The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  He studied the release, looked at the photo of his grandfather, and listened to the pitch.

  “I’m inclined to participate,” he said, carefully.

  It took another couple of months for “inclined” to solidify into a yes.

  When Martin Baron, the executive editor of the Post, interviewed Bezos at a conference hosted by the paper, he acknowledged the tricky and potentially perilous position he was in. “In journalism, interviewing the owner of the company is considered to be high-risk behavior,” he said.

  As a Washington Post reporter, the same was true for me now.

  Relaxed and in a good mood, sitting in the Jupiter 2 conference room, Bezos began to talk about his long-held passion for space, and what he hoped to accomplish. Amazon was still very much his primary occupation—something he was passionate about, especially as it had branched out from selling books to selling nearly everything. But on Wednesdays, he stole away to Blue’s headquarters in Kent, Washington, about 20 miles south of downtown Seattle. Wednesdays were for space.

  His girlfriend from high school had once told an interviewer that Bezos had founded Amazon in order to make enough money to start a space company. Now on this Wednesday in May 2017, he conceded that there “is some truth to that.” The great fortune, which now stood at more than $80 billion, had allowed him to found Blue Origin.

  While Musk had initially invested $100 million of his own money into SpaceX, the company had also benefited from more than $4 billion in contracts from NASA. By contrast, Bezos was his own NASA, funding Blue Origin almost entirely on his own. He’d joked that Blue Origin’s business model has been, “I sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.” He bought the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013. By contrast, he spent $2.5 billion of his own money on the New Glenn rocket alone, without accepting any government investment.

  But Amazon was a real passion, he said, and no mere “stepping-stone” for Blue.

  Bezos had recently been to the Oscars where Amazon Studios’ film Manchester by the Sea had won an Academy Award. Alexa, Amazon’s personal home assistant, was a hit, and the company was getting deeper into artificial intelligence. And groceries. Soon Amazon would acquire Whole Foods. There was plenty there to keep him occupied at what he called his “day job.”

  “I’ve fallen in love with it,” he said.

  He’d fallen in love with Blue, too. If you asked Alexa what she thought of Donald Trump, for example, she’d respond by saying, “When it comes to politics, I like to think big. We should be funding deep space exploration. I’d love to answer questions from Mars.” And he had also recently scored a small role playing an alien in the film Star Trek Beyond.

  A few days earlier, Bezos had been to the Seattle Museum of Flight, where the F-1, Apollo-era engines he had recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean had just gone on display. He had come to speak to a group of schoolchildren about the mission, and his interest in the cosmos, how from a young age he was “passionate about space, rockets, rocket engines, space travel.”

  “We all have passions,” he told the students sitting before him on the floor. “You don’t get to choose them, they pick you. But you have to be alert to them. You have to be looking for them. And when you find your passion, it’s a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction. It gives you purpose. You can have a job. You can have a career. Or you can have a calling.”

  His calling had come to him when he was five years old, as he watched Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon.

  Sitting in the conference room, he said “I have a very distinct memory,” he said, of the lunar mission and the moment space took hold of him. His grandparents and mother were huddled around the television. “I remember the excitement in the room,” he continued. “And I remember the black-and-white TV.”

  Most of all, he remembered the sense “that something important was happening.”

  Something important was happening at Blue as well. Not far from where Bezos was seated, crews on the factory floor were building the next generation of New Shepard rockets, the ones that could take humans to space.

  Over the past year, Blue had flown the same New Shepard booster five times in a row, with minimal refurbishment in between flights, pulling off precise landings each time and proving that reusability was possible. After each flight, the company painted a tortoise on the booster, a reminder of the slow, deliberate path. And the company had a new motto: “Launch. Land. Repeat.”

  The next step would be flying people on suborbital trips just past the edge of space. First would come test passengers—not pilots; the rocket flew itself autonomously—whose sole job would be to rate the experience from a customer’s point of view. Were the seats comfortable? How was the view? Were the handles in the right place? Then would come the first space tourists, himself included.

  “My singular focus is people in space,” Bezos said. “I want people in space.”

  As a young child, he had wanted to be an astronaut. But as he got older, and studied rocketry, he realized that he wanted to also be an engineer. Armstrong was a hero, but he also admired Wernher von Braun, the German-born chief architect of the Apollo-era Saturn V rocket.

  “I think he would also be quite disappointed that we aren’t further out into space,” Bezos said in response to a question about what von Braun would think of the state of the current space program. “I think he’d be shocked that nobody had been back to the moon. I think he’d be shocked that the record for the maximum number of humans in space at any one time is thirteen. He would be, like, ‘What have you guys been up to? What, I die and the whole thing stops? Dudes, get on with it!’”

  YEARS AFTER VIRGIN Galactic started touting its space tourism program, it now was about to have competition. Richard Branson was promising all the luxuries that had been associated with the glamorous Virgin brand. But with Amazon, Bezos had a long history of customer service experience that he was bringing to Blue.

  Two days before the launch, Blue’s passengers would arrive in West Texas, the company said on its website, where “the area’s isolation lends clarity and focus as you prepare for the experience of a lifetime.” A day-long training session would include an overview of the rocket and spacecraft, safety briefings, a simulation of the mission, and “maneuvering in a weightless environment”—“everything you need to know to make the most of your experience as an astronaut.”

  On the morning of the flight, as many as six passengers would board the spacecraft thirty minutes before launch time. Inside the capsule, with its white padded walls, they’d strap into reclined, La-Z-Boy–like seats each positioned next to a massive window, the biggest ever to fly into space.

  They’d blast off in a burst of fire and smoke; soon the capsule would separate from the booster and float past the edge of space. The passengers would then unbuckle their seatbelts and have four minutes to float around the cabin, weightless. Thrusters would slowly spin the capsule to give passengers a 360-degree view. Then they’d strap themselves back into the seats and the spacecraft would fall back toward Earth under parachutes, before touching down in the desert. In all, the entire trip would last ten or eleven minutes.

  No one sold space like Branson did, promising his customers a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But now Blue was getting into marketing mode, touting its program in similarly lofty tones.

  “When you first look out through these massive windows, you just lose yourself in the panorama of blue and black,” former NASA astronaut Nicholas Patrick, who worked as Blue’s human integration architect, said in a promotional video the company posted on its website. “You can see clearly for millions of light years in every direction. It gives you a sense of the scale of the universe. The minute you unstrap, you’re free. It opens up the possibilities for movement that you’ve just never, ever had here on Earth. It’s a shared experience with your crew, but it’s also profoundly personal. So, you really feel a part of the unfathomable d
epths of the cosmos.”

  And a connection to Earth. At least that’s what the astronauts always said—that they went to space only to discover home. The crew of Apollo 8 had made it all the way to the far side of the moon, and then, as they came around the bend, there it was, “the pale blue dot,” half-lit on the horizon, a frail planet, suspended in the darkness, alone. Their “Earth rise” photograph would become one of the most iconic images in the history of still photography.

  In mid-2017, Bezos invited several of the surviving Apollo-era astronauts to an air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he was showing off the New Shepard booster and a mock-up of the crew capsule that would soon take paying tourists to space. It was an extraordinary reunion of the most exclusive of fraternities. There was Buzz Aldrin. And James Lovell, and Frank Borman, both members of the Apollo 8 crew, along with Fred Haise, who had served with Lovell on Apollo 13. There were Walter Cunningham, Apollo 7, and Gene Kranz, NASA’s legendary flight director.

  One by one, they stepped into Bezos’s spacecraft, crossing the chasm from Apollo to the promise of the Next Giant Leap, even if so many of their brethren had passed away and would never see it come to fruition. They stretched out in the reclined seats next to the giant windows of this newly designed crew capsule, and ran their fingers over the handrails there to provide stability during those minutes of weightlessness. Bezos was thrilled. These were his heroes.

  “Space changes people,” he said, welcoming them. “Every time you talk to an astronaut, somebody who has been into space, they will tell you that when you look back at the Earth and see how beautiful it is and how fragile it is and that thin layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that it makes you really appreciate home.”

  No one knew that more than the men assembled in his spacecraft.

  “That was all heart,” Bezos later said of the gathering. “I felt so many emotions, and had three of my four kids there.”

  Space had been a dream for decades, and he was looking forward to experiencing weightlessness, seeing the curvature of Earth, the blackness of space.

  “I will go. I definitely will go. I can’t wait, actually.”

  He had said that in 2007 on Charlie Rose. But now he was finally getting close to his dream.

  FOR YEARS, BLUE Origin had been obsessively secretive, the tortoise holed up in his protective shell, not wanting to attract attention to himself, content to let the hare steal the show.

  “We’ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about,” Bezos said at one point.

  Now it had something to talk about—and had begun opening up ever so slightly. Over the course of several months, starting in early 2016, as New Shepard flew and flew again and as Bezos collected a series of awards on behalf of Blue Origin’s groundbreaking landings, he made it clear in speeches and interviews that his ambitions went far beyond simply flying tourists to the edge of space and back.

  After spending so many years researching and testing, he told a small group of reporters that he invited to Blue for a first ever media tour, “really exciting cool stuff that’s not just hype is coming out the other end.”

  Without mentioning Musk by name, he said that “space is really easy to overhype.” He continued, “There are very few things in the world where the ratio of attention you get to what you’ve actually done, can be extreme.”

  When asked about Musk, he said they “are very like-minded about a lot of things. We’re not twins about our conceptualization about the future.”

  Bezos wanted to go to Mars, yes, but also “everywhere else.” Musk liked to call Mars a “fixer-upper of a planet,” one that he said could be heated up and made habitable in the event that an asteroid hit Earth and threatened to wipe out humanity.

  Bezos seemed skeptical that Mars could be a backup for the human race. “[To] my friends who say they want to move to Mars one day, I say, ‘Why don’t you go live in Antarctica first for three years, and then see what you think?’” he said at a conference at the Washington Post. “‘Because Antarctica is a garden paradise compared to Mars.’”

  “Think about it,” he said at another point. On Mars there was “no whiskey, no bacon, no swimming pools, no oceans, no hiking, no urban centers. Eventually Mars might be amazing. But that’s a long way in the future.”

  NASA had visited every planet in the solar system, he would say, “and believe me, Earth is the best one.… This planet is incredible. There are waterfalls and beaches and palm trees and fantastic cities and restaurants and parties and events like this. And you’re not going to get that anywhere but Earth for a really, really long time.”

  The better plan, then, was to preserve “this gem” called Earth. “We don’t want Mars as a Plan B,” he said. “Plan B is to make sure Plan A works. And Plan A is to make sure we keep this planet around for thousands of years.”

  It had become something of a well-honed stump speech, told over and over with remarkable consistency. Then again, using space as a way to preserve Earth was a concept he had been thinking about since high school.

  “The whole idea is to preserve the Earth,” he had told the Miami Herald in 1982 after his high school valedictorian speech. He was eighteen and saying Earth should be designated as a national park. Now, four decades later, he had revised his speech, only slightly. Instead of using the national park line, he said that Earth should be “zoned residential and light industrial.”

  The point was the same: all “heavy industry” would move into space. He now called this the “Great Inversion”—mining for energy resources in space, while leaving Earth alone. This planet was finite, Bezos said, lacking the resources to keep up with the demand of a world growing ever more developed and dynamic.

  “There’s all kinds of interesting stuff you can do around the solar system, but the thing that’s going to move the needle for humanity the most is mining near-Earth objects and building manufacturing infrastructure in place,” he said as he sat in the conference room at Blue Origin. “That’s the big thing.”

  That would be in the distant future, after he was gone—“unless somebody does a good job on life extension,” he added. But it was not that far in the future. “We only have a couple hundred years.”

  “If you take baseline energy usage today, compound it at just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years and you have to cover the entire Earth’s surface with solar cells” to keep up with demand, he said. “You either go out into space or you need to control population on Earth. You need to control energy usage on Earth. These things are totally at odds with a free society. And it’s going to be dull. I want my great-great-grandchildren to be using more energy per capita than I do. And the only way they can be using more energy per capita than me is if we expand out into the solar system. And then we can really keep Earth as this incredible gem that it is.”

  Blue Origin’s oft-repeated goal was “millions of people living and working in space.” But over the long term, it was even more ambitious than that. “If we want, we could have a trillion human beings living in the solar system,” he said during an awards ceremony in Washington. “And then we’ll have a thousand Einsteins, and a thousand Mozarts. What a cool civilization that would be.”

  When he started Amazon, the infrastructure was already in place so that a startup Internet company, even in 1995, could be successful. Now he wanted to start building the transportation network to space. While he had been inspired by the achievements during the Apollo era, the country’s human spaceflight program had “been treading water for a long time,” he said. And during an interview at the Vanity Fair “New Establishment Summit,” he sounded very much like Musk, speaking about creating a “cargo route” to space that would be similar to the railroads that opened up the West.

  “What I want to achieve with Blue Origin is to build the heavy-lifting infrastructure that allows for the kind of dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion of thousands of companies in space that I have witnessed over the last twenty-one years on the Internet,�
�� he said.

  Amazon had its path laid out for it. Cables for the Internet had been laid. The postal service delivered packages to his customers. “There was already a payment system; we didn’t have to do that,” he said. “It was called the credit card, and it had been initially put in place for travelers.”

  All Amazon had to do then was “take that infrastructure and kind of reassemble it in a new way, and do something new and inventive with it.… In space today, that is impossible. On the Internet today, two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry, because the heavy-lifting infrastructure is in place for that. Two kids in their dorm room can’t do anything interesting in space.”

  He wanted, then, to use his vast fortune to lay the foundation of that infrastructure into space. To make that part of his legacy.

  “If I’m 80 years old and I’m looking back on my life,” he said during an awards ceremony, “and I can say that I put in place, with the help of the teammates at Blue Origin, the heavy-lifting infrastructure that made access to space cheap and inexpensive so that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the Internet, I’ll be a very happy 80-year old.”

  BUT FIRST A relatively small step. Blue Origin would have to get good at launching reliably, efficiently, affordably, over and over, so that the act of going to space would became routine. Although suborbital space tourism had been derided by some as trivial, like bungee jumping in reverse for the superrich, as one science fiction author said, Bezos saw it as vital. If nothing else, the flights would be good practice.

  “We humans don’t get great at things we do a dozen times a year,” Bezos said during a Q & A in 2016. Launching rockets at such a rate was “just not enough to get great at it. You never want to get a surgeon [who operates] just a dozen times a year. If you need to have surgery, find somebody who does the operation 20 to 25 times a week. That’s the right level of practice.”