AND NOW, IN THE WORLD THAT MATTERS MORE THAN POLITICS: Jeff Bezos Lifts Veil on His Rocket Company, Blue Origin.
Like Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos talks about Blue Origin less as a business than as part of a glorious future for humanity, with millions of people living and working off the planet. It is also a path, he asserted, that humanity must pursue if it is to continue to prosper.
His argument was simple: Energy consumption has been rising at 2 or 3 percent a year. Even at that modest rate, within a few centuries, the energy usage would be equal to the energy produced by high-efficiency solar cells covering the entire surface of the planet. “We’ll be using all of the solar energy that impacts the Earth,” he said. “That’s an actual limit.”
But there is much energy and raw materials to use elsewhere in the solar system, and eventually, he prophesies, there will be the “great inversion.” Instead of factories on Earth manufacturing sophisticated components that go into tiny machines that go into space, the heavy manufacturing will all be done elsewhere, and Earth, he joked, would be zoned for residential and light industrial use, allowing much of Earth to return to a more natural state. “It’ll be universities and houses and so on,” he said.
That is still far in the future. For now, Blue Origin’s business plans fall in three categories. The first is space tourism, with short hops launching from West Texas on the New Shepard, a competitor to Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space start-up. Space tourism is not just a frivolity for the rich, but a necessary steppingstone to develop the expertise in a new technology, Mr. Bezos said, much like the early days of airplanes or how video games spurred the development of more powerful computer chips.
Currently, most rocket companies launch, at most, about a dozen times a year. “You never get really great at something you do 10, 12 times a year,” Mr. Bezos said. With a small fleet of reusable New Shepard rockets, Blue Origin could be launching dozens of times a year.
Good chance that in a thousand years, or even a hundred, this stuff will matter much more than who’s President in 2017.