![]() All four men talk of creating the basic infrastructure for easy access to space, kind of like the railroad or the internet. Other gazillionaires- Richard Branson and Paul Allen-are also funding startup space ventures. Blue Origin has proceeded more slowly and with less oomph. SpaceX has had 60 successful launches of its Falcon 9 rockets and employs 6,000 people. (Twitter follower metric: SpaceX, 7 million Blue Origin, 123,000.) That’s in part due to Musk’s personality but also to his rocket company’s longer list of feats. Though Bezos has touched many more lives than Elon Musk (lots more Prime deliveries than Teslas), Blue Origin has received far less attention than Musk’s private rocket company, SpaceX. He’s not the only tech magnate with his head in the stars. The second part of his plan is already under construction in a giant factory in Cape Canaveral, Florida: an imposing rocket meant for orbit and beyond. But suborbital tourism is just the beginning of his vision for Blue Origin. Though Blue Origin hasn’t announced the fee, it’s been reported to be a couple hundred thousand dollars per head, and Bezos anticipates ramping up quickly to a few flights a week. Clad in cool Star Trek–style jumpsuits, customers will settle into a comfy capsule and shoot up over the atmosphere for a quick peek at their home planet through panoramic windows and a few moments of weightless ecstasy. Starting next year, Bezos plans to use New Shepard to send passengers on jaunts into space. ![]() He asks one question-do the helicopters that will track the rocket’s flight know that weather balloons will be in the area? (Yep. As they run down the checklist for the next day’s launch of that rocket, the New Shepard, Bezos sits near the back, not checking his phone even once. Also, the salaries of about 1,500 Blue Origin workers, including the 35 or so engineers in the room and another 10 or so on a video screen, dialed in from the company’s headquarters in Kent, Washington. Bezos’ money, earned from Amazon, has paid for the building where he sits, the air-conditioning, and the 60-foot rocket lying on its side in a nearby hangar, waiting to be tugged to a launchpad and shot into the thermosphere. ![]() It’s a number so huge that the Amazon CEO can painlessly siphon off a billion dollars every year to fund his boyhood dream: his other company, Blue Origin. And the previous day, the price of Amazon stock had hit a threshold that put Bezos’ wealth at $150 billion, making him officially the richest person since people started keeping score. His company’s annual Prime Day sale proved so popular (good) that it temporarily took down the website (terrible). It’s only Tuesday, but the week has already been eventful. But the air is cool inside the one-story prefab building where Jeff Bezos, wearing a North Face hiking shirt and a cap emblazoned with an Amazon Robotics logo, is attentive, back straight, listening. It’s July 17 and the temperature in the West Texas desert is marching, predictably, toward 100 degrees. ![]()
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