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Rocket man
Jeff Bezos is set to send tourists into space next year, using technology developed by his company Blue Origin. It’s all down to the Amazon founder’s lifelong fascination with science fiction, as Christian Davenport explains. Photograph by Daniel Berman
How Star Trek inspired Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to send tourists to outer space. By Christian Davenport
They caught their first glimpse of it at 25,000ft and falling fast. Normally, a rocket dropping like a bomb would be cause for panic. But instead, the 400 or so people gathered in the employee lounge at Blue Origin’s headquarters outside Seattle were thrilled to see the booster plummeting toward Earth.
‘Estimate 10 seconds to engine start,’ the flight controller announced. The employees, mostly engineers, were packed in, watching the rocket in free fall on a giant screen. Some had their hands over their mouth. Others sat forward with fists clenched. Mostly, they were silent, waiting for what would happen next. ‘Engine start,’ said the flight controller. ‘We have thrust.’ At that, the employees started cheering wildly. Just minutes before, on this morning three days before Thanksgiving in 2015, the engine had fired to lift the New Shepard rocket off the launch pad at Blue Origin’s West Texas test site and hit a top speed of Mach 3.72, faster than the speed of sound. But now that the rocket was falling back, the thrust had the opposite effect: it was slowing the rocket down, preventing it from slamming into the ground and exploding.
Soon the rocket’s altitude was 2,000ft. Then 1,000ft; 500ft. As the ground came into view, fire from the engine kicked up a plume of dust. The employees rose to their feet in unison. The rocket was under control, descending gently, like a hotair balloon coming in for a landing. ‘150ft,’ the flight controller called out. ‘70ft.’ ‘50ft. Velocity steady.’ There was one last flash of the engines, a bright-orange glow shining through the dust and smoke. Then, it went out. ‘Touchdown.’
The room broke out in pandemonium. The employees celebrated wildly, hugging one another, giving high fives. The rocket booster stood in the centre of the pad like a giant trophy. Jeff Bezos had watched from the control room of the Texas launch site. It was ‘one of the greatest moments of my life’, he would later say. ‘I was misty-eyed.’
Bezos’s fascination with space started when he was five years old, on 20 July, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. As young as he was, he could tell he was witnessing something historic. ‘It really was a seminal moment for me,’ he said. ‘I remember watching it on our living room TV, and the excitement of my parents and my grandparents. Little kids can pick up that kind of excitement. They know something extraordinary is happening. That definitely became a passion of mine.’
The family lived in New Mexico, then Texas, and later in Florida. But after school broke up for summer, Bezos was shipped off to his grandparents’ ranch, where he spent every summer from the ages of four to 16. Located in Cotulla, a small town in south-west Texas, it was rural and isolated, a place where Bezos learnt the value of self-sufficiency from his grandfather. ‘Pop’, as Bezos called him, was patient and gentle, and taught his grandson to live a rancher’s life, fixing windmills and laying pipe. On the ranch, Bezos learnt how to vaccinate and castrate cattle, and brand them with the ranch’s ‘Lazy G’ logo. And when the Caterpillar D-6 bulldozer broke, Pop and his eager grandson built a crane to lift the huge gears out.
It was, Bezos recalled in an interview, ‘an incredible, incredible experience. Ranchers, and anybody, I think, who works in rural areas, they learn to be very self-reliant.’ Bezos spent a lot of time with his grandfather, whom, he said, was ‘always incredibly respectful of me even when I was a little kid. And would entertain long conversations with me about technology and space and anything I was interested in.’
His grandparents were also members of a caravan club, striking out across the United States and Canada, sometimes taking their inquisitive grandson along for the ride. ‘We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers,’ Bezos said in 2010, during a graduation speech at Princeton. ‘I loved and worshipped my grandparents, and I really looked forward to these trips.’ He recalled one time, when he was about 10, ‘rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car’. Pop Gise was at the wheel. Bezos’s grandmother, Mattie, was beside him, smoking as she always did on these journeys, filling the car with a smell that Bezos couldn’t stand. He’d recently seen an anti-smoking advertisement, which claimed that every puff takes about two minutes off your life. Even at such a young age, Bezos loved coming up with calculations in his head, estimating how far they’d be able to travel on a tank of petrol, what they’d spend at the grocery store… And with his grandmother puffing away on the front passenger seat, and an open road with little else to occupy his expansive mind, he decided to do the maths.
‘I estimated the number of cigarettes per day, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette, and
‘My grandfather looked at me and said, “One day you’ll understand it’s harder to be kind than clever”’
so on,’ he told the Princeton graduates. ‘When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”’
He expected his grandparents would be awed by his precociousness and would compliment him: ‘Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.’ But instead the car was silent, except for the sound of his grandmother’s sobs.
‘While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over on to the shoulder of the highway,’ Bezos said. ‘He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologise to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents, and no way to gauge what the consequences might be.
‘We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”’
Bezos spent his summers on the ranch, even though the stifling heat would often drive them to huddle indoors. They’d watch soap operas. Days of Our Lives was a favourite. His grandparents encouraged playing board games and reading, and Bezos discovered that the county library, which was not much larger than a oneroom schoolhouse, had an extensive sciencefiction collection that had been donated by a town resident. The library ‘had maybe a few hundred science-fiction novels. All of the classics,’ Bezos recalled. ‘There was a whole shelf of them there, and over several summers I worked my way through that collection.’
The visits to the library ‘started a love affair for me with people like [Robert] Heinlein and [Isaac] Asimov and all the well-known science-fiction authors that persists to this day.’ At home, Bezos spent a lot of time watching Star Trek. When he was nine years old, he figured out how to play a Star Trek game on a computer at school. It was 1974, before the advent of the personal computer; his school had one mainframe with a teletype connected to an acoustic modem. Not that anyone at the school knew how to use it. ‘But there was a stack of manuals, and me and a couple of other kids stayed after class and learnt how to
programme this thing,’ he recalled, eventually figuring out that it had been pre-programmed with the Star Trek game.
‘And from that day forward all we did was play [it],’ he said. Later, he even named his dog Kamala, after a character on the show. By the time he got to high school, Bezos’s passion for space merged with his prodigious intellect and curiosity. He wrote an essay titled ‘The Effect of Zero Gravity on the Ageing Rate of the Common Housefly’ that won him a trip to Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
His idea was to test how the weightless environment in space reduced stress on the body’s systems. Bezos thought to start out with a creature with a very short lifespan – the common housefly – to test whether you could see any biological changes in a short amount of time aboard the space shuttle, compared with a control group of flies kept on the ground. He was a finalist, not a winner, so Nasa never did fly his experiment to space. But he and his physics professor got to spend a couple of days at Marshall. It didn’t have the cachet of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the astronauts launched into space, or the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they trained. Rather, it was where Nasa built its rockets, the home to many of its most accomplished engineers and sharpest minds.
Bezos said that when he was really young he ‘wanted to be an astronaut. I went through many phases and wanted to do many different things. I wanted to be an archaeologist – and this was pre– Indiana Jones. I didn’t have Indy on my mind. Many kids sort of have ideas of what they want to do and so on, and the thing that never went away was my fascination with space. And then I realised I didn’t want to be an astronaut. I was really more interested in the engineering side of it.’
F‘The thing that never went away was my fascination with space’
or years, journalists had been banging at Blue Origin’s door, trying to get a glimpse into a mysterious company that operated like the CIA. Now, on the morning of 24 November 2015, Blue Origin was ringing their mobile phones in the predawn darkness. The groggy journalists were told to check their email for a press release and that they’d be assigned a time slot to speak with Bezos later that day. He had news to share.
The day before, New Shepard, the suborbital vehicle named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had flown to 329,839ft, or just over 62 miles, past the ‘Kármán line’ that’s widely considered the edge of space. The crew capsule on top of the rocket, which had no passengers in it, separated from the booster and landed softly under the guidance of parachutes.
More important, the rocket landed after falling back and enduring 119mph high-altitude crosswinds. Using GPS guidance, and a fin system that helped stabilise it on the descent, the booster fired its engine to slow itself down before deploying its landing legs and touching down softly on a concrete landing pad. It hit 4½ft from the centre. For a first landing, that was a bullseye.
When he founded Blue Origin 15 years earlier, Bezos had been trying to build a chemically fuelled reusable rocket, one that could be launched then fly again, like an airplane – a breakthrough the industry had long been waiting for. It would lower the cost of space travel and make it accessible. Now, Blue Origin had pulled off the landing, a triumphant crescendo of more than a decade of work. Bezos was beaming. In interviews afterwards, he called it a ‘flawless’ mission.
He said that the joy the landing gave him reminded him of the saying ‘God knows how to appropriately price his goods.’
‘The things that you work hardest for, for the longest periods of time, always bring you the most satisfaction,’ he explained. ‘If you do something and it takes you 10 minutes, how satisfying can it actually be? For me, in a sense I’ve been working on this since I was five, so [the test day] was incredibly satisfying. And I think the whole team felt that. The people who go into this business do it because they are missionaries.’ Adapted from The Space Barons by Christian Davenport (Publicaffairs, £20), published on 26 April. To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk