As a teenager, young Jeff Bezos was interested in space exploration. Speaking as the 18-year-old valedictorian of his high school, Bezos in 1982 said that he planned “to build space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people who would be in orbit. The goal was to be able to evacuate humans. The planet would become a park.”
In the year 2000, having grown up, founded Amazon, and gained a measly $6 billion net worth – Bezos founded the Blue Origin Federation. Tasked with the mission of sending millions of people to live and work in space, the company has spent the past twenty years secretly designing and building rockets to do just that.
Bezos officially funded Blue Origin on September 8th, 2000 in Kent, Washington and set about developing both space-worthy vehicles as well as the rocket motors to push them. The company’s existence wasn’t even known by the public until 2003 when Bezos began purchasing land in Texas for suborbital launch and engine test site.
The secrecy continues to this day. As a matter of fact, the company repeatedly denied proposals for comment regarding this story. The financial backing from Bezos resulted in the development of several spacecraft and engineering prototypes. In 2005, the 9,500-pound Charon jet-powered VTOL test platform made its first and only flight above Moses Lake, Washington.
The company built on that motive the following year with a test flight of the Goddard suborbital test vehicle. It was driven by nine pressure-fed peroxide-powered BE-1 rocket engines, Blue Origin’s first successful rocket design. It made two flights in 2007 before being retired.
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