While Virgin Galactic plans on eventually growing suborbital spaceflight into a profitable industry, Blue Origin has made no mention of a profit motive-and in fact has bigger, more expensive plans for the future. On July 20, the rocket New Glenn will shoot Bezos and his crew just barely into space, giving him the distinction of being the Virgil Grissom to Branson’s Alan Shepard. The ad was pulled, however, during a tabloid scandal that exposed a Bezos affair, when it was revealed that his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, had worked on the TV spot. For instance, Bezos reportedly paid as much as $20 million for a Blue Origin ad that was supposed to run during the 2019 Super Bowl. For one contract, NASA notes that Blue Origin failed to adequately detail conflicts of interest, and said it would have to rely on NASA’s funding-a curious admission considering that Bezos’s net worth is about 10 times the space agency’s annual budget.Īnd since it is a private company, its spending can follow the whims of its owner-for better or worse. It’s also won government contracts to take payloads into suborbital space on its aircraft, and others for using NASA’s technology. For one, at least 19 patents are registered under Blue Origin, including one for technology that will aid the takeoff and landing of a vertical craft. Corporate filings from Bezos’s other company, Amazon, disclosed that Blue Origin bought $4.2 million in unnamed consumer goods from the online retailer last year, in addition to the direct funding from the CEO.
In that way, it’s much closer to SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, which keeps its plans relatively close to the space vest.īut it doesn’t operate in a hermitage.
Unlike rival Virgin Galactic, it doesn’t publish any filings that document its financial state or the risks to the company. Here’s what we know about the upcoming Blue Origin flight: A vacuum of information, almostīlue Origin-the space company Bezos founded in 2000-is private, if not secretive. and the Soviet Union, is now funded by private capital and still could have decades more of development. The new space race, some 60 years after the Cold War competition between the U.S.
Bezos is set to be the second billionaire space jockey, after Richard Branson rode a Virgin Galactic spacecraft on July 11 past where Earth’s atmosphere ends and the final frontier begins.
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