National Post (National Edition)
Unleashed Bezos will seek to shift space venture into hyperdrive
SEATTLE • Freed from his daily obligations at Amazon. com Inc., Jeff Bezos is expected to turn up the heat on his space venture, Blue Origin, as it faces a pivotal year and fierce competition from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, industry sources said.
The 57-year-old Bezos, a lifelong space enthusiast and the world’s second-richest person behind Musk, said last week he is stepping down as chief executive of the e-commerce company as he looks to focus on personal projects.
Blue Origin has fallen far behind SpaceX on orbital transportation, and lost out to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA) on billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. national security launch contracts which begin in 2022. ULA is a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp.
Now, Blue Origin is battling to win a competition with SpaceX and Dynetics to develop a new lunar lander for NASA’s potentially multibillion-dollar push to return humans to the moon in a few years. Dynetics is owned by Leidos Holdings Inc.
Winning the lunar lander contract — and executing its development — are seen by Bezos and other executives as vital to Blue Origin establishing itself as a desired partner for NASA, and also putting Blue on the road to turning a profit, the people said.
With limited revenue streams, Bezos has been liquidating about US$1 billion of Amazon stock annually to fund Blue, which he said in 2018 was “the most important work that I’m doing.”
A Blue Origin representative declined to comment, but pointed to comments Bezos made last week when he said he was stepping down as Amazon’s chief executive.
He told Amazon employees he would “stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives” but also devote time to Blue Origin and various philanthropic and media “passions.”
NASA is expected to winnow the lunar lander contest to just two companies by the end of April, adding pressure as Blue Origin works through problems such as wasting millions of dollars on procurement, and technical and production challenges, the sources said.
One of the development struggles Blue has faced is getting the lander light and small enough to fit on a commercially available rocket, two people briefed on the development said.
Another source, however, said Blue has modified its design since it was awarded the initial contract last April and that its current design fits on an additional number of available and forthcoming rockets, including Musk’s Falcon Heavy and ULA’s Vulcan.
“He is going to kick Blue Origin into a higher gear,” said one senior industry source with knowledge of Blue’s operations.
Bezos already has transplanted Amazon’s culture on Blue, down to enforcing similar “leadership principles” and kicking off meetings by reading documents in silence, sources say.
But one industry veteran said Bezos needs to take a hands-on, operational role if he is going to fix a number of problems like bureaucratic processes, missed deadlines, high overhead and engineer turnover which, according to this source, have emerged as Blue Origin seeks to transition from development to production across multiple programs.
One person familiar with the matter said that Bezos has no desire to immerse himself completely in daily operations, and instead would prioritize major initiatives and new endeavours.
In his latest Instagram posts, Bezos is seen climbing into a crew capsule wearing cowboy boots, and sitting in his pickup truck watching a rocket engine test, which he described as a “perfect night!”
Founded in 2000, Blue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., has expanded to around 3,500 employees, with sprawling manufacturing and launch facilities in Texas, Florida and Alabama.
Its ambitious portfolio includes selling suborbital tourist trips to space, heavylift launch services for satellites, and the lander — none of which is yet fully commercially viable.
Recent data show Blue has overcome combustion stability problems on its BE-4 rocket engine — another business line, two sources said. Test engines for ULA’s inaugural Vulcan rocket are expected to arrive at Florida’s Cape Canaveral this week, with the first-flight engines and booster coming later this spring, one added.
By comparison, Musk’s SpaceX, founded two years after Blue Origin, has launched its Falcon 9 boosters more than 100 times, launched the world’s most powerful operational rocket — Falcon Heavy — three times, and transported astronauts to the International Space Station.
SpaceX said on Thursday it had 10,000 users on its nascent satellite-based broadband service, dubbed Starlink, which Musk says will provide crucial funding to develop his Starship rocket for missions to the moon and, eventually, Mars.
Blue is also hoping for a steady stream of revenue for its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket — potentially set for a debut late this year — from Amazon’s forthcoming constellation of some 3,200 satellites dubbed Project Kuiper, sources say.
Amazon aims to have half the constellation in orbit by 2026, but there is no public timeline for a first launch.
Until now, Bezos has devoted one day a week to Blue Origin, with conference room meetings replaced in recent months by video calls, due to COVID-19, the sources said.
The Great Barrier Reef is alive and well: Go and see it for yourself. The first part of that is true. The second part is tongue-in-cheek, as very few of us will be diving on the Great Barrier Reef anytime soon. Besides, it is beneath the surface and considerably larger than Texas so you would need to be in the water every day for a very long time to verify its alleged demise. As it turns out, virtually all the doomsday narratives promoted by today's alarmists fit this pattern. Their stories are either about something invisible, like CO2 and radiation, or so remote, like coral reefs and polar bears, that the average person cannot observe or verify them for themselves. We must rely on the activists, the media, the politicians, and the scientists directly involved — those who have a huge financial, professional or political stake in their claims of catastrophe being believed — to tell us the truth.
Contrast this with the example of your friend looking up in the sky and saying, “Look, there is a flock of geese heading south for the winter.” You look up and see the geese, which are indeed heading south, and you know winter is coming. You have directly observed and verified your friend's observation.
Direct observation through our senses or with instruments is the beginning of scientific discovery. Verification is seeing the same thing occur many times under the same circumstances. And, finally, replication is challenging other credential led scientists to repeat your observation independently. If these criteria are met, you are verging on a discovery, or a theory in science. Today's “narratives” claiming present or impending catastrophe or doom are apparently exempt from this procedure.
This is the focus of my new book, Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. We are being served up huge helpings of despair, aimed at our and our children's concern for the future, based on fabrications and falsehoods. In 11 chapters, each on a different claim of an alleged present catastrophe or threat of future doom, I demonstrate that these claims are fake news and fake science.
Let's focus on coral reefs, one of the most beautiful and biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. It is claimed that rising CO2 levels caused by our fossil-fuel emissions will make the oceans too hot for corals and many other marine species. But if you know the history of the Earth's climate, and the present-day location of coral reefs, you will soon realize this is not a credible prediction.
To listen to the alarmist camp, the global climate began in 1850 at the beginning of the Industrial Age. They seem unaware of the historical fact that we are in an interglacial period of an ice age called the Pleistocene that set in 2.6 million years ago. The last time the world was this cold was 250 million years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the Karoo, which itself lasted 100 million years. The ancestors of corals evolved 535 million years ago and have seen a climate change or two. Today's corals emerged 225 million years ago when the climate was much warmer and there was no ice on either pole.
In the cool climate that now prevails, coral reefs are restricted to tropical and some sub-tropical seas because more northern and southern seas are too cold. During the warmer climates of the past, corals had a much wider distribution. But today many marine species, including the majority of coral species, are in the very warmest oceans.
The “Coral Triangle” — the seas around Indonesia and the Philippines — have more than 600 species of coral and more than 2,000 species of reef fish, far more than any other location, including the Great Barrier Reef. The Coral Triangle is actually a sanctuary, greatly diminished in area from when the seas were considerably warmer. Even the World Wide Fund for Nature, a climate activist organization, recognizes this reality.
I can't explain my new book in a few hundred words, but I guarantee you it tells the inconvenient truth (for climate alarmists) on a whole slew of subjects.
An instance or two: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, twice the size of Texas, that supposedly is killing the oceans, does not in fact exist. Massive forest fires, allegedly caused by climate change, are really the result of bad forest management. Ocean acidification due to CO2 will not kill most marine life: CO2 is the basis of life in the oceans. Radiation from nuclear energy accidents has not killed hundreds of thousands of people (as millions and millions of people believe); it has actually killed fewer than 60 people. Hundreds of Russian walruses that supposedly leapt to their death because of climate change were actually attacked by a large pack of polar bears.
And, of course, the main attraction: invisible CO2 wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting planet and all species of life thereon when in fact CO2 is the building block of all life and is in short supply compared with previous millennia.