Bezos in space: Houston, we have a promotion problem
It began with a slickly produced video back on 5 May that was only really memorable for the quite conspicuous role that Jeff Bezos was suddenly playing in the promotional material for New Shepard, the suborbital vehicle built by his company, Blue Origin.
This was a Bezos we’d rarely seen: looking fit and a just little toned, at the wheel of a 4×4 as it kicked up a cloud of dust, speeding across the desert to the place where the New Shepard capsule had just landed. Bezos looked like he was about to take the lead role in the new Indiana Jones movie – Raiders of the Tax Loopholes, perhaps – as he walked over to the capsule. “Let’s get in there,” he’s heard saying as he climbs into the capsule before a crowd whoops with excitement. The implied meaning at the time was that Bezos would greet the first passengers to ride into space in a Blue Origin vehicle.
How wrong we were. The news this week that Bezos would be taking a seat on the first manned flight of New Shepard came as a genuine surprise for a few moments before it began to make complete sense. There’s always been speculation, of course, that these super-rich operators were engaged in vanity projects that would eventually carry their egos into space – Richard Branson has been particularly vocal in his wish to fly Virgin Galactic – but Elon Musk has always taken the far more sober approach. “I’d have to have a really good succession plan because the likelihood of death is very high,” he has said. The problem, as he sees it, is that it would leave his company, SpaceX, in the hands of “investors who want to maximise the profit of the company and not go to Mars.”
Bezos, by contrast, has framed this as an inevitable adventure he could not turn down, especially since the second seat will be occupied by his brother, Mark.
“To see the Earth from space, it changes you, changes your relationship with this planet. It’s one Earth,” the Amazon founder said in a post on Instagram. “I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me.”
A big deal and, certainly, an adventure, but it’s hard not to look at this decision in stark business terms. Back when the video went live in May, Blue Origin had seen repeated setbacks in its fortunes. In April, NASA had awarded a hugely lucrative Artemis contract, worth $2.8 billion, to Musk’s SpaceX, which had also just landed its hugely ambitious Starship prototype for the first time. Yet it wasn’t just the race for the future that SpaceX was winning. It was winning the present as well, having already supplied the International Space Station with its second crew to have ridden a Falcon 9 rocket into space.
Blue Origin, by contrast, was still playing around with suborbital flight. New Shepard had enjoyed repeat test flights, but those successes were in the domain of space tourism; brief hops into space that were considerably lower than where Blue Origin needed to be. Despite glossy promotional videos on its YouTube channel, the company had little to show of the New Glenn project that should be the true rival to SpaceX’s Starship. The shock of losing the contract that would have placed them at the centre of NASA’s return to the Moon was so profound that Blue Origin launched an appeal around the fairness of the process. It made it look like a sore loser. The firm needed something to regain the initiative and get people interested in (and sympathetic to) its project.
With this week’s announcement, Bezos has undoubtedly done just that. For the moment, it’s almost irrelevant that “travel into space” remains a matter of semantics; “space” meaning travelling above the Kármán Line, the altitude above which it’s thought that aerodynamic flight is no longer possible. Bezos and his two crewmates will enjoy about three minutes of weightlessness before the capsule begins its descent. It’s closer to the so-called “vomit comet” used by NASA to help train astronauts than it is to true orbital flight.
Yet it will be dangerous. Bezos will be riding a vehicle that has only completed 15 test flights. That might sound like rigorous testing but, by contrast, it was the 85th launch of the Falcon 9 that carried the first manned flight containing NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, to the International Space Station back in May 2020. And whilst Bezos is certainly affording himself the adventure of a lifetime, the cold logic around his decision also points to the hard reality of this private rush to space.
Whilst there is no better way of expressing his faith in Blue Origin, Bezos is also acknowledging the ultimate reality that any failure was always going to be catastrophic for his company. American politicians get very twitchy when it comes to losing people in the pursuit of space, with even the Shuttle program grounded for two whole years after the loss of Challenger. SpaceX itself has faced considerable pushback from the federal government around its test programme down in Boca Chica, Texas, with the FDA taking a particularly dim view of what Musk has facetiously called “RUD” or “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly” after the first few Starship prototypes crashed on landing.
Ultimately, then, beyond him risking his neck, the risks to Bezos’ fortunes were always going to rest on the success of the flight. Promotion is key: the identity of the person sitting in the third seat will be decided by the auction which currently sits at varound $2.8 million. The proceeds will go to Blue Origin’s education foundation, “Club for the Future”. It’s perceptions that matter. Bezos, by some estimates, earns $149,353 a second, meaning he could have paid for the seat himself simply by sitting still for the first 18 seconds of flight.
It should – and hopefully will be – a successful flight that produces lots of quality promotional video of the Blue Origin chief looking down on the Earth through the large windows that will finally emphasise the main virtue of the New Shepard vehicle. Bezos will hope it gives Blue Origin the boost it so desperately needs as it progresses on New Glenn. If it does, the slightly anaemic New Shepard project will have at last found the purpose it had been sorely lacking.