Jeff Bezos said on a Blue Origin tour that he wants the company to make space travel so cheap that “two kids in a dorm” can make the next space mega-company.
YouTuber Tim Dodd, known by his channel name “Everyday Astronaut,” posted a video of the second part of his tour of the Blue Origin production facility and Glenn launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Thursday. Dodd interviewed Bezos while he gave a tour of the massive facility Blue Origin will use to launch its rockets into space.
(Bezos even pointed to the launch area that competitor SpaceX uses to launch its Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful operational rocket.)
Bezos said in the interview that he wants Blue Origin to make space travel so cheap that we can fly to the moon “100 times cheaper.”
“Space travel is a solved problem. It’s been solved for fifty years. What’s unsolved is the cost,” Bezos said in the video.
Solving the problem of cheap and easy space travel is “what will really open the heavens to humanity” and make possible the “entrepreneurial dynamism in space that I just got to witness up close and personal over the last 20 years on the internet,” Bezos said.
“If the minimum size to do any useful experiment is many, many millions of dollars, then you just can’t get, you know, two kids in a dorm room making the next amazing invention,” he added. “The barrier of entry is too high.”
It’s been more than three years since Bezos stepped down from his post as CEO of Amazon, which he famously founded in his garage in 1994. When he stepped down, Bezos said he planned to spend more time on his two other endeavors, Blue Origin and The Washington Post.
Bezos said during the Blue Origin tour that the “primary reason” he left his role as CEO of Amazon was to focus on Blue Origin.
“I’m still very involved in Amazon, mostly on the AI side, but Blue is really where I’m putting the vast majority of my productive efforts, and I’m working harder than I ever have really,” Bezos said in the video.
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