Tag: Blue Origin

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Jeff Bezos shares Apollo’s lessons with kids

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos takes questions from kids at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire Photo / Chelsey Ballarte)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos came to Seattle’s Museum of Flight today to talk with students about the decades-old rocket engines he rescued from the sea – but he stayed to share some down-to-earth lessons for life on this planet.

“Be proud, not of your gifts, but of your hard work and your choices,” the billionaire told more than 100 kids and grown-ups who crammed themselves into the central gallery for “Apollo,” the museum’s new exhibit focusing on the 1960s space race.

The highlight of the show is a display of components from the mighty F-1 engines that powered Apollo astronauts on the first leg of their journey to the moon. Bezos backed a multimillion-dollar effort to recover the Saturn V engines from the bottom of the Atlantic.

Today, he stood between those artifacts and an intact F-1 engine, which was lent to the museum by NASA, as he answered questions from elementary-school and middle-school students.

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Jeff Bezos says BE-4 rocket test went awry

BE-4 rocket engine testing
In a photo from March 2017, the BE-4 rocket engine’s powerpack is installed on a stand at Blue Origin’s West Texas proving ground for startup transient testing. (Blue Origin Photo)

In a rare update, the Blue Origin space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos reported that it lost a set of powerpack test hardware for its BE-4 rocket engine over the weekend, but added that such a setback is “not unusual” during development.

“That’s why we always set up our development programs to be hardware-rich,” the company tweeted today. “Back into testing soon.”

Blue Origin is headquartered in Kent, Wash., but the BE-4 is being tested at its facility in West Texas, on ranchland owned by Bezos. The powerpack is the heart of a rocket engine, pumping fuel and oxidizer to the engine’s combustion chamber.

The current round of engine testing is key to the company’s fortunes: Blue Origin is planning to use the BE-4, which is powered by liquefied natural gas, on its own New Glenn orbital-class rocket. Blue Origin already has started lining up satellite customers for the New Glenn.

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Bezos’ $941M stock sale fuels Blue Origin

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos discusses Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster rocket and crew capsule at the Space Symposium (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is sure to benefit from his record-high $941 million selloff of Amazon shares. The sale, executed this week and reported in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, represents just a thin slice of the Amazon founder’s estimated $80 billion net worth. But it meshes with his comment last month at a Colorado space conference that he sells “about a billion dollars a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.”

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Space ventures call for boosting FAA’s budget

Image: Blue Origin launch
Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship lifts off for a test in January 2016. (Credit: Blue Origin)

When senators asked executives from Blue Origin and other commercial space ventures what they could do to help them at a Senate hearing today, they received an unusual reply: Give more money to the regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration.

“”It may be rare for companies to be pushing for more funding for their regulators, but we really think this is a case where it could be a good investment for the country,” Virgin Galactic CEO George T. Whitesides said during a Senate space subcommittee hearing.

The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, also known as AST, is responsible for regulating and encouraging development of private-sector launch companies such as Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX.

AST’s budget for the current fiscal year is just a little less than $20 million, or just a little more than 0.1 percent of the FAA’s total budget of $15.9 billion.

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How Blue Origin upgraded its rocket ship

Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin spaceship
JAmazon billionaire Jeff Bezos discusses Blue Origin New Shepard booster rocket and crew capsule, on display at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship performed beautifully during five trips to space and back, but the company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is already upgrading the next model to capitalize on the lessons learned to date.

Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson pointed out some of the upgrades this week here at the 33rd Space Symposium during an impromptu session with journalists who were waiting to climb inside a mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule.

The scorch-scarred New Shepard booster was on display just a few yards away, and Meyerson said his team was getting ready for a new series of uncrewed test flights at Blue Origin’s suborbital launch facility in West Texas. “We’re building out the fleet, and we want to get multiple vehicles out in the field,” he said.

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No potty breaks on Blue Origin space trip

Amazon's Jeff Bezos
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos takes questions in front of Blue Origin’s mock-up for the New Shepard spaceship’s crew capsule. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Are you worried about having to pee while you’re flying on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship? Or getting sick? Billionaire founder Jeff Bezos has a word of advice: Fuhgeddaboudit.

During this week’s visit to the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Bezos handled the standard questions about, um, bodily needs while in the confines of the suborbital spaceship that Blue Origin is developing.

Those questions have been addressed before, but perhaps not quite as authoritatively (or humorously). Watch our video, and then we’ll sum up answers to all the burning questions that arose.

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Here’s what it’s like in Blue Origin’s spaceship

Alan Boyle in Blue Origin capsule
GeekWire’s Alan Boyle sits in one of the padded seats inside a mock-up of the crew capsule for Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship. The door of the capsule’s hatch is just to the right of Boyle’s head. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – The seats in Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship are like a dentist’s chair that’s fully extended, with a big difference. You can float out of this one when weightlessness sets in.

Of course, we couldn’t get the zero-G experience when we tried out the seats in a mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule, on display here at the 33rd Space Symposium. But we did get a condensed version of the 11-minute flight scenario, from launch to landing.

Our guide for the sit-in was Ariane Cornell, a member of Blue Origin’s strategy and business development team. Five other journalists and I ducked our heads, stepped through the hatch and settled into the six seats placed around the periphery of a cabin that’s about the size and shape of a big igloo.

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How Blue Origin builds on Amazon’s success

Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos
Blue Origin’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, peers out the window of a New Shepard crew capsule mock-up. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has long said that he’s using his personal fortune to fund his Blue Origin space venture, and today he hinted at just how many billions of dollars he intends to spend.

“My business model right now for Blue Origin is, I sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin,” he told reporters here at the 33rd Space Symposium. “So the business model for Blue Origin is very robust.”

Bezos threw out the figure half-jokingly, after noting that he typically doesn’t reveal how much he’s spending. But he made clear that his in-house space effort, headquartered in Kent, Wash., takes a noticeable chunk out of his estimated $78 billion fortune.

He said the development cost for Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital launch system, which should be taking off from a Florida launch facility by 2020 or so, is likely to be on the order of $2.5 billion.

And then there’s the New Shepard suborbital rocket ship, which has successfully flown to space and back five times during uncrewed test flights launched from Blue Origin’s West Texas facility. The space-flown booster and a mock-up of New Shepard’s crew capsule are on display this week at the Space Symposium.

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Get a peek at Blue Origin’s lunar lander

Blue Moon lander
Blue Origip President Rob Meyerson shows off a concept for the Blue Moon lunar lander during a session at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. Other panelists include Jonathan Arenberg, chief systems engineer for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope; former astronaut John Grunsfeld; and Mary Lynne Dittmar of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Blue Origin, the space venture backed by Amazon billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos, is providing a first look at the design for the Blue Moon lander it wants to use for deliveries to the lunar surface in the 2020s.

It’s been more than a month since Blue Origin’s plan for sending payloads to the moon for a permanent settlement came to light – but the company’s president, Rob Meyerson, lifted a veil a bit higher by showing off an artist’s conception of the lander here at the 33rd Space Symposium.

As the four-legged lander design was displayed on screen, Meyerson told the crowd that the spacecraft could be launched on NASA’s own heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket, or SLS, which is currently under development. It could also go on United Launch Alliance’s existing Atlas 5 rocket, or on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket – which is due to start flying by 2020.

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Space geeks check out Blue Origin spaceship

Blue Origin spaceship
A crane hoists Blue Origin’s space-flown New Shepard booster into position at the Space Symposium in Colorado. (Ariane Cornell Photo via Twitter)

Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship is continuing its farewell tour this week with a stopover at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., and there’s even a mockup of the crew capsule for would-be space tourists to sit in.

The Seattle area’s best-known space company, founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos back in 2000, is making a splash by erecting the slightly toasted rocket booster near the Colorado conference’s hottest hot spot, the Broadmoor Hotel.

Tweets tell the story, starting with a snapshot of Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson and Ariane Cornell, who’s on the company’s strategy and business development team.

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