For a supposedly hi-tech company involved in exploring the futuristic notion of space tourism, it is surprisingly difficult to make contact with anyone at Blue Origin's headquarters in Seattle. The firm is not listed in the local telephone directory and its website offers no other means of contact - unless you are a rocket scientist, in which case you are invited to send an e-mail to the company's recruitment department.
A sceptic may wonder if Blue Origin is for real, or just another cyber tiger. Yet the name adorns a blue awning outside a warehouse in a street off Duwamish Waterway in Seattle. Records of the company's registration in 2000 reveal that it was set up from an office in the city's old Pacific Medical Centre, a building occupied by Amazon.com, the world's biggest internet retailer.
Blue Origin is the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. But don't try ringing him about it: no one, it seems, wants to talk about Blue Origin, least of all Bezos. Not talking is perhaps the prerogative of rich men, and Bezos is an extremely rich man, with a fortune estimated at $1.7bn (£1.1bn).
But back in February, a couple of weeks before the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the skies over Texas, Bezos did talk, in private at least, about Blue Origin and his space ambitions. He had been invited to lunch at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, which is contracted by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to run its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, one of the top research centres in the world for the exploration of space.
Caltech was courting Bezos because it was looking for financial sponsors for its new, ground-based telescope. After a tour of some of JPL's research projects, the party sat down to lunch. Bezos had brought along a few of his employees from Blue Origin, as well as the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson, a close friend and confidant of the internet billionaire.
Over lunch, the Caltech scientists realised that their dreams of receiving a large cheque for their new telescope were not to be. "It became obvious that Blue Origin was where Bezos was putting his money," recalls Richard Ellis, a Caltech scientist and a former professor of astronomy at Cambridge University.
Ellis sat between two of the Blue Origin employees and quizzed them closely about their space ambitions. They pretty much toed the company line, as it is described on its one-page website for potential recruits. "You must have a genuine passion for space. Without passion, you will find what we're trying to do too difficult. There are much easier jobs," it reads.
"Our hiring bar is unabashedly extreme," it continues. The company's policy is to keep its research teams deliberately small, "which means that each person occupying a spot must be among the most technically gifted in his or her field". Tellingly, perhaps, the website boasts: "We are building hardware, not PowerPoint presentations. This must excite you. You must be a builder."
During the meal, Ellis began to quiz Bezos and his people about exactly what Blue Origin was building, or attempting to build. He wanted to get some idea of the physical mechanism they had in mind to get people into space more economically than a rocket paid for with government taxes. The Blue Origin people talked about propulsion, energy sources and related space-travel issues, but Ellis was not impressed. "To be honest, my opinion at the time was that it sounded really wacky," he says.
Wacky or not, Bezos is not alone. Quite a few very rich men are interested in private space travel. Take Peter Diamandis, a multimillionaire and entrepreneur who has set up a $10m prize for the first privately-financed company to send a three-person crew into suborbital space twice in two weeks using the same, reusable vehicle. Diamandis has called it the X-prize, after the "X" series of aircraft developed by the US government for high-altitude flight.
Diamandis got the idea for a space-travel prize after reading a book called Spirit of St Louis written by Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 was the first person to make a solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Lindbergh's flight to Paris had been a bid for the $25,000 Orteig prize. Just as the aviation pioneers of the last century were spurred on by cash prizes, similar awards might jump-start private space travel in the 21st century, Diamandis thought.
When the X-prize was launched in the Midwest city of St Louis in 1996, many space engineers considered it something of a joke. After all, it took billions of dollars to get a man into space and - more important - back again safely. But there are now about 25 entrants, some more serious than others, who believe they could win the X-prize.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_medical/story.jsp?story=430664
A sceptic may wonder if Blue Origin is for real, or just another cyber tiger. Yet the name adorns a blue awning outside a warehouse in a street off Duwamish Waterway in Seattle. Records of the company's registration in 2000 reveal that it was set up from an office in the city's old Pacific Medical Centre, a building occupied by Amazon.com, the world's biggest internet retailer.
Blue Origin is the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. But don't try ringing him about it: no one, it seems, wants to talk about Blue Origin, least of all Bezos. Not talking is perhaps the prerogative of rich men, and Bezos is an extremely rich man, with a fortune estimated at $1.7bn (£1.1bn).
But back in February, a couple of weeks before the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the skies over Texas, Bezos did talk, in private at least, about Blue Origin and his space ambitions. He had been invited to lunch at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, which is contracted by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to run its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, one of the top research centres in the world for the exploration of space.
Caltech was courting Bezos because it was looking for financial sponsors for its new, ground-based telescope. After a tour of some of JPL's research projects, the party sat down to lunch. Bezos had brought along a few of his employees from Blue Origin, as well as the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson, a close friend and confidant of the internet billionaire.
Over lunch, the Caltech scientists realised that their dreams of receiving a large cheque for their new telescope were not to be. "It became obvious that Blue Origin was where Bezos was putting his money," recalls Richard Ellis, a Caltech scientist and a former professor of astronomy at Cambridge University.
Ellis sat between two of the Blue Origin employees and quizzed them closely about their space ambitions. They pretty much toed the company line, as it is described on its one-page website for potential recruits. "You must have a genuine passion for space. Without passion, you will find what we're trying to do too difficult. There are much easier jobs," it reads.
"Our hiring bar is unabashedly extreme," it continues. The company's policy is to keep its research teams deliberately small, "which means that each person occupying a spot must be among the most technically gifted in his or her field". Tellingly, perhaps, the website boasts: "We are building hardware, not PowerPoint presentations. This must excite you. You must be a builder."
During the meal, Ellis began to quiz Bezos and his people about exactly what Blue Origin was building, or attempting to build. He wanted to get some idea of the physical mechanism they had in mind to get people into space more economically than a rocket paid for with government taxes. The Blue Origin people talked about propulsion, energy sources and related space-travel issues, but Ellis was not impressed. "To be honest, my opinion at the time was that it sounded really wacky," he says.
Wacky or not, Bezos is not alone. Quite a few very rich men are interested in private space travel. Take Peter Diamandis, a multimillionaire and entrepreneur who has set up a $10m prize for the first privately-financed company to send a three-person crew into suborbital space twice in two weeks using the same, reusable vehicle. Diamandis has called it the X-prize, after the "X" series of aircraft developed by the US government for high-altitude flight.
Diamandis got the idea for a space-travel prize after reading a book called Spirit of St Louis written by Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 was the first person to make a solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Lindbergh's flight to Paris had been a bid for the $25,000 Orteig prize. Just as the aviation pioneers of the last century were spurred on by cash prizes, similar awards might jump-start private space travel in the 21st century, Diamandis thought.
When the X-prize was launched in the Midwest city of St Louis in 1996, many space engineers considered it something of a joke. After all, it took billions of dollars to get a man into space and - more important - back again safely. But there are now about 25 entrants, some more serious than others, who believe they could win the X-prize.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_medical/story.jsp?story=430664