Amazon's Jeff Bezos Sets His Sights on the Stars

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo News is reporting that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is looking to open a 'rocket-ship complex' for his new startup Blue Origin early next year. From the article: 'Blue Origin has released few details about the project. But a Texas newspaper editor who interviewed Bezos earlier this year said the billionaire talked [about] 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.'"

Re:Foreign airspace (spacespace?)

[John Hasler]

> With all of the talk lately about civilian space travel, I was
> wondering if anyone knew specifically how far national borders
> extend vertically.

100km.

> ...would an American colony be bound by law to be in a
> geosynchronous orbit over the U.S at all times?

What a wonky idea! In any case, it is not possible for anything to be in geosynchronous orbit over the US.

More info

[Life700MB]

If you're interested, you can find more info on the topic at this web [slashdot.org].

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Re:Foreign airspace (spacespace?)

[Voltageaav]

The GOES weather sattillites are. One for the East, one for the West, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 356 days a year.

Re:Foreign airspace (spacespace?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Well not exactly. As another poster noted, you cannot have a satellite in a geostationary orbit over the CONUS. By definition, a geostationary orbit is circular, at zero-degrees inclination relative to the equator. At no time does such an orbit pass over the US. In principal, a geosynchronous orbit (circular, but inclined relative to the equator) could result in a spacecraft producing a figure-eight or teardrop-shaped ground track that moved over the CONUS -- but the GOES birds are geostationary.

Re:Sounds Good

[WhiplashII]

Well, first of all, helicopters can do a vertical landing without power (though that is not what is being looked at here). Take off can take no energy at all (using a balloon, for instance), it only requires a force, not energy.

That said, the real problem with your post is that most of the energy is used up accellerating to >7 km/s. When landing, all of that energy goes into the atmosphere, so vertical/horizontal landing really doesn't change the energy requirements really. Detailed analysis is inconclusive as to which one is better - wings for horizontal landing tend to weigh the same as rocket fuel for vertical landing - and there are many other variables that could go either way, ie: reentry sheilding of wings is hard, but better reentry wings may not need as much shielding, etc.

Jeff Bezos and John Carmack

[FleaPlus]

I wonder if Jeff besoz is a fan of John Carmack.

Considering that Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace and Bezos's Blue Origin are both operating in Texas and are both developing suborbital reusable VTOL spacecraft, I wouldn't be surprised to see them engage in some sort of collaboration.

Carmack's been having hardware issues, but being Carmack, probably has top-notch software. I'm betting he would benefit greatly from collaborating with Blue Origin's rocket engineers, and Blue Origin would benefit from his programming godhood.

Bezos has apparently met with SpaceX's Elon Musk, who's built (and is preparing to launch) a private orbital rocket. Here's a quote from a recent press conference with Musk:

http://michaelbelfiore.com/blog/2005/11/spacex-pre launch-conference.html [michaelbelfiore.com]

On Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space program
Musk: "I met with Jeff Bezos a couple of times and had dinner. His motivations in doing Blue origin are identical to mine in forming spacex. There's a good chance we'll work collaboratively at some point."

--Update-- (presumably elaborating on motivations)
Musk: The expansion of life on earth to other places is arguably the most important thing to happen to life on earth, if it happens. Life has the duty to expand. And we're the representatives of life with the ability to do so.