It’s now suing the US government to reconsider the award. Earlier this year, Nasa awarded its lunar lander contract to SpaceX, leaving Blue Origin in the lurch. Over the past few years, Blue Origin’s master plan has begun unraveling. Jeff Bezos and William Shatner in Van Horn, Texas, on Wednesday. The question is: why can’t the second richest man in the world execute on it? There’s no doubt that Bezos has plenty of vision. It has designed and built one of the most powerful rocket engines ever made and inked contracts with the United Launch Alliance to supply the engine for its next generation Vulcan rocket. His company is building a rocket as powerful as the one that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon and has partnered with leading defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a lunar lander that could bring humans back to the lunar surface. He wants to lay the foundation for an extra-terrestrial economy where thousands of people are living and working in space. Inspired by the late Princeton futurist Gerard K O’Neill, Bezos dreams of moving heavy industry off of Earth and into space to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And unlike Musk, Bezos actually knows what it’s like to ride on his own rocket.īezos founded Blue Origin with visionary goals. While this is not as challenging as bringing a rocket back from orbit – as Musk has taunted Bezos in the past – it was still a major milestone in the history of private space exploration. In 2015, Blue Origin became the first company to send a rocket above the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, and land it again. The company was founded by the former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2000, just two years before SpaceX set up shop in California. If there were any rocket company expected to be at a comparable level of technological achievement to SpaceX, it is Blue Origin. Audrey Powers, William Shatner, Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries on the landing pad of Blue Origin’s New Shepard after they flew into space on Wednesday near Van Horn, Texas.
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