Bezos adds space travel to the billionaire bucket list

All being fine with weather, technology and health, Jeff Bezos will next month climb into a capsule atop one of his Blue Origin rockets and be blasted into space. His suborbital trip, expected to last just 10 minutes, will briefly take him across the Karman line, 62 miles above sea level, marking the outer atmosphere of earth.

The starkly differing reactions to his announcement this week can be summed up by two questions: Is he crazy? Or: Can I go too? (Space romantic that I am, count me in the second camp).

To the sceptics, the idea of the 57-year-old founder of Amazon embarking on such a high-profile space jaunt counts as the ultimate vanity project that also damages the environment. Studies have shown that rocket launches are responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion.

Two weeks after stepping down as Amazon’s chief executive on July 5, the world’s richest man will become one of the first three crew members aboard the New Shepard capsule launched by the space company he founded. He has also invited along his brother Mark, a private equity investor and volunteer firefighter, who identified himself in one joint appearance as “the one with the smaller bank account, to your left”.

A successful voyage would undoubtedly give Bezos bragging rights among the entrepreneurs intent on developing space tourism, most notably Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic. A trip to space may soon count as an essential entry on a billionaire’s bucket list. Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction writer, has memorably described space tourism as “bungee jumping” for the ultra-rich. 

It is hard to disagree with much of this criticism. This story is not so much about the right stuff as the rich stuff. Unlike the astronauts who preceded them, the New Shepard crew will undergo just three days of training. They will not need any flying skills given the voyage will be fully automated. The third seat will go to the winner of an ongoing charity auction that has already reached $3.5m.

That said, one can still admire Bezos’s extraordinary spirit of adventure: a man who seemingly has it all being prepared to risk it all. Although Blue Origin has successfully tested the uncrewed capsule 15 times, all space missions are dangerous.

Sitting on top of a rocket full of combustible fuel hurtling through the atmosphere at enormous speeds is an inherently risky business. Of more than 550 people who have travelled into space, 18 have died during those missions, a mortality rate of about 3 per cent. It is telling that the paying passenger, or more likely their surviving relatives, will not be able to sue Blue Origin if things go wrong.

Bezos’s flight also underscores the astonishing ingenuity and courage of the original space voyagers. This April marked the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight, which orbited Earth, lasted 108 minutes and travelled 26,000 miles. As Stephen Walker explains in his gripping book on the early space race Beyond, one of the reasons why Gagarin beat Alan Shepard into space by 23 days was because the Soviets had a higher tolerance of risk.

The Amazon founder, who named his capsule in honour of Shepard, calculates risk in a very different way to that applied during the cold war, operating what he calls a “regret-minimisation framework”. Why would he not want to go to space given the chance? Announcing the launch in an Instagram video, Bezos enthused: “Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of travelling to space . . . It’s a big deal for me.”

But in a very Bezosian way, he is also obsessed with building the infrastructure needed for future space stations and moving packages around. Up to now, Blue Origin has been seen as an also-ran in the race with Musk’s more innovative SpaceX. But you can count on Bezos increasingly focusing his lavish resources and laser-like attention on his space ventures.

When he unveiled his Blue Moon lunar landing mock up in 2019, Bezos said that Amazon’s success had only been possible because of the logistics and internet infrastructure built by previous generations. In turn, Bezos now wanted to build the infrastructure for space entrepreneurs to come. “It’s this generation’s job to build that road to space so that the future generations can unleash their creativity,” he said.

Bezos’s trip may be one small, self-indulgent flight for one human, but it may yet speed up a bigger journey for humanity. 

john.thornhill@ft.com