First tour of Blue Origin Headquarters

Crew capsule for reusable ship New Shepard

The headquarters of the aerospace company Blue Origin is hidden in the middle of an industrial park in Kent, Washington. The company operates secretly. In front of the office there are no pointers and identification marks.

On March 8, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, the billionaire and owner of Amazon, opened Blue Origin for reporters for the first time in history.
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“Welcome to Blue,” he said. - Thank you for coming". An entrepreneur rarely speaks with the press, but now he has spent four hours with journalists, answering many questions.

Blue Origin is one of the private companies that embodies the transfer of space business from NASA and aerospace giants like Lockheed Martin to small private companies. One of the most notable and successful among them is Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX, founded by Internet entrepreneur Ilon Mask. Last week, she put another satellite into orbit , although an attempt to land a rocket on an offshore platform again ended with an explosion.

Acting much more quietly, Blue Origin also has big plans for space exploration, but still has not shown to outsiders what it is doing. Now everything has changed. Jeff Bezos personally led a great tour of the company. His verbose speech was sometimes interrupted by loud laughter: “I am very pleased. I hope you can feel how I like it, ”he said.

Bezos showed a picture on a wall in the central part of the enterprise, on it two turtles hold an hourglass and look up at a stylized image of planets and space. Below is the Blue Origin motto: "Gradatim ferociter", from Latin "Step by step, frantically" - without cutting corners, but not waiting for too much. “You can go through all the steps quickly, but you cannot miss a single step,” Bezos explained.

He also spoke about the latest news in the direction of space tourism, which Blue Origin is working on. The launch of the reusable ship and the New Shepard rocket took place in November 2015, the successful return with a soft landing on Earth - in January 2016. Re-launch is planned soon. Depending on the results of test flights, the ship can take the first paid space tourists into space, six people at a time, as early as 2018, Bezos said. Tourists will experience a few minutes of flight in the absence of gravity.

Sometimes Bezos interrupted his speech so that the company's engineers could demonstrate the new BE-4 engine, which is under development, and the working version will begin testing at the end of the year.


Blue Origin engineers are studying the main combustion chamber of the engine BE-4

Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, although few people knew about it at that time. Over the next few years, half a dozen experts tried to find a better way to put cargo into orbit than rockets with loud, inefficient engines burning chemical fuels. They came to the conclusion: there is no better way.

Bezos says he was fond of rockets from the age of five. “I never thought that I would have the resources to establish a space company. Amazon.com was the winning lottery ticket. ”

The businessman declined to say how much money he invested in the realization of his dream: “Let's just say: a lot,” he replied.

Around 2005, the Bezos company seriously took up the development of the rocket. Still, almost no one knew what she was doing. For many years, Blue Origin activities remained shrouded in mystery.

Sometimes the news leaked to the outside world: a NASA award, a blog post on Bezos, a video of a successful launch. Last year, the company made a brief public announcement at Cape Canaveral that Blue Origin missiles would launch from there.

Like Ilon Musk, Jeff Bezos also speaks about his company not so much as a potentially profitable enterprise, but as part of the glorious future of humanity, where millions of people will live and work outside Earth. He argues that humanity is obliged to take this path in order to preserve the prosperity of its race.

His argument is simple. Energy consumption grows by 2-3% every year. Even with moderate growth, in a few centuries, energy consumption will reach a level that solar panels would give out if they cover the entire surface of the planet. “We will use all the solar energy that reaches the Earth,” he said. “This is the actual limit.”

But there is a lot of energy and raw materials in other regions of the solar system, and in the end, he predicts, we are in for a “great inversion”, that is, a reverse process. Instead of producing complex components on Earth and launching them into space, heavy industry migrates beyond the planet, and the Earth, he jokes, will become a residential area and a region of light industry, which will allow her to return to a more natural state: at home and so on. "

But this is still a distant future. The current business plan consists of several items. Firstly, this is space tourism, with short-term flights of tourists from their own cosmodrome in western Texas in a capsule on a single-stage reusable rocket New Sheppard. Here the competition is the startup Virgin Galactic Richard Branson. Space tourism is not seen as fun for the rich, but as a necessary step for gaining experience using the new technology, Bezos said, as the first aircraft or as video games stimulated the development of more powerful computer chips.

Now most aerospace companies make about a dozen launches a year. “You will never achieve perfection if you launch 10, 12 rockets a year,” says Bezos. With short flights and reusable New Sheppard missiles, he plans to launch dozens of launches each year.

The second part of the business plan is the sale of rocket engines to other companies, such as the United Launch Alliance, which plans to use them in Vulcan new generation rockets (a future replacement for Atlas-5 and Delta-4). The engine will also find use in its own heavy rocket Blue Origin, which will bring cargo into orbits.

Jeff Bezos says that Blue Origin practically did not conduct public activities not because of secrecy, but in order not to make unnecessary promises and not to provoke hyip, because in the space industry this is especially easy to do.

This is not the last tour organized by Blue Origin. Later this year, the company promises to provide additional information about the new heavy rocket, which will be launched from Cape Canaveral. They will also show the launch of New Sheppard from the cosmodrome in Texas.

Bezos promised that in the future, Blue Origin will become more open.