• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, April 6, 2017

Jeff Bezos said yesterday that he is selling about $1 billion in Amazon stock every year to fund Blue Origin, the commercial space venture that expects to put paying passengers in orbit by 2018. Bezos spoke to reporters in front of his company’s exhibit at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, where he also showed off a mock-up of the capsule that will hold the crew and gawkers.

“Like his fellow technology titan Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla, Mr. Bezos has identified reusable rocket parts as a key to lowering the price of admission to the field, which he said on Wednesday would lead to a ‘golden age of space exploration,’” Nicholas St. Fleur reports for the New York Times.

“If we can make access to space low-cost, then entrepreneurs will be unleashed,” Bezos proclaimed in front of the New Shepard propulsion module. “You will see creativity, you will see dynamism, you will see the same thing in space that I’ve witnessed on the Internet in the last 20 years.”

The capsule on display “[sported] six reclined seats, each with its own large window,” reports Reuters’ Irene Klotz.

Indeed, Bezos believes big windows “are just the thing to entice people to pay about $300,000 for a quick flight to suborbital space,” writes Spencer Soper for Bloomberg Technology. But they will “add cost and complexity … because larger glass panes have to be thicker, adding weight to a vehicle that needs to be as light as possible,” Bill Goodman, VP of space systems at HNu Photonics, tells him. But they are a good marketing ploy, Soper says Goodman added.

“‘Bigger is always better,’ Goodman said. ‘Someone who can afford a spaceflight is probably going to have a really nice camera and want to take some nice pictures.’”

Bezos “backed away from earlier statements that called for flying people on test flights later this year,” Jeff Foust reports for Space News. “We’re going to go through the test program, and we’ll put humans on it when we’re happy,” Bezos said. “I don’t think it’s going to be 2017 at this point. It could be.” 

But “even if Blue Origin doesn’t start crewed test flights this year, he believed the vehicle could be ready for commercial flights next year,” Foust writes. “I still think we could do commercial paying passengers in 2018,” Bezos said.

“No ticket price has been set for the trips that will launch from western Texas and offer about four minutes of weightlessness, an experience similar to one that Virgin Galactic markets for $250,000,” reports James Dean for Florida Today. “But Bezos offered his future customers one bit of humorous advice: ‘Go to the bathroom in advance.’ 

“The six-seat capsule lacks facilities, but he joked that shouldn’t be a problem on such a short flight,” Dean continues. “‘If you have to pee in 11 minutes, you got problems,’ he said.”

Reuters’ Klotz reminds us that “Blue Origin is developing a second launch system to carry satellites, and eventually people, into orbit, similar to SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. Development costs for that system, known as New Glenn, will be about $2.5 billion.”

Last month, Bezos “unveiled a deal to launch a commercial satellite for Paris-based Eutelsat Communications by 2021 or 2022,” as well as a contract to launch five OneWeb satellites, both from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, as Dean reported in USA Today.

To make all this happen, Bezos “said he'll apply some of the lessons he learned at Amazon, especially when it comes to bringing down costs and gauging customer demand,” reportsCNBC.com’s Anita Balakrishnan. 

And, in the end, it all comes down to giving people what they want.

“Of course, we'll be just as competitive,” Bezos said — and CNBC.com features in a prominent pull-quote gleaned from its livestream coverage of the event. “But how do you compete? When people say that an entrant is disruptive in an industry, what they really mean is that customers are adopting that new way. At Amazon we've had a lot of inventions that we were very excited about and customers didn't care at all. And believe me, those inventions were not disruptive in any way. The only thing that's disruptive is customer adoption. If you can invent a better way, and customers believe that's a better way, then they will use it.”