Jeff Bezos wants lots of spaceflight companies to succeed, even SpaceX

COLORADO SPRINGS -- When it comes to spaceflight competition, Jeff Bezos says “the more the merrier.”

Despite some high-profile sniping on Twitter with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Bezos -- the founder of Blue Origin -- believes there’s enough room in the private spaceflight market for the many companies attempting to make a name for themselves in the growing industry.

“Great industries are usually built by not just one or two or three companies, but usually by dozens of companies. There can be many winners,” Bezos said during a talk here at the Space Symposium.

“From my point of view, the more the merrier. I want Virgin Galactic to succeed. I want SpaceX to succeed. I want United Launch Alliance to succeed. I want Arianespace to succeed, and of course I want Blue Origin to succeed. And I think they all can.”

Bezos wants Blue Origin to make it easier for others to join in on the spaceflight fun, creating a simpler path for entrepreneurs that might have grand ideas but not enough large-scale technology to pull it off.

Blue Origin hopes to accomplish this by producing reusable rockets and spacecraft that can fly many times instead of being jettisoned into space after one use, thereby greatly reducing the cost of spaceflight.

“Right now, only the most important applications can make their way to space because of the cost to get there,” Bezos said.

“Our mission is to try and put in place some of the heavy-lifting infrastructure, make access to space much lower cost so that thousands of entrepreneurs can do amazing and interesting things to take us into the next era.

“We only need two things to be able to do it: reusability and practice.”

And Blue Origin is on its way to reusability.

The company recently launched and landed one of its rockets for the third time, and the company could start launching crewed test flights of the rocket and capsule by 2017 with paying customers flying in 2018, Bezos said.

Blue Origin is hoping to launch paying customers about 100 kilometers above the Earth during commercial flights of the New Shepard. The capsule is outfitted with large windows where people will be able to see Earth against the blackness of space and feel weightlessness for a few minutes as the craft reaches altitude.

Bezos’ company is also planning to build and launch orbital-class rockets from Florida as well. Details about the new rocket are still pretty light, but the large future rocket is nicknamed the “very big brother” internally.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Bezos’ longterm goal is about as grand as you can get.

“I want millions of people living and working in space,” Bezos said. “I want us to be a space-faring civilization.”

“I want millions of people living and working in space.”

That high-minded idea was, in some ways, seeded when a five-year-old Bezos saw Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon.

And today, people close to Bezos joke that he uses Amazon as a bank for Blue Origin.

“My high school girlfriend has been interviewed in the media and has said that she is sure that Amazon exists solely to create money for Blue Origin. I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Bezos said.

Bezos isn’t the only person who thinks reusable rockets are the future of spaceflight.

SpaceX is also aiming for reusability, recently landing a stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in the company’s history. The company also landed a rocket stage on land in Florida in 2015.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.