#Jeff bezos spaceship windows#

Bezos isn’t building a rocket business for profitability in 2020. But Bezos is thinking long term, and in this sense, too, his strategy has something in common with Amazon, which started 22 years ago as an online bookseller. military-which is in the market for Blue Origin’s next-generation rocket engines.

No other rocket has ever been used even twice.Īt the moment, Blue Origin has just one major customer-United Launch Alliance, a launch contractor for clients like NASA and the U.S. The engine-also developed from scratch-provides 110,000 pounds of thrust on launch, turns off, and can be restarted in the last 30 seconds of flight and throttled down to 20,000 pounds of thrust, enabling the spacecraft to settle gently on its landing gear.Īnd Bezos’ rocket works: In less than a year, between November 2015 and early October, Blue Origin launched the same New Shepard rocket to the edge of space five times and landed it safely.

#Jeff bezos spaceship windows#

The crew capsule has the largest windows ever on a spacecraft-single, multilayered acrylic panes that are 3.5 feet tall and 2 feet wide, no minor detail when Bezos’ vision for commercializing Blue Origin, especially in the early going, is ferrying tourists to suborbital space. It flies into space nose-first and back to Earth tail-first, with a ring near the top of the rocket’s first stage that acts as a circular fin to stabilize the rocket as it descends at the speed of sound. His first operational rocket, New Shepard, which Bezos named for America’s first astronaut, Alan Shepard, was designed fresh, down to the steerable tail fins at its base. Now 52 years old, Bezos has reportedly put $500 million of his own money into Blue Origin to change that. “If you look at the progress we’ve made over the last five decades,” he says, “it hasn’t been that much.” The problem, as he sees it, is that not enough has happened since then: Fewer than 600 people have made it to outer space. This article is a selection from the December issue of Smithsonian magazine Buyīezos was only 5 years old in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on the Moon-an achievement that he says inspires his work to this day. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 In other words, a launch that today costs $60 million or $100 million would cost just $1 million. With reusability, in theory, you can see a path to lowering the cost of access to space by a factor of 100.” “The big costs come from throwing that aerospace-grade hardware away.

“When you look at expendable rockets today, the cost of propellant is only about 1 percent of the cost of the mission,” he says. The new-economy pioneer who founded and revolutionized retail by making it effortless to shop, Bezos expects to revolutionize space travel with an equally simple notion: If we’re going to come and go to space, our spaceships will have to come and go, too. In front of him, workers are putting together crew capsules with cartoonishly large windows. Behind him is the rocket booster assembly area. He is sitting on the expansive manufacturing floor at the headquarters of Blue Origin, the spaceflight company he quietly founded 16 years ago, in an old Boeing plant south of Seattle. “One day,” Bezos says, “all rockets will have landing gear.” Two months later, the rocket did just that, blasting off and landing a second time. Late last year, they allowed it to do something that no rocket had ever done before: fly to space, then fly back to Earth and settle down, upright, as if ready to fly again. In the history of space travel, technology that changes everything has rarely looked as down-to-earth as the four spindly struts at the bottom of Jeff Bezos’ first rocket.