(Jan 13): Amazon-founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos said the space industry has room for “multiple winners,” including his own firm Blue Origin LLC and the company it most hopes to challenge, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
“There is going to be new uses for space that’s going to drive demand for large capacity up,” Bezos said in an interview with Bloomberg on the eve of his company’s first orbital rocket launch attempt.
“SpaceX is going to be very successful. They’re going to continue to be very successful. Blue Origin is going to be successful. And there’s some company that hasn’t even been founded yet, hasn’t even been thought of yet — they’re going to be successful, too.”
Speaking at the company’s rocket factory in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Bezos and Blue Origin chief executive officer Dave Limp said they have high expectations that the New Glenn rocket will successfully achieve orbit. It’s slated to launch as early as Monday at 1am local time from Florida.
But if there is a failure during the flight, they plan to move on quickly.
“We have more vehicles in build right here,” Bezos said, adding, “we’ll be ready to fly again in the spring.”
Bezos, who serves as executive chair of Amazon, later added that working at Blue Origin has become his full-time job.
Blue Origin aims to launch six to eight New Glenn flights in 2025, Limp said. He declined to get into specifics about how much a New Glenn launch contract runs, but said the price is “competitive”. Blue Origin has said it has a US$10 billion (RM45.12 billion) backlog of launch contracts with customers.
The New Glenn rocket is set to play a pivotal role in Blue Origin’s biggest space ambitions, including launching satellites for commercial customers, Nasa, and the Defense Department.
It’s also on tap to launch variations of Blue Origin’s lunar landing vehicles. The company is a major participant in Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to send humans back to the moon.
With US President-elect Donald Trump set to take office in the coming weeks, Bezos said his hope is that Nasa maintains continuity of its mission.
“What I would always like to see — that’d be true of any administration — is that we not start and stop,” Bezos said. “If you look at the long arc of Nasa’s history, one of the things that’s held Nasa back from time to time, it’s been too much starting and stopping. And most of these programmes take longer than a single presidential administration.”
The future of Nasa’s Artemis mission seemingly hangs in the balance, however. Musk, who serves as a trusted adviser to Trump, has recently said: “We’re going straight to Mars. The moon is a distraction.”
Bezos, ultimately, remains optimistic about Trump’s space policy.
“The first Trump administration, as you may recall, created the Space Force and they’ve been very focused on space and been very pro space,” Bezos said. “I certainly would hope that would continue as well.”
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