Jeff Bezos stands next to a nozzle of a BE-4 engine in his Blue Origin rocket factory. (credit: Eric Berger)
For more than a decade Jeff Bezos kept his Blue Origin rocket company under a shroud. Engineers worked away at four versions of engines in a rocket factory near Seattle, and then tested those machines in a remote area of West Texas. All the while the spaceflight industry wondered what Bezos and his billions were up to.
In November the plan became more clear when Blue Origin pulled off the remarkable feat of flying its New Shepard space vehicle to 100.5km and then returning it successfully to the ground near its West Texas launch site. It then re-flew the booster.
After these successes Bezos began to open up Blue Origin a little bit. In March he invited Ars and a handful of other media outlets for an unprecedented tour of the Washington state-based rocket factory, and talked expansively about the company's plans. His philosophy about secrecy, he said, was that he didn't want to make unwarranted claims about Blue Origin's capabilities until they could be demonstrated.
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment