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Jeff Bezos’ high school girlfriend once said he always wanted to make a lot of money.
Because it was the only way to get what he wanted.
What he wanted was to get to outer space.
Alright, and touchdown of the capsule.
Bezos may be famous for founding Amazon. But he believes his most meaningful company is Blue Origin.
This is the most important work I’m doing and I have a great conviction about that.
His space venture is only six years younger than the online giant. Yet it hasn’t made anywhere near the same kind of mark.
One reason it’s moving slowly is that it’s obsessed with getting things exactly right. The logo is a feather that represents the perfection of flight.
Wow. Look at that stability.
The New Shepard looks beautiful as it hovers before landing. The focus has been on perfecting the technique.
But is perfection at the cost of rapid progress?
SpaceX is famously not afraid to fail.
They even poked fun at themselves in a video.
Elon Musk once said if things are not failing, you’re not innovating enough.
In October, SpaceX achieved its 100th successful flight and marked the milestone with this compilation.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin hasn’t gotten into orbit once despite being two years older than SpaceX.
The New Shepard doesn’t go into orbit. It only flies to the edge of space before coming back down.
This is meant for tourists who have a lot of pocket change. We don’t know how much a ticket will cost.
As an estimate, Virgin Galactic is selling a seat on its suborbital spaceplane for $250,000.
2021 is supposed to be the big year as New Glenn is expected to fly into orbit.
The heavy-lift launch vehicle that’s partially reusable remains a mystery for now.
When we got a sneak peek at the mission control center inside New Glenn’s factory in Cape Canaveral, Florida, we never saw what the actual rocket looks like.
Bezos has run the company pretty secretly since the beginning.
He quietly told a select few Amazon employees that he started up an aerospace firm in 2000.
Even three years later, word still wasn’t getting out.
When Bezos was involved in a helicopter crash in Texas in 2003, news articles said he was looking at property without any mention he was also scouting out a place to build a launchpad.
Blue Origin keeps quiet about its plans. But it's clear that it's moving slower than SpaceX because it can.
Blue Origin can afford to take its time because it has a lot of money.
Bezos puts a billion dollars’ worth of Amazon stock toward his space company every year. There's no need to race after government contracts to stay alive.
Some believe this financial security negatively impacts growth.
SpaceX’s COO Gwynne Shotwell once said the “free money” from Amazon as she calls it can hurt motivation and drive.
SpaceX doesn’t have the luxury of big financial backing.
It has to speed ahead to secure contracts like sending NASA astronauts to the International Space Station
because it needs a lot of money to make Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars come true.
The company has been working toward specific deadlines.
It’s developing a massive, fully reusable system called Starship
to try to make it to the red planet, uncrewed, in 2024.
Blue Origin’s timelines are less defined.
Bezos may dream of millions of people living in space colonies.
This is Maui on its best day. All year long.
However, we don’t know when these would be built and who would do it.
A lack of a set date to work toward could be another reason Blue Origin appears to move with less urgency.
This is how Bezos describes his company's role in his lifetime.
I want to build space infrastructure so that the next generations of people can use that infrastructure the same way I used FedEx and UPS to build Amazon.
Just as UPS and FedEx helped Amazon make deliveries, especially during the early days, Blue Origin hopes its spacecraft can act like a delivery service,
providing future entrepreneurs a foundation to make living beyond Earth possible.
Let me show you something.
Blue Moon can carry 6.5 metric tons of cargo to the lunar surface.
It’s capable of navigating autonomously so it doesn’t require human hands.
There’s another version designed to carry people.
NASA will have to choose between this lander and the vehicles being developed by Dynetics and SpaceX.
One of the three will be the first to take astronauts back to the moon by 2024.
The company has gone head to head with others before and recently got stung by a big loss.
The US Air Force has been looking for a new rocket to launch top-secret missions.
It no longer wants to rely on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V
because it’s powered by a Russian engine and America is trying to move away from Russian technology.
ULA won 60% of the contract to develop another rocket, the Vulcan Centaur, while SpaceX received the remainder.
The Pentagon had handed Blue Origin $500 million to help develop New Glenn but in the end opted not to choose the company.
After getting passed over, Blue Origin’s CEO said “we are disappointed in the decision."
Despite the loss, it’s sticking by its slow and careful approach to space flight embodied in its motto Gradatim Ferociter, Latin for “step by step, ferociously".
Bezos even has it stitched down the side of his lucky cowboy boots.
We’ll see if those steps are ferocious enough but Bezos has always followed his instincts.
All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts.
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