Jeff Bezos Explains How He Wants to Make Space Tourism

A ripple could be felt through the space exploration world after Jeff Bezos tweeted a picture the engine that will power his new huge rocket that is expected to accompany a new spacecraft in the coming years.

Blue Origin now has 1,000 employees and is targeting 2023 for its first commercial launch of a Eutelsat satellite.

Just a week after the billionaire CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos announced his grand, ambitious plan for his rocket venture “Blue Origin” to join forces NASA for shipping cargoes to the moon, the company has signed its first paying commercial customer, for its pipelined rocket project.

The rocket engine, now complete, will power the New Glenn rocket, a giant spacecraft created to transport astronauts and payloads to low-Earth orbit and beyond. The rocket engine is part of Blue Origin’s mission to end United States dependence on the Russian-built RD-180 engine. Interestingly, this also outlines one of the few prominent differences between SpaceX and Blue Origin’s modus operandi. “Welcome to the launch manifest, Eutelsat, can’t wait to fly together”, said Bezos. It’s much bigger than Dragon, with its stage 2 standing tall at 270 feet, while stage 3 at 313 feet.

Blue Origin is building a New Glenn rocket factory at Kennedy Space Center’s Exploration Park on Merritt Island. “New Glenn presented itself, we jumped on it”. Standing just over 269 feet tall, the New Glenn rocket will have the capacity to lift a almost 100,000-pound payload into low Earth orbit.

“It’s very important to us to build up this kind of spirit because the relationship between a launch agency and a satellite operator needs to be intimate”, he explained. Just like SpaceX, Bezos’s company has also been working on reusable rockets that are capable of landing after takeoff, a technological capability that can significantly lower the cost of space missions. Blue Origin has unveiled plans for two-stage and three-stage versions of New Glenn, both with a reusable first stage and an identical second stage. The engine is expected to be ready for take off by 2019. As The Verge points out, Blue Origin filed a patent for a similar water landing back in 2010, and an ensuing legal battle between the two companies resulted in the withdrawal of numerous claims. Staged combustion engines now flying include the Russian RD-180 on ULA’s Atlas 5, which the Vulcan will replace.

“Having a very significant player with large ambition, with capacity to innovate and with a proven track record of innovation, is extremely good news for our industry”, said Eutelsat CEO Rodolphe Belmer. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, Congress passed a bill banning the use of Russian rocket engines to launch military satellites. “When we do achieve that goal, we will reach a new equilibrium in this industry”.