NewSpace Journal » Blue Origin

Blue Origin has a bad day (and so do some of the media)

Jeff Foust — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 00:38:39 +0000

Blue Origin's PM 2 vehicle in flight shortly before it lost control last month. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Last month the small community of people who closely follow the NewSpace field expected a test flight by ultra-secretive Blue Origin, based on a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) issued by the FAA warning of “rocket launch activity” by the company at its launch site in west Texas on August 24. that date came and went without any news, which is not surprising given how the company closely rations information about its activity.

Late today came news that the test flight did not go well. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that the vehicle suffered a malfunction in flight and was destroyed. The initial report indicated that the failure took place when ground controllers lost contact with the vehicle during the flight. The vehicle was either severely damaged or destroyed; “parts of the vehicle were recovered on the ground and are now being analyzed by company experts,” the Journal article reported. An unnamed local official in the nearby town of Van Horn, Texas, claimed in an interview with Forbes.com that some locals saw the launch failure, likening it (with some amount of hyperbole, no doubt) to the Challenger accident.

In a rare public statement, Blue Origin posted a brief note to the “Updates” page of its web site late Friday afternoon. “[L]ast week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet,” the statement, signed by Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (of Amazon.com fame), reads. “A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle.” Included in the update were several images from the test flight and a previous, successful one in May. Although Blue Origin has posted information about research opportunities and job openings, this is the first update about its flight test activities posted in exactly 56 months: the first, and only other one, is dated January 2, 2007. (The page does disclaim, in understated language, “We won’t make these updates frequently.”)

The company disclosed few other details about the vehicle, which is known as “PM 2″ in its experimental permit with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Bezos did note that they did “a short hop mission” three months ago; that took place on May 6, according to the list of permitted launches on the FAA’s web site (not yet updated to include the August launch failure.) The “PM” designation suggests this is a propulsion module in Blue Origin’s two-stage suborbital vehicle design, with a separate crew module; Bezos notes in a postscript to his statement that “the development vehicle doesn’t have a crew capsule”, only a round fairing. “We’re working on the sub-orbital crew capsule separately, as well as an orbital crew vehicle to support NASA’s Commercial Crew program,” he adds.

Bezos, in his note, sounded undaunted by the failure. “Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job,” he wrote. “We’re already working on our next development vehicle.”

Some in the media, though, tried to unnecessarily play up the implications of the test flight failure. “The mishap, which industry officials said occurred last Wednesday, dealt a potentially major blow to the ambitions of Mr. Bezos,” claimed Andy Pasztor in his Wall Street Journal article, even though Bezos himself didn’t sound overly concerned in his message. Later, noting that Blue Origin is one of four companies with 2nd round NASA Commercial Crew Development (CCDev-2) awards, Pasztor suggested that “The failure also could set back White House plans to promote commercially developed spacecraft to transport crews to the international space station by the second half of this decade,” even though the test flight did not appear to be directly related to their separate CCDev-2 work, as Bezos also indicated in his note.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal published a blog post with the curious title “Rich Guys Have No Luck in Space”. The text of the blog post, though, doesn’t match the headline: some of those profiled seem to have had, or are having, at least halfway decent luck: Paul Allen was successful, for example, backing SpaceShipOne in the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE, while Elon Musk is enjoying some technical and business success at SpaceX after some early launch failures of its Falcon 1.

It’s worth remembering that this was, by all accounts, a test flight. And, by their nature, not all test flights are successful: that’s why you fly to, to find problems and correct them. Moreover, the loss of PM 2 is hardly the first time a vehicle has been lost in a test flight, either by a company or a government agency. It’s the nature of aerospace. By Bezos’s account, he sounds ready to move ahead, undaunted by the failure. There’s also a lesson for some in the media as well, to not overreact from a single test failure (or, for that matter, a single successful test).

Who’s the mystery Texas spaceport customer?

Jeff Foust — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:53:30 +0000

A decade ago the Texas spaceport scene was relatively active. No fewer than three spaceports had been proposed by various local entities to attract RLVs and other commercial launch vehicles. One was the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport, located in Brazoria County, south of Houston; the second was the West Texas Spaceport, near Fort Stockton; and the third was the Willacy County Spaceport, located on the Gulf coast north of Brownsville. (A summary of the status of those spaceports at the time can be found in the 2002 edition of the FAA’s “Commercial Space Transportation Developments and Concepts” report.) However, as the RLV boom went bust, these spaceport plans either went dormant or, in the case of the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport, were cancelled.

Now, through, one of those proposed spaceports may have found new life. A recent article in the McAllen (Tx.) Monitor (which is actually a reprint of one last week in the Valley Morning Star in the Rio Grande Valley) reports that Willacy County officials have found a new tenant for their proposed spaceport. According to the county judge John F. Gonzales Jr., an unnamed aerospace company is planning to lease 50 acres spread across two sites; it would invest up to $50 million for its facilities and hire 100 to 200 people. At least one site would be on the coast, apparently to be used for launches over the Gulf into orbit.

Judge Gonzales, though, declined to disclose the name of the interested company, saying that he was bound by a confidentiality agreement. He did say that the company did test its rockets in December and it “recovered a reusable container similar to 1960s-type space capsules”, according to the article. “They’re the first private company to have successfully launched a low-altitude space flight and successfully recovered it,” Gonzales said. All those comments make the company in question sound like SpaceX: it launched a Falcon 9 in December from Cape Canaveral, placing the Dragon capsule in orbit. That capsule returned to Earth later the same day, making SpaceX the first non-government entity to recover a spacecraft from orbit. However, it’s not clear why SpaceX would have any interest in the Texas site, given its investment in developing its Cape Canaveral site.

Some have suggested that the company in question could be Blue Origin, which already has a test site in west Texas, north of the town of Van Horn. As RLV and Space Transport News pointed out earlier this year, Blue Origin has a patent for a “Sea Landing of Space Launch Vehicles and Associated Systems and Methods”, which covered the powered landing of a booster stage on a barge or other ship in the ocean after launch from a coastal launch site. However, what we know of Blue Origin’s activities don’t seem to match what Gonzales said in the article, but then, there’s a lot about Blue Origin we don’t know about.

Assessing the CCDev-2 losers

Jeff Foust — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:11:11 +0000

Monday afternoon NASA announced the award of nearly $270 million to four companies for the second round of the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev-2) program. The four winners, and their awards, are:

Blue Origin: $22 million
Boeing: $92.3 million
Sierra Nevada Corporation: $80 million
SpaceX: $75 million

Those companies will work on their vehicle concepts under Space Act Agreements, maturing elements of their designs in anticipation of a full-fledged commercial crew development program. But what about the companies that didn’t win? NASA officials noted at Monday’s press conference that it received 22 proposals, selecting eight companies for additional due diligence. So what about some of the companies that didn’t make the cut?

United Launch Alliance: Perhaps the biggest surprise of the CCDev-2 announcement was that ULA didn’t receive any funding. The company was one of five first-round CCDev awardees and its launch vehicles factor significantly into the plans of other commercial crew development companies. ULA is likely to be back for future activities here, although perhaps as part of multiple teams proposing for commercial crew funding rather than a standalone competitor.

Excalibur Almaz: This company, which has plans to use Russian Almaz spacecraft for commercial space flights, was a surprise finalist for CCDev-2. Few details about what EA was proposing for CCDev-2 have been released by the company, but it’s likely the company will continue its commercial activities, although at what externally appears to be a slow pace.

Orbital Sciences: Orbital made a big splash last year with its commercial crew development plans, using a lifting body concept called Prometheus launched on an EELV, building upon interest in commercial crew that dates back to the 1990s. Failure to secure a CCDev-2 award will put the company into a tough spot: should they continue to work on this, albeit at a lower level, to stay in contention for future commercial crew awards, or instead focus on their separate commercial cargo program, the Cygnus spacecraft and Taurus 2 launcher?

ATK: Another surprise entry into CCDev-2 was ATK, which announced in February the Liberty launch vehicle comprised of a five-segment SRB developed for the Ares 1 and a modified Ariane 5 core stage for the upper stage. Without CCDev-2 funding, will ATK continue work on this project? Moreover, would it be cost-competitive for other applications against alternatives like the Falcon Heavy, announced by SpaceX earlier this month?

United Space Alliance: The Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that operates the space shuttle had put forward a proposal to continue flying two of the orbiters, Atlantis and Endeavour, commercially. However, USA was not among the eight companies shortlisted for CCDev-2, and even company officials admitted last week that the proposal was “an extremely long shot”. That may be an understatement now.

NSRC Day 2 highlights: payload integration and researcher training

Jeff Foust — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:09:45 +0000

The second day of the the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Orlando focused more closely on the types of scientific research (biomedical, microgravity science, astronomy, etc.) that can be performed on commercial suborbital reusable vehicles and the issues associated with carrying out this research. One key topic is integrating payloads into vehicles. With a wide range of vehicle concepts under development, there are no standards for payload size, power, and other interfaces, and NASA has indicated that they will let the market set those standards rather than impose them themselves, even for the flights it funds.

This means that researchers are working closely with vehicle providers to work through issues of integrating their experiments on spacecraft. Blue Origin, for example, has several “pathfinder” research customers who are getting their payloads flown for free while working through these issues. Blue Origin has also come up with a “Cabin Payload Bay”, a standard payload box designed to more easily accommodate experiments with various power, data, and other services. Annamarie Askren, the Research and Education Market (REM) payload integration lead for Blue Origin, said the company would be publishing a payload users guide on its web site later this week with more technical details.

While many experiments will be automated, others will require a human presence (indeed, in some biomedical cases the human will be the experiment). These payload specialists will require training, but just how much is necessary is another area without clear standards. Dan Durda of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) recommended prospective payload specialists experience as many different training environments as possible, from piloting aircraft to scuba diving. Zero-g parabolic aircraft flights are almost a given, he said, to understand what weightlessness is like. Erik Seedhouse, the training director for Astronauts4Hire (A4H), a startup that proposes to develop a cadre of professional commercial astronauts for research and other applications, described a far more rigorous set of qualification standards that A4H has developed, including centrifuge and zero-g training, aerobatic flights, and more.

The training requirements for payload specialists—far more rigorous than what’s expected for tourists—and the specialized requirements for research experiments raise the question of whether research and tourism missions can be mixed on the same flight. Askren said Blue Origin is cautious about the ability to mix the two, given the “chaos” in the cabin during 0-g portions of parabolic flights. That’s not an issue, of course, for uncrewed vehicles, or for XCOR’s Lynx, which is small enough that almost every flight is a dedicated one for either tourism for research. “It’s your ride,” as XCOR’s Jeff Greason put it.

NSRC Day 1 highlights: suborbital research customers, prizes, and vehicle developments

Jeff Foust — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:47:34 +0000

Monday was the first day of the the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. This conference, the second of its kind, is designed to bring together suborbital vehicle developers and the research community, an emerging market for commercial suborbital reusable vehicles. The conference has attracted more than 300 people, compared to the 268 who attended the inaugural NSRC last February in Boulder, Colorado. The three-day conference features presentation on both vehicle capabilities and potential research applications, as well as education, policy, and other issues.

The big announcement Monday was the news that the Southwest Research Institution (SwRI) has purchased seats on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx vehicles for research missions. SwRI bought a total of eight seats—six on Lynx and two on SS2—with an option for nine more. (XCOR actually announced its part of the deal last Thursday, while Virgin waited until Monday.) Three SwRI researchers will fly on this missions, conducing several experiments. SwRI associate vice president Alan Stern, one of three who will fly, said at a press conference Monday that the experiments include a biomedical monitoring harness, a microgravity physics experiment to study asteroid regolith, and an astronomical imaging sensor. (For some additional background on this, see my article in Monday’s issue of The Space Review, incorporating some of these developments.)

On the vehicle side, five suborbital vehicle developers—Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin, and XCOR—presented in a panel session at the conference. All but Blue Origin presented at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation conference earlier in February, and are summarized in my TSR article linked to above, so there were not much in the way of new developments (Blue Origin, not at the FAA conference, didn’t offer much in the way of vehicle development updates.) Armadillo’s Neil Milburn did say that Armadillo is currently performing cryo load tests on its “Tube” (aka “STIG”) rocket this week; if those go well they plan a first flight test as soon as March 9 from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

One other development of interest: in his plenary talk Monday morning, FAA associate administrator of commercial space transportation George Nield revealed that the FAA’s 2012 budget proposal includes a $5-million “Low Cost Access to Space” prize. Few other details about the proposed prize are available, although Nield said the FAA would work with other agencies, including NASA and the Defense Department, on implementing the prize.

Suborbital vehicle development updates

Jeff Foust — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:58:01 +0000

In yesterday’s sessions at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Boulder, Colorado, four major developers of suborbital vehicles presented updates on their efforts. Here’s a summary of what they revealed:

Virgin Galactic: Stephen Attenborough provided considerable details about their plans to flight test SpaceShipTwo (SS2). Ground testing will continue until the end of this quarter, he said. The first captive-carry flight, with WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) carrying SS2 aloft but not releasing it, should take place by the end of this quarter. The second quarter of 2010 will be for captive-carry tests flights. The first drop test will be some time in the third quarter. That initial drop test, he said, “will be a pretty interesting moment for all of us on the ground, and a pretty interesting moment for the pilot as well.”

Attenborough said he hoped first powered test flight of SS2 would take place by the end of this year. There would be “a lot” of powered test flights in 2011, he said. His “best case” scenario for beginning commercial operations would be the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012, adding it would be entirely depending on the progress made during the test flights. “We can’t cut corners” on the test program, he noted.

XCOR Aerospace: Jeff Greason noted that development of the prototype Lynx Mark 1 was underway, which will be followed “as quickly as possible” (9-18 months, according to his slides) by the more capable Mark 2. Engine development, normally a limiting factor in the development of a launch system, isn’t a concern. “The engines are ahead of the airframe,” he said. The first test flights of the Mk 1 prototype are planned for the first half of next year.

Masten Space Systems: Fresh off its wins in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge last fall, Masten is pressing ahead with plans for a couple of different vehicles in the coming year, said Michael Mealling. First up, in the next couple of months, will be “Xoie v2.0″, an updated version of the XA-0.1E that won first place in Level Two of the LLC, now equipped with an aeroshell and the ability to do an engine relight; it will be able to fly up to about 36 kilometers. XA-0.1G, or “Xogdor”, will be built by October or November, will pick up where Xoie left off, flying eventually up to 100 kilometers using a new 3000-lbf engine under development. By 2011 Masten plans to fly commercial missions, and is even looking at the possibility of getting into the nanosat launch market through the use of an expendable second stage.

Blue Origin: Gary Lai didn’t make any great new revelations about the secretive company’s plans in a presentation, which he said was the first time a Blue Origin employee had presented any details at a conference. “If we’re famous for anything it’s famous for keeping quiet,” he said. The reason for that, he said, “is that we have a culture within the company to talk publicly only about results, and not about plans,” an approach similar to Burt Rutan.

While he didn’t provide much in the way of specifics, and no hints about schedule, he did reveal a few things. He briefly discussed Goddard, the gumdrop-shaped prototype of the New Shepard propulsion module that the company first flew in November 2006. “One of the main reasons for flying Goddard was to learn how to take a vertical-landing vehicle that uses the same propellants that our operational vehicle uses and learn how to fly that and turn it around in a very rapid manner,” he said. “Most of our lessons learned were in the operational area.”

However, he cautioned about reading too much into Goddard. “That is not necessarily what the operational New Shepard vehicle looks like,” he said.

Blue Origin proposes orbital vehicle

Jeff Foust — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:02:55 +0000

Illustration of Blue Origin's orbital crew vehicle, designed to be launched on an Atlas 5, as shown on a NASA slide at an FAA conference last week.

One of the most intriguing NewSpace companies is Blue Origin, perhaps because they’re also one of the most secretive. Backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos—and thus without the funding concerns of many other companies in this field—the company has been working for several years on its “New Shepard” vehicle that takes off and lands vertically. While the company has done a few test flights in 2006-2007 that required experimental permits from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, it hasn’t done any such flights recently, and speculation continues about what the company is, or isn’t, up to, and how long it might be before they have a vehicle flying.

The company has been closely guarded, revealing few details about its developments: its posting in January 2007 about its first test flight (which took place the previous November) has been its biggest bit of publicity. Those who have gotten a look inside the company, though, have been duly impressed. One of those is Dan Rasky of NASA Ames, who visited the company as part of an effort to develop a technology roadmap for commercial RLVs. “I joke with people that if you want to see what a billionaire’s clubhouse looks like, go visit Blue Origin,” he said at a public workshop last week in Washington.

However, Blue Origin isn’t quite as black as it has been. Late last year they announced that they has selected three investigations that would be the first suborbital research payloads the company plans to fly. At that time the company said that the crewed flight opportunities for New Shepard would be in 2012, with the possibility of flying remote-controller or autonomous payloads as early as 2011.

More recently, the company won a small contract from NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program that has provided a bit more of a peek of what the company is up to. The $3.7-million contract covers the development of two items: work on “pusher” launch escape system and a composite pressure vessel. The escape system would use thrusters below a crew cabin that pushes the cabin away from its launcher in the event of a malfunction, instead of the “tractor” escape systems mounted on top of a crew capsule that pulls it away; the company had been planning something like that for its New Shepard vehicle, whose crew module is designed to separate from the propulsion module and land separately. A composite pressure vessel would, most likely, provide a lighter-weight option for any sort of vehicle that Blue Origin might be developing.

What is interesting is that Blue Origin is actively looking beyond suborbital spaceflight to orbital missions. Proof of that came in a presentation last week by Alan Lindenmoyer, who managers NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Programs, including CCDev. Speaking at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, he presented slides describing all five CCDev awards, including for Blue Origin. The Blue Origin slide, shown below, revealed that the company was proposing a “bi-conic space vehicle” that could be launched on an Atlas 5 402, a variant of the Atlas 5 with two Centaur engines in its upper stage and no strap-on solid rocket boosters. The slide notes that the composite pressure vessel that would be tested under the CCDev contract would be structural test article of their planned suborbital vehicle “as a subscale demonstrator for the orbital Space Vehicle”.

Blue Origin CCDev award details

Robert Milliman of Blue Origin, who was present at the February 2 NASA press conference in Washington where NASA unveiled the CCDev winners, as well as existing COTS/CRS awardees Orbital Sciences and SpaceX, didn’t provide many details about what the company’s plans were. “The [Blue Origin] team is dedicated to creating technologies for an enduring human presence in space,” he said before briefly describing the technologies funded under their CCDev award.

In very brief comments after the press conference, he said that Blue Origin was still focused on its suborbital program right now, proceeding “step by step”. He didn’t provide any specifics, such as schedule, about the company’s development of New Shepard or any future orbital vehicle, other than to say that flight tests are “coming up”.

It’s not surprising that Blue Origin sees suborbital as a step towards orbital flight, although the concept they proposed for their CCDev contract indicates that, at least in the relatively near term, they’re less likely to scale up New Shepard into an orbital vehicle than use some of that technology for a crewed vehicle that could be launched on an ELV.

A Blue Origin representative is scheduled to speak Thursday at the Next-Generation Suborbital Research Conference in Boulder, Colorado. Maybe we’ll learn a few more details about their vehicle plans. And maybe not.

Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos’s reading habits

Jeff Foust — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:49:18 +0000

When Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show last October to discuss the Kindle e-book reader, he mentioned in passing that he was reading a book on the history of cryogenics. Not your usual reading fare to be certain, even for a self-professed nerd like Bezos (and particularly when paired with the other book he said he was reading, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road).

That unusual reading choice prompted the Wall Street Journal to ask him about it today when Bezos was announcing the new version of the Kindle. It turns out his interest in cryogenics is tied to his spaceflight venture, Blue Origin:

And what about the reference he made on his October appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show to a book about cryogenics? “It’s a rocket book. Liquid hydrogen turns out to be a very important propellant. I am very interested in space exploration and started a company called Blue Origin that pursues that,” he said. “I didn’t think it was going to be the next Oprah Club pick, but I thought it was only fair to disclose some of my interests.”

And he’s right: that cryogenic book didn’t make the cut for Winfrey’s famous book club. But it will be sure to interest those trying to learn anything new about the ultra-secretive Blue Origin…

Video: Whitehorn assesses the competition

Jeff Foust — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:25 +0000

Below is a brief snippet of Will Whitehorn’s speech at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference on Friday. In this segment Whitehorn examines some of the other ventures developing suborbital vehicles, including Rocketplane, EADS Astrium, Blue Origin, XCOR, Armadillo Aerospace, and Copenhagen Suborbitals, a little-known Danish firm developing a very minimalist suborbital system. Whitehorn’s theme in this segment is that while some of these ventures may be technically viable, they’re not capable—in his opinion, at least—of expanding to markets beyond tourism.

[Note: the video was shot with a Flip handheld camera, so the quality isn't great, and you'll probably want to crank the sound up.]

Bezos: “My passion is for space”

Jeff Foust — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:28:57 +0000

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos appeared on The Charlie Rose Show Monday night, primarily to talk about the new electronic book reader that Amazon unveiled earlier in the day. However, at the very end of the show Rose did ask Bezos some questions about Blue Origin, Bezos’s spaceflight venture. A lot of the interview covered familiar ground for those have followed what limited information that the company has released, but there were a few new insights:

Blue Origin has moved on from its original demonstration vehicle, Goddard, to a second vehicle currently under development. At least one more demo vehicle will follow that second one.
Bezos said that they’re in no rush to bring a vehicle to market “because we’re trying to build a very safe, well-engineered vehicle.”
He believes that there is a market for suborbital space tourism, but is skeptical of market studies that have been performed to date because “you don’t really know until you do it.” (That skepticism is not unique to Bezos: Eric Anderson of Space Adventures has expressed similar sentiments in the recent past.)
Bezos not only had Charles Simonyi, the former Microsoft executive who went to the ISS in April, speak to his Blue Origin employees, Bezos talked with Simonyi while on the station.

The video of the show is available online. (Skip ahead to about the 50:30 point of the interview; the Blue Origin portion takes up the last three minutes or so of the show). I’ve included a rough transcript below as well:

Rose: You own 200,000 acres of land in Texas?

Bezos: Yes.

Rose: What are you going to do with it?

Bezos: Well, when you’re building rockets and launching rockets, it’s nice to have a bit of buffer. [laughter]

Rose: Yeah, what is that that just landed in our yard? [laughter] So, tell me what your dream is.

Bezos: Well, we’re building a vertical takeoff, vertical landing spacecraft that will take three or more astronauts to the edge of space — it’s a suborbital journey, so it’s like what Alan Shepard did. The program’s called New Shepard, paying homage to Alan. So it goes up and you have a few minutes in zero gravity, you can look out and see the limb of the Earth, how thin the atmosphere is of the Earth. People tell me, who have been in space, tell me that it’s a transformative experience. You get up there and, then, this vehicle is going to come back down and land on its tail — it’s reusable, which it very unsual for space vehicles, they’re almost all expendable rockets — and it’s going to come and land on its tail, sort of like a Buck Rogers rocket.

Rose: So what’s the stage of development today?

Bezos: Well, we have flown our first development vehicle. We flew it several times. We’re now working on –

Rose: It went up and came back safely.

Bezos: That’s right. It was this low-altitude demonstration vehicle. We’re now working on our second development vehicle. There will be at least one more development vehicle after that — at least, maybe there will be more. We’re not in any hurry because we’re trying to build a very safe, well-engineered vehicle. We don’t see any reason to rush on this.

Rose: Where does the revenue come on this from?

Bezos: Our motto is “Gradatim Ferociter” [Rose laughs.] It stands for “step by step, ferociously.” So we’re just going to do it one step at a time.

Rose: And so what’s the market for this?

Bezos: Well, this is basically kind of a tourism market.

Rose: Yes, I know.

Bezos: People would pay to go up into suborbital space. I don’t know how big the market is. People have done studies that have tried to size this market, but I’m highly skeptical of such studies, because you don’t really know until you do it. People, well-intentioned people, when they respond to the surveys, will say, “Oh, yeah, I will do that” but they don’t really know.

Rose: But are you more interested in space or more interested in the business?

Bezos: My passion is for space, for sure. But I do think this can be made into a viable business. I think that you have to be very long-term oriented. People who compained that we have invested in Amazon for seven years would be horrified by Blue Origin. [laughter]

Rose: Did you ever talk to Charles Simonyi?

Bezos: Yes, in fact, he came and spoke at Blue Origin and spoke to our employees.

Rose: What did he say about his experience?

Bezos: Actually, I called him while he was up there and talked to him on the phone while he was up there, while he was space shuttle, space station.

Rose: He loved it.

Bezos: He loved being in the International Space Station.

Rose: So why wouldn’t you do that?

Bezos: Well, I want to go on a Blue Origin vehicle, and that’s what we’re working on. I like to build, I’m into building the vehicle. I will go. I definitely will go. I can’t wait, actually.