Why Jeff Bezos is going to space, and why we should care
The world’s richest man will hurl himself to the edge of space on a rocket tomorrow morning accompanied by three chosen passengers, on a mission to save the world.
Jeff Bezos has been waiting for this moment since he started Blue Origin in 1999, a few years after minting a fortune by taking his world-changing e-commerce company Amazon public. Blue Origin was intended to address Bezos’ long-seated obsession with humanity’s future in space, which began as a child during NASA’s Apollo years and continued at Princeton, where he was influenced by a theorist of human space habitats, Gerard O’Neill. Bezos thinks that the future of human civilization is moving heavy industry and energy production off of the earth.
It took Blue Origin a long time to evolve from an organization that invited experts to space-themed barbecues to a company that actually developed space hardware. But with the 2015 debut of the New Shepard rocket, Blue’s engineers had a major success on their hands: A vehicle capable of carrying six passengers some 100 km (62 miles) into the sky, but more importantly, one that returns safely to be reused again and again. It was seen as a first step towards bigger things, and an ideal vehicle for luxury tourist flights just out of the atmosphere.
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