A little more space development

KENT, Wash. - Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos expects a rocket-ship complex
for his aerospace venture Blue Origin to open early next year.

[...]Blue Origin has released few details about the project. But a Texas newspaper editor who interviewed Bezos earlier this year said the billionaire talked sending a spaceship into orbit that launches and lands vertically, like a rocket, and eventually building spaceships that can orbit the Earth — possibly leading to permanent colonies in space.

It sounds pretty ambitous, but of course one must be skeptical. I mean, that sounds like something Popular Science was talking about 30 years ago. However, there are signs that this guy is pretty ambitious.

Bezos paid $13 million for nearly 25 acres of industrial land, where city records indicate he's spending up to $8 million to remodel an office building and warehouse. Plans also call for construction of an experimental stand where rocket engines will be tested in three-minute-long trial runs.

Test launches will be conducted in West Texas, where Bezos recently bought a 165,000-acre ranch near the small town of Van Horn, about 110 miles southeast of El Paso. Long-term plans for that site include a spaceport where three-person space-tourism flights could blast off once a week.

So he's obviously putting real money into this and plans to do something big (speaking of which, if acres don't mean anything to you, that's about 258 sq. miles). As for their earlier comment about space colonization, that does seem to be the eventual aim of Bezos in comments given by him at different times.

The only interview Bezos has granted about his space plans was with Larry Simpson, the editor of the weekly Van Horn Advocate.

"He told me their first spacecraft is going to carry three people up to the edge of space and back. But ultimately, his thing is space colonization," Simpson told The Associated Press in March.

In 1982, during the valedictory speech he gave at his high-school graduation, Bezos stressed the need for space colonization. "I'm not sure this is a hobby for him," Logsdon said. "I think this is his next big idea."

So yes, it seems to be for real, people. As new and undeveloped as this might be, here's a guy who seems to be working on space colonization. It will probably take many years to develop his project though, so his may not bear as much fruit immediately as Richard Branson's space tourism, but we'll see.