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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Thinks Space Can Be the New Internet (theverge.com)
Speaking at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said space is essentially a new internet, as it is the next frontier that needs new infrastructure to support new entrepreneurs. He said the purpose of Blue Origin is to build out a similar kind of infrastructure for space that Amazon used to operate during the days of the early internet, such as the United States Postal Service and long distance phone network. The Verge reports: "Two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry," Bezos said, referring to the strengths of the modern internet. "Two kids in their dorm room cannot do anything interesting in space." Bezos says rocket reusability needs to be improved, and both Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX are working toward the goal of vastly reducing the cost of sending payloads to space. Bezos said there's also a number of restraints right now that prevent the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that helped create Amazon do the same for a next-generation space venture. "We need to be able to put big things in space at low cost." Bezos talked of his earliest days at Amazon more than 20 years ago, where he was driving packages himself to the post office with a 10-person team. "We were sitting on a bunch of a heavy lifting infrastructure," he said. "For example, there was already a gigantic network called United States Postal Service. The internet itself was sitting on time of the long distance phone network." This is the kind of infrastructure Bezos hopes to build out with Blue Origin. "Every time you figure out some way of providing tools and services that allow other people to deploy their creativity, you're really onto something," Bezos said. But building that infrastructure space is still the grandest dream. "I think space is about to enter a golden age."
Actually, sir, this is EXACTLY what NASA was initially designed to do, and still does in many areas of research. Basically, govt / public funded research to develop technologies that can then be passed to the private sector for utilization (and, yes, even exploitation). I would mod you down (ignorance / flame-bait), except I cannot post and mod the same article.
redneck geek
There is a chance of slightly more than zero that something like that is going to happen and ignoring it may mean to miss it or to come too late. Of course there is a dream of tricking out the limits of growth by just growing out of Earth. Then someone else already is sitting on the juiciest resources out there.
Well, either that or we will be increasingly fighting over diminishing resources down here, sooner or later. In case you haven't noticed the world is becoming smaller and smaller.
Bezos is just spending some money on trying not to miss the ultimate growth opportunity in history. In the worst case he will just be selling engines to ULA (and he's is already developing the BE4 engine for them).
Can do nothing on the internet now; people expect polished products and most markets are getting saturated and if you do start to gain traction in some new area, the big guys like Amazon can easily spin up their own version of whatever you're doing rather than buy you out.
Lets be honest, no one wants to increase government budgets, what most would consider reasonable is shifting some of the budget from the War Industrial Complex. Some of that War Industrial Complex spending should also be shifted to infrastructure spending and well, what is development of space but quite simply the building of off earth infrastructure to allow access for humanity, not only to the rest of the solar system but also the galaxy beyond that. It will also not be one nations goal but the majority of democratic nations working together to achieve a goal for the entirety of humanity on this planet.
The comparison of what that exploration provides, is the gap between cave persons and where we are today. So, why leave the cave, why climb past that mountain range, why cross oceans, well, if we hadn't there would still be a tiny number individuals squatting in caves, terrified of all the far more physically capable predators around us and continually under threat of immediate extinction.
It is not destiny, it is just another challenge, just another goal, just another step in working together to become more than what we were. We will either fail or succeed but we will most certainly fail ie extinction inevitable, if we do not try. Personally I see that step next step of becoming a galactic species to be the greatest ever possible achievement of humanity, every other fear pales against it (consider that trillions of species over billions of years did not manage to escape this planetary cocoon and we are now in a position to do so). Humanity on many worlds and scattered throughout the galaxy, writing their history across this galaxy, possibly hundreds of millions of year of it. How can you deny that, in all good conscience, to future generations. This versus turning in on ourselves, squabbling ever more violently over diminishing resources and tearing down this planet down around ourselves.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen