Almost everyone recognizes Jeff Bezos as the founder and CEO of Amazon, but he is also the founder of another venture. This one is not related to delivery products on grounds, but enabling individuals to witness the beauty of space. He runs a private space company called Blue Origin and has today revealed an unknown fact about its operations at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado.
At the conference, Bezos revealed that he is funding his rocket company by selling $1 billion worth of Amazon stock every year. This development was first reported by SpaceNews (also by Reuters). This is a rather significant portion of the world’s second richest man after Microsoft’s Bill Gates. His current networth, as per the majority stock holdings, stands at a whopping $73 billion. This means he still has decades worth of share capital to keep his ambitions (or dream) of space travel alive.
My business model right now … for Blue Origin is I sell about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.
Born out of his childhood dream of space colonization, Bezos is competing against Elon Musk’s SpaceX to also build a reusable rocket and bring down the cost of space travel. He is planning to enable consumers to make their way beyond the skies and experience the dark expanse we call space a little closely. It will jettison paying passengers on 11-minute space rides that are scheduled to begin next year. SpaceX has recently also revealed its own plans to send two paying individuals on a round-trip of the Moon, which is scheduled for next year.
Further, the Amazon founder says that he is applying the lessons he’s learned at the e-commerce giant into building his space venture. And he is currently looking to gauge the consumer demand and outlook towards space travel. There’s no doubt that the service would be an expensive one in the beginning but Bezos is trying to make it accessible to a larger audience. He believes consumer adoption is a true measure of your disruptive technology — much like VR, whose bubble is now bursting.
At Amazon, we’ve had a lot of inventions that we were very excited about and customers didn’t care at all. And believe me, those inventions were not disruptive in any way. The only thing that’s disruptive is customer adoption. If you can invent a better way, and customers believe that’s a better way, then they will use it. And that’s what we’re trying to do at Blue Origin.
Space Tourism could become one of the most fledgling businesses in the coming years. And Blue Origin is now gearing up to become the first in the industry to make this a reality. The space company has already successfully tested its reusable rockets several times (i.e five times, to be specific). It has managed to land its New Shephard back on the ground more than once — proving it is reusable. Now, it aims to make their launch vehicle and capsule operational and ready for flight by next year.
Bezos’ is aiming to make space travel commercially viable and affordable. Though ticket prices for a passenger on the New Shephard have not been revealed, but the Amazon CEO aims to lower them to the level of airplane tickets over time. He also mentioned that a passenger would be able to experience space with just a day worth of training. And if you’re thinking the skies the limit, then you are completely wrong.
Blue Origin is currently developing an even larger and next-generation launch vehicle called New Glenn. This launch vehicle will be capable of orbital missions, thus, giving SpaceX an even tougher fight in the space industry. It’ll contain seven larger rocket engines called BE-4s, which were recently shown off by the company. It is also presenting the crazy idea of building an Amazon-like supply and delivery service on the South end of the Moon, where there are traces of water.
