Tag: Jeff Bezos

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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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Amazon stirs up laughs on ‘Silicon Valley’

Silicon Valley
HBO has ramped up the tech-themed comedy “Silicon Valley” for its fourth season. (HBO Illustration)

HBO’s “Silicon Valley” comedy series presents a California-centric view of how tech is done (and undone), but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Seattle-based Amazon Web Services came in for satirical shout-outs in April 23’s season premiere.

The show centers on the travails of a startup called Pied Piper, often suffered at the hands of Hooli, a monolithic Google-like company.

As the season’s first episode begins, Pied Piper is pivoting from the data compression and storage business to video chat – specifically, a miraculous smartphone app called PiperChat that can conference an unlimited number of video users at the same time, with no lag or loss of picture quality.

Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks poses as an Uber driver and virtually kidnaps a potential VC investor, touting PiperChat’s 120,000 daily active users and the 18 percent week-over-week growth in its user base.

But there’s a problem: The user load is so high that Pied Piper is burning through cash to pay Amazon Web Services for the streaming. There’s no money left to pay Pied Piper’s developers, despite their protests.

“I’m not paying because you’re not the one getting [bleeped] face first by your credit card company because of massive AWS hosting fees,” the startup’s living-on-the-edge backer, Erlich Bachman, tells the team.

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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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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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Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin wins Collier Trophy

New Shepard
Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster stands on its West Texas landing pad after a successful touchdown. (Blue Origin Photo)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos keeps racking up the awards for his Blue Origin space venture: He just found out that Blue Origin is winning the prestigious Robert J. Collier Trophy for its New Shepard suborbital spaceship.

The 2016 Collier Trophy was awarded to the Blue Origin team, headquartered in Kent, Wash., “for successfully demonstrating rocket booster reusability with the New Shepard human spaceflight vehicle through five successful test flights of a single booster and engine, all of which performed powered vertical landings on Earth,” the NAA said today in a statement.

The trophy is awarded annually to recognize the previous year’s greatest achievement in American aeronautics or astronautics. Past winners range from aviation pioneers Glenn Curtiss (1911 and 1912) and Orville Wright (1913) to the teams behind SpaceShipOne (2004), NASA’s Curiosity rover (2012) and NASA’s Dawn probe to Ceres (2015).

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Jeff Bezos provides a peek at his spaceship

Blue Origin New Shepard spaceship
In this artistic view, a passenger takes a look at the interior of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship. (Blue Origin Illustration via Jeff Bezos)

While Blue Origin’s scorch-scarred New Shepard spaceship continues its nationwide tour, billionaire founder Jeff Bezos is giving fans an updated look at what they could be riding (and wearing) when the company puts passengers on board.

The latest email update from Bezos, who created the Blue Origin space venture only a few years after starting up Amazon, includes a series of artist’s conceptions showing the interior of New Shepard’s spacious six-seat passenger cabin.

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Richard Branson sizes up Seattle’s billionaires

Richard Branson
Richard Branson is a fan of Seattle’s entrepreneurs. (Virgin Atlantic photo)

At the age of 66, Virgin billionaire Richard Branson has seen a lot of entrepreneurs come and go, but he’s also gotten to know some of the enduring titans of the tech industry, such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Seattle’s entrepreneurial spirit is one big reason why Branson scheduled one of his signature “Business Is an Adventure” forums here this week. (Another big reason was the start of Virgin Atlantic’s nonstop air service between London and Seattle.)

During an exclusive interview with GeekWire, Branson gave his unvarnished views on controversial issues ranging from Donald Trump’s presidency to the status of women in the entrepreneurial world. But he also reflected on his relationships with Bezos and Gates.

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Jeff Bezos gets his bearings on rocket engine

BE-4 rocket engine testing
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)

What’s the difference between ball bearings and hydrostatic bearings? You should have more of an inkling after checking out Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ latest update on the development of Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine.

The engine is undergoing testing for use not only on the New Glenn rocket that Bezos’ space venture is planning, but also on United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan rocket.

The BE-4 is designed to provide 550,000 pounds of thrust, propelled by liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas. Bezos says that kind of thrust should be enough to send a payload on the first leg of a trip to the moon when seven of them are firing together.

But that kind of performance can involve a lot of wear and tear, particularly if you’re using traditional ball and roller bearings. To maximize the engine’s reusability, Blue Origin’s team is taking a different approach. To keep the BE-4 running smoothly, Bezos says the turbine at the heart of the engine’s turbopump will use a thin film of the fluid propellants as its bearings.

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OneWeb satellites added to Blue Origin’s list

Wyler and Bezos
OneWeb executive chairman Greg Wyler and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos shake hands on a deal for satellite launches on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. (Blue Origin Photo)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A day after announcing the first launch customer for Blue Origin’s yet-to-be-built New Glenn rocket, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos introduced the second customer: OneWeb, a venture that aims to create a satellite network for global broadband access.

Over the next few years, OneWeb is planning to send hundreds, and then thousands of small satellites into low Earth orbit. In partnership with Airbus, OneWeb is due to build and launch the first satellites within the next year. It’s also planning a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing complex on Florida’s Space Coast – not far from where Blue Origin is building a 750,000-square-foot factory for New Glenn rockets.

OneWeb already has struck deals with Virgin Orbit and Arianespace for the initial launches. The deal that Bezos announced today provides for five additional launches on the New Glenn, starting in 2021.

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