The 54-year-old American technology entrepreneur Jeff Bezos is again cooking something up literally out of this world, in his space research and travel startup Blue Origin founded in the year 2000. It only came to fame in 2015 after a few successful missions.

Jeff Bezos is worth $146 Billion according to Forbes and the entrepreneur plans to spend all of this bulk fortune on one single goal: getting into space!

Bezos reportedly told the media, “I’ve seen what you buy with a lot of money, I don’t want to be near that!”

After his most famous venture Amazon, which started as an online bookstore, that has now grown into a full-fledged online market, Bezos sent his patented rocket, Blue Origin’s New Shepherd into space and got it back safely.

The interesting point here is that New Shepherd flew far above the internationally recognized space line, adding another milestone to his career.

The Blue Origin Crew with New Shepard

What Is Blue Origin?

One of Jeff Bezos’ many ventures, Blue Origin is a privately funded aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company founded in the year 2000.

The company was founded with the primary goal of sending humans to space, not in terms of research, but in terms of space travel, made much more affordable and reliable.

It is evident from the company’s name that Blue refers to the Blue Planet – the Earth, and Origin refers to the thought that our planet is only the origin of life.

A quote from the movie Interstellar would aptly describe the purpose of Blue Origin LLC:

“Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”

Recent Achievements Of Blue Origin

Not only did New Shepard launch into space, it came back, and after a few months, it relaunched. Mankind has never seen such an achievement.

The most remarkable moment was on 18th July when the specially designed rocket with an unmanned crew pod cruised to an all-time high 120 km into space and landed back safely.

New Shepard went 120 kms into space and landed back safely with the crew capsule

The 8th mission launched higher than 100 kms, which is the internationally recognized line of space and the successor was even better.

The Crew Capsule’s technology was so cutting edge that it could bear a lot of aerodynamic stress and other drag factors in space. Jeff tweeted about it after the 9th successful mission:

Jeff Bezos tweeted after the successful mission

Jeff puts it in three simple words,

Launch, Land, Repeat!”

Also Read: In Pics: This Is How Amazon Delivers Packages To The Top Of The World, Leh

How Are Bezos And Musk Making Space Travel Affordable?

The key aspect of affordable space travel and exploration lies in the re-usability concept. The cost of the propellant is about only 1% of the total cost of the space mission.

Most of the big bills come in throwing away high-grade aerospace hardware material away after one use.

By introducing reusability of rockets, the cost of each mission could be lowered by an approximated factor of 100!

Bezos says, “In other words, if a launch costs $60 million or $100 million today, it could cost only $1 million, which is gigantic.”

Alike Jeff, Elon Musk clearly believes in the go-to-space-save-the-human-race idea.

He said, at a Westworld panel earlier this year in March,

“Life can’t be about solving one miserable problem after another. We need things to inspire you, that make you glad to wake up in the morning and be a part of humanity. That’s why we did this”.

Elon Musk founded SpaceX for affordable space travel

The statement referred to the recent launch of SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket which works on a similar launch and land concept.

This kind of technology has the ability to change everything, and the whole game of space exploration and development of aerospace technology will take a huge leap forward.

Creating a real space age, a real out of the world space economy might as well give rise to a different dimension of space technology industry. We are looking at the future of humanity here. 


Image Source: Google Images

Sources: Twitter, Wikipedia, Independent UK


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