Although the United Launch Alliance (ULA) used to have a monopoly on the aerospace industry, after 2015 companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin began to make advancements that changed the landscape. Jeff Bezos, founder of the latter company and Amazon.com, says that it will test its first flights with humans in 2017. Thousands of people have expressed interest in paying for a trip on one of their suborbital crafts in the future.
As of now, Bezos is investing his money into high-tech equipment and approximately 600 employees for Blue Origin. Work is being conducted in a former Boeing airplane parts facility and with effort, Bezos believes that the company will eventually be profitable due to the high demand for the technology.
"Though wings and parachutes have their adherents and their advantages, I'm a huge fan of rocket-powered vertical landing," he said. "Why? Because - to achieve a vision of millions of people living and working in space - we will need to build very large rocket boosters. And the vertical landing architecture scales extraordinarily well."
Founded in 2000, Blue Origin has launched a ship twice thus far, and each one successfully landed safely. The company plans to continue its current testing and also focus on other ships in the process of being built for human flight, as well as create rocket engines that will be sold to those that are planning to launch satellites and spaceships.
Although Bezos continues to run Amazon during the day, he is deeply investing in Blue Origin and spends a great deal of time at the Kent, Wash., facility, located 17 miles south of Seattle.
"I only pursue things that I am passionate about," he said, adding that he has dreaming of space travel and building rockets since he was 5 years old.
In the future, Bezos hopes that the company can decrease the cost of space launches, allowing projects like building a colony on Mars to become feasible. The key to this, he says, is making spaceships reusable, which is one of Blue Origin's goals.
"What I know you cannot afford is throwing the hardware away," he said.
