Bezos's big space decision

[Bloomberg]( Hi folks, it’s Brad, writing from [Van Horn, Texas,]( (population 1,760) where today the richest man in the world will blast off and pass, if only briefly, through the ethereal doorway to space. You may be reading this after the launch, which is set for 9 a.m. East Coast time. But barring a delay or some unforeseen event, we pretty much know what to expect. The New Shepard rocket booster, fueled by liquid hydrogen and oxygen, will propel Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old Dutch student [Oliver Daemen]( 62 miles above the earth, past the so-called Kármán line, where they’ll experience about three minutes of weightlessness. Three parachutes will then deploy from the capsule and the newly minted astronauts will float gently to the ground. Then Bezos will have a rather significant decision to make: whether, and how fast, to turn his historic flight into a regular space tourism business. Using New Shepard to ferry paying passengers to space was always part of the plan for his 21-year-old space startup, Blue Origin. At a press event at Blue’s Kent, Washington, headquarters in 2016, Bezos said that taking regular people to the edge of space was “a critically important mission” and key to getting society comfortable with its long-term vision of having millions of humans living and working in space. In a recent interview with [the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport](, Blue Origin’s chief executive officer, Bob Smith, reiterated that commitment and said that the company plans two more human spaceflights this year and “more than a half dozen next year.” After that, Smith said, the company plans “to be getting to an every-two-weeks kind of cadence very soon.” So, it sounds like it’s all systems go for Blue’s tourism business—or so the company claims. But I actually think it may move slower with New Shepard than many expect. The majority of the company’s 4,000 employees are now working on more ambitious projects, like the New Glenn orbital rocket and Blue Moon landing system. As my colleague Justin Bachman and I [wrote over the weekend](, some analysts wonder if Bezos is now more focused on his larger ambitions deeper in space, which he’s pursuing in competition with Elon Musk’s fleet-footed Space Exploration Technologies Corp. “I don’t believe Blue Origin’s intent is to fly the masses to suborbital space,” Laura Seward Forczyk, a space industry consultant and analyst at Astralytical, told us. Then there’s the age-old question of risk. I was discomfited [by a recent story]( by Wired’s Steven Levy, who relayed his last interview with the late Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen. Allen financed the development of the vehicle being used by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. But he was so nervous about turning it into an actual business that during test launches, he kept written remarks in his pocket, just in case the worst happened. “Any kind of manned space flight is risky, and if people pay for tickets to go into space eventually there's going to be a bad outcome” Allen, who died in 2018, told Levy. “That wasn't something I was interested in being a part of.” There’s already plenty of evidence that Blue is going to be incredibly cautious opening New Shepard to the paying public. Former Blue engineers told me that Bezos originally hoped to launch New Shepard two years ago—on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landings—but that technical challenges and delays perpetually ensnared the flight. Even now, Blue is only putting four astronauts on New Shepard, a craft that has six seats and six spacious windows of which the company is [inordinately proud]( (a view “immersing you in the vastness of space”). Blue Origin hasn’t explained why there are only four passengers on the maiden voyage, but some of the company’s former engineers speculate that they’re keeping the capsule’s overall weight down—and playing it safe. That’s the kind of prudent caution that will stand between today’s achievement and Bezos’s dream: a full-fledged space tourism business that makes historic days like this one seem routine. —[Brad Stone](mailto:bstone12@bloomberg.net) If you read one thing The U.S., U.K. and allies accused China’s leadership of a broad array of “malicious cyber activities,” escalating between the White House and Beijing. 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