--- From: "James Lucier" <james.lucierat_private> To: "'Declan McCullagh'" <declanat_private> 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 Message-ID: <002c01c30d19$0d2f4110$5986fea9@VALUEDA9CC7744> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_002D_01C30CF7.861DA110" X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal <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." ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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