry is heating up between Bezos and Musk. When Amazon and other companies
opposed SpaceX's request to move its satellites to a lower altitude than
originally planned, Musk tweeted: it does not serve the
public to hamstring Starlink, pointing out Kuiper is at best several
years away from operation. Amazon fired back, accusing SpaceX of
trying to smother competition. We don't know when Kuiper will launch
but half of its 3,000 satellites have to be up and running within six years to
meet licensing requirements. When it does get off the ground, it could
expand Amazon's empire by becoming the middleman
for getting data into its successful cloud service AWS.
Getting satellites into orbit is just a step into space for Bezos.
He wants to go much farther. We're not going back to the moon to
visit. We're going back to the moon to stay.
This is a full-scale prototype of the descent stage of Blue Origin's lunar
lander which is based off the Blue Moon lander
the company had previously been working on.
NASA will choose either this vehicle or SpaceX's modified Starship
or the entry from Dynetics to send American astronauts back to the moon for
the first time in nearly 50 years. The government agency
was supposed to narrow the race down to two by the end of February.
That has now been extended to the end of April as the Biden administration
re-evaluates the 2024 target for a moon landing.
Bezos appears pretty confident his ride will be chosen,
declaring on Instagram that Blue Origin's BE-7 rocket engine will be the
one to take the first woman to the surface of the moon.
NASA handed Blue Origin over half a billion dollars to develop the lander - a
considerable chunk of change. But for the most part, Bezos has been
paying out of his own pocket to keep his rocket company afloat -
funneling a billion dollars worth of Amazon stock toward it every year.
So securing juicy contracts could make Blue Origin less dependent on his own
personal wealth and perhaps erase some of the
disappointment of losing out to United Launch Alliance
and SpaceX for a U.S. Air Force contract worth
billion. With the funding, Bezos has a bigger, long-term vision for humans in
space. Imagine moving off the planet into
enormous space colonies holding a million people or more.
Here's the international space station for scale.
He believes Blue Origin is his most important work because he fears Earth's
resources will run out one day. It would lead for the first time to
where your grandchildren and their grandchildren would have worse lives
than you. There is one place in space he doesn't
want to go. He's not a fan of Musk's plan to build a city on Mars,
pointing out Mount Everest would be a "garden paradise" in his words compared to
the freezing red planet. But while the SpaceX CEO has a timeline
for sending the first humans to Mars - 2026 is his latest estimate - it will be
well into the future before Bezos's big dream has a shot of coming true,
Blue Origin may liken itself to the tortoise in the fable where slow and
steady beats the speedy hare however some believe this tortoise is
just too slow. By leaving the top job at Amazon and
focusing more energy on his true passion, Bezos wants to prove them wrong. But it's
not a sprint. The race to space requires both mental
and physical endurance. Bezos made headlines a couple of years
ago by looking remarkably fitter than in the past.
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Thanks for watching Newsthink.
I'm Cindy Pom.