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billionaire and aspiring rocket man Jeff Bezos said he sells $1 billion a year
in Amazon.com stock to fund Blue Origin, the company fuelling his dream of
sending people into space.
“My business
model right now for Blue Origin is I sell about a billion a year of Amazon
stock and I use it to fund Blue Origin,” Bezos said Wednesday at the Space
Symposium, an annual industry conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “So the
business model for Blue Origin is very robust.”
Bezos, the
world’s second-wealthiest man behind Bill Gates, has said before that he has
been reinvesting money he made at e-commerce giant Amazon since he started his
space exploration company more than a decade ago. On Wednesday, he unveiled
what he thinks is just the thing to entice people to pay about $300 000 for a
quick flight to suborbital space: big windows.
The Amazon
founder took a page from waterfront hotels and restaurants in the design of a
space capsule that Blue Origin plans to use to launch paying tourists into
space within two years. The pod will be equipped with the “largest windows
in spacecraft history,” according the company. It has room for six passengers
each with their own window and a reclining leather seat that will distribute
the force felt when shooting into space, Blue Origin said.
“My singular
focus is people in space,” Bezos said. “I want humans in space.”
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Blue Origin will
have competition. Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies plans to
send two tourists on a trip around the moon late next year. It reused a rocket
last month to send satellites into orbit, an important step toward making space
delivery and travel commercially viable. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic also
is pursuing the idea of blasting customers into space.
Blue Origin also
is trying to reduce the cost of travel by making rockets reusable like
airplanes. The company’s New Shepard rocket has flown to suborbital space five
times since November 2015. Suborbital space is high enough for passengers to
experience weightlessness, but not high enough to orbit the Earth.
Big windows like
those envisioned for Blue Origin’s capsule add cost and complexity to designing
spacecraft because larger glass panes have to be thicker, adding weight to a
vehicle that needs to be as light as possible, said Bill Goodman, vice president
of space systems at HNu Photonics. A 22-inch diameter window on the
International Space Station is about 3 1/2 inches thick, made from layers
designed to withstand collisions with fast-moving dust particles, maintain air
pressure within the capsule and a final layer that improves visibility through
the thick window, he said. Despite the high cost, big windows will be a good
marketing ploy for space tourism, Goodman said.
“Bigger is
always better,” Goodman said. “Someone who can afford a space flight is
probably going to have a really nice camera and want to take some nice
pictures.”