FC: Newsweek on Amazon's Jeff Bezos in Space

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

---

From: "James Lucier" <james.lucier () att net>
To: "'Declan McCullagh'" <declan () well com>
Subject: Newsweek: Bezos In Space--The Noted Star Trek Buff Hires Neil 
Stephenson as a consultant
Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 19:59:33 -0400
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<http://www.msnbc.com/news/904842.asp?0cv=CB20>http://www.msnbc.com/news/904842.asp?0cv=CB20



Bezos in Space

By Brad Stone, Newsweek

What is blue origin? The name adorns a blue awning outside a 
53,000-square-foot, one-story warehouse on a desolate side street along 
Seattle's Duwamish Waterway. SUVs and motorcycles are lined up out front 
seven days a week, often late into the night. There's no record of the 
company in the city's phone books, and its workers will tell their 
neighbors only that the firm pursues scientific research. But the databases 
of the state of Washington offer more tantalizing clues. They reveal that 
Blue Origin is actually a space- research company and that the business was 
registered in 2000 from an office in Seattle's old Pacific Medical Center, 
a building that since 1998 has been occupied by the world's largest 
Internet retailer, Amazon.com.

IN OTHER WORDS, Jeff Bezos is getting into the space business.

To close followers of Forbes's 100th wealthiest American, this should come 
as no surprise. On Amazon's site, the 39-year-old billionaire himself 
enthusiastically reviews books about space. Bezos says in interviews that 
the early NASA missions into orbit and to the moon inspired him when he was 
young, and that he dreamed of becoming an astronaut. In his 1982 
high-school valedictory speech at Palmetto High School in Miami, he spoke 
about colonizing space to secure humanity's future.

Now he has a $1.7 billion fortune to try to convert that dream into 
reality. NEWSWEEK has learned that Bezos created Blue Origin, also known as 
Blue Operations LLC, to pursue his fervent dream of establishing an 
enduring human presence in space. He has surreptitiously recruited a stable 
of rocketeers: physicists, ex-NASA scientists, veterans of failed space 
start-ups and even sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson ("Snow Crash" and 
"Cryptonomicon"), who has a lifelong interest in rocketry. People familiar 
with the firm say Bezos spends part of a day each week at Blue, and is in 
frequent touch through e-mail, pinging his staff with technical questions. 
These sources say Blue Origin is actually building a spacecraft whose 
mission will be closely related to some of the first voyages that brought 
astronauts to the very edge of space. Confident that people want to travel 
beyond the Earth's atmosphere--even after a second shuttle disaster--Bezos 
and his engineers are in the process of working on rocket designs. They're 
adding staff and aiming toward launching a reusable space vehicle into 
suborbital space, with seven tourists onboard, in the next few years.

Bezos is boldly going where no dot-comer has gone before, but surprisingly, 
he's not alone. He's in the vanguard of a migration of successful high-tech 
entrepreneurs into the space industry. Millionaires Elon Musk, the founder 
of the online payment firm PayPal, and John Carmack, the genius coder 
behind the games Doom and Quake, are each building their own separate 
rocket companies. All these dreamers, and others in the movement, doubt if 
NASA will ever attempt anything else truly inspiring in their lifetimes. 
With the cocky self-assurance of entrepreneurs, they believe they can 
re-engineer rockets from the ground up, with modern information-technology 
systems, to accommodate spaceflight at a significantly lower cost than 
government bureaucrats now incur. Some space veterans, pointing to the poor 
history of private launch companies, think they might be underestimating 
how expensive and dangerous the final frontier can be. But the techies are 
motivated by their passion for space and science fiction, their confidence 
in their engineering and management skills and the challenge of solving the 
greatest technology problem ever known to humankind. Says Musk, "The 
computer and Internet revolutions have given a great deal of capital to the 
'Star Wars' fans."

...





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