Bezos was awarded the 2018 Axel Springer award recently. According to the award’s website: This year’s festivities were called “An Evening With Jeff Bezos.” At the award ceremony, Bezos said: But could it lighten his wallet to the tune of $126 billion? Blue Origin is not a hobby, it is Bezos’ passion. His rocket, New Shepard, is designed to carry tourists, payload, and researchers on short suborbital trips. The rocket is named after the late Original Seven astronaut Alan Shepard. The company is also working on rocket engines and orbital launch systems that would compete directly with Elon Musk’s space exploration company SpaceX’s equipment. Bezos also financed an expedition to recover the remains of the discarded first stages of Apollo 11 and a couple of others. Bezos can spend billion dollars a year on Blue Origin and still have money to spare, but in reality, what else is he going to spend it on? He could join the Giving Pledge, for one thing. But that’s not how Bezos sees it. He thinks that he really doesn’t have many alternative ways to spend his vast fortune. Bezos believes that space travel is necessary to advance human civilization. Bezos also believes that space exploration could help slow energy usage on Earth and increase human productivity. Bezos plans to put humans into his Blue Origin rockets by early 2019. Blue Origin is also building an enormous orbital vehicle that will take flight for the first time in 2020. This is just one of the steps in Bezos’ goal to have “millions of people and then billions of people and then finally a trillion people in space.”
