Jeff Bezos to Build Space Center

An anonymous reader writes "Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos will build a space facility in west Texas to develop a commercial suborbital spaceship. His space company, Blue Origin, is 'developing vehicles and technologies that, over time, will help enable an enduring human presence in space.'"

Comments

why we need (human) space exploration/colonisation

[N3wsByt3]

We all heard the reasoning for abolishing space-exploration (particulary human-based) before, and I think the major flaw in all these 'arguments' why we shouldn't go into space is that they always set economic factors as a premise.

But, although economic viability is important to create a mass-usuage of space(travel), I fail to see why it should be the only possible motive to start exploring space. It's a pretty narrowminded, materialistic and typical capitalistic view on things. It's the same view that makes progress on medication for very rare diseases, or for diseases that are prevalent in continents that are poor, so slow: corporations can't see how they are ever going to get profit out of it, so they all turn their backs on it.

If ppl (including states) are only going to do something when they are sure of an immediate profitable return, the world has become a sad place. (And we should leave it the sooner ;-)

Arguments based on such a viewpoint fail to recognise other incentives apart from economical ones.

The reason why we shouldn't (only) rely on robots? You can explore, but you can not colonise with robots. The will to explore is deeply entrenched in the human race, but with a reason: it has survival advantages.

A species that doesn't colonise new territory and adapt, will perish. I think it's paramount that humans always keep their adventurage spirit and keep exploring and expanding, because the moment we will go "ah, let's sit back in our sofa's and let our robots/droids do it", we're basically finished, even when not being aware of it at that moment.

Not new

[Schwarzchild]

This attempted privatization of space is not new. Many Companies have been trying to reach space since the mid 80s. The problem is that most or all of these have failed to produce a working spacecraft even though they were bank rolled by millionaires.

So far, only one company, Scaled Composites, seems to be successful at this although I did see a reference about a year ago to some other company that towed their spacecraft out into the sea and launched from a floating platform but I don't recall if they've had successful launches.

There's certainly no guarantee that Blue Origins or Armadillo will ever make it into space. It may get too expensive.

Why not go in on virgin galactic?

[192939495969798999]

Why does everyone have to start their own space thing? Space travel is freaking expensive -- Jeff would be smarter to partner with virgin galactic, so that they could potentially "get there" 2x as fast with 2x as much money + no impedance from the gov't like NASA runs into.

Wannabees

[BigTom]

Talk is cheap, websites are cheap, real estate (in West Texas) is pretty cheap.

Until they start bending tin and launching things they are just another bunch of wannabees.

Nothing To See Here (yet).