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Jeff Bezos discusses his childhood on a ranch, the Apollo program, Blue Origin's rockets, his vision for humanity in space, and his unique decision-making and invention processes. Learn about his approach to business, AI, and the future of space exploration.
Published December 14, 2023
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Jeff Bezos
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Interviewer: You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather on a ranch here in Texas, and I heard you had a lot of work to do around the ranch, so what's the coolest job you remember doing there? Interviewee: Wow, coolest. Most interesting, most memorable. Most memorable. Most impactful. It's a real working ranch. I spent all my summers on that ranch from age four to 16, and my grandfather was really taking me those in the summers. In the early summers, he was letting me pretend to help on the ranch because, of course, a four-year-old is a burden, not a help in real life. He's really just watching me and taking care of me. He was doing that because my mom was so young. She had me when she was 17, and so he was sort of giving her a break, and my grandmother and my grandfather would take me for these summers. But as I got a little older, I actually was helpful on the ranch, and I loved it. I was out there. My grandfather had a huge influence on me, huge factor in my life. I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch. I've fixed windmills and laid fences and pipelines and done all the things that any rancher would do, vaccinated the animals, everything. But we had a... My grandfather, after my grandmother died, I was about 12, and I kept coming to the ranch. Then it was just him and me, just the two of us. And he was completely addicted to the soap opera, The Days of Our Lives. And we would go back to the ranch house every day around 1 p.m. or so to watch Days of Our Lives. Like sands through an hourglass. So are the Days of Our Lives. Just the image of that, the two of us sitting there watching a soap opera. He had these big, crazy dogs. It was really a very formative experience for me. But the key thing about it, for me, the great gift I got from it, was that my grandfather was so resourceful. He did everything himself. He made his own veterinary tools. He would make needles to suture the cattle up with. He would find a little piece of wire and heat it up and pound it thin and drill a hole in it and sharpen it. So you learn different things on a ranch than you would learn growing up in a city. So self-reliance. Yeah. Like figuring out that you can solve problems with enough persistence and ingenuity. And my grandfather bought a D6 bulldozer, which is a big bulldozer. And he got it for like $5,000 because it was completely broken down. It was like a 1955 Caterpillar D6 bulldozer. Knew it would have cost, I don't know, more than $100,000. And we spent an entire summer fixing, like repairing that bulldozer. And we'd use mail order to buy big gears for the transmission and they'd show up. They'd be too heavy to move. So we'd have to build a crane. Just that kind of problem-solving mentality. He had it so powerfully. He did all of his own. And he didn't pick up the phone and call somebody. He would figure it out on his own. Doing his own veterinary work, you know.
Interviewer: But just the image of the two, you fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in for a little break at 1 p.m. to watch soap opera. Interviewee: Laying on the floor. That's how he watched TV. Yeah. He was a really, really remarkable guy.
Interviewer: That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood also. In all those Westerns. When he's not doing what he's doing, he's just watching soap operas. All right. I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you were five, watching Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. So let me ask you to look back at the historical context and impact of that. So the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and the U.S. was in many ways epic. It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events. First satellite to space, first human to space, first spacewalk, first uncrewed landing on the moon. Then some failures, explosions, deaths on both sides, actually. And then the first human walking on the moon. What are some of the more inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time, those few years, that just 12 years? Interviewee: Well, I mean, there's so much inspiring there. One of the great things to take away from that, one of the great von Braun quotes is, I have come to use the word impossible with great caution. And so that's kind of the big story of Apollo is that things, you know, going to the moon was literally an analogy that people used for something that's impossible. You know, oh yeah, you'll do that when, you know, men walk on the moon. Yeah. And of course it finally happened. So, you know, I think it was pulled forward in time because of the space race. I think, you know, with the geopolitical implications and, you know, how much resource was put into it, you know, at the peak, that program was spending, you know, two or 3% of GDP on the Apollo program. So much resource. I think it was pulled forward in time. You know, we kind of did it ahead of when we quote unquote should have done it.
Interviewer: Yeah. Interviewee: And so in that way, it's also a technical marvel. I mean, it's truly incredible. It's, you know, it's the 20th century version of building the pyramids or something. It's, you know, it's an achievement that because it was pulled forward in time, because it did something that had previously been thought impossible, it rightly deserves its place as, you know, in the pantheon of great human achievements.
Interviewer: And of course you named the projects, the rockets that Blue Origin is working on after some of the folks involved. Yeah. I don't understand why I didn't say new Gagarin. And I, is that- Interviewee: There's an American bias in the naming. I apologize.
Interviewer: It's very strange. Interviewee: Lex. Just asking for a friend. Clarify. I'm a big fan of Gagarin's though. In fact, I think his first words in space, I think are incredible. He, you know, he purportedly said, "My God, it's blue." And that really drives home. No one had seen the Earth from space. No one knew that we were on this blue planet. No one knew what it looked like from out there. And Gagarin was the first person to see it.
Interviewer: One of the things I think about is how dangerous those early days were for Gagarin, for Glenn, for everybody involved. Like how big of a risk they were all taking. Interviewee: They were taking huge risks. I'm not sure what the Soviets thought about Gagarin's flight, but I think that the Americans thought that the Alan Shepard flight, the flight that, you know, New Shepard is named after, the first American in space, he went on his suborbital flight, they thought he had about a 75% chance of success. So, you know, that's a pretty big risk, a 25% risk.
Interviewer: It's kind of interesting that Alan Shepard is not quite as famous as John Glenn. So for people who don't know, Alan Shepard is the first astronaut. The first American in space. American in suborbital flight. Correct. And then the first orbital flight is... Interviewee: John Glenn is the first American to orbit the Earth. By the way, I have the most charming, sweet, incredible letter from John Glenn, which I have framed and hang on my office wall.
Interviewer: What does he say? Where he tells me how grateful he is that we have named New Glenn after him. And he sent me that letter about a week before he died. And it's really an incredible... It's also a very funny letter. He's writing and he says, you know, this is a letter about New Glenn from the original Glenn. And he's just... He's got a great sense of humor and he's very happy about it and grateful. It's very sweet. Interviewee: No, he doesn't.
Interviewer: Does he say, P.S., don't mess this up or is that... Make me look good. Interviewee: He doesn't do that. Okay. But John, wherever you are, we got you covered.
Interviewer: Good. So back to maybe the big picture of space. When you look up at the stars and think big, what do you hope is the future of humanity? Hundreds, thousands of years from now out in space. Interviewee: I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. That would, you know, our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy. And we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system.
Interviewer: So what do you think that looks like? Giant space stations? Interviewee: Yeah. The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. You know, the planetary surfaces are just way too small. So you can, I mean, unless you turn them into giant space stations or something, but yeah, we will take materials from the moon and from near-Earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on, and we'll build giant O'Neill-style colonies. And people will live in those. And they have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces. You can spin them to get normal Earth gravity. You can put them where you want them. I think most people are going to want to live near Earth, not necessarily in Earth orbit, but in, you know, Earth vicinity orbits. And so they can move, you know, relatively quickly back and forth between their station and Earth. So I think a lot of people, especially in the early stages, are not going to want to give up Earth altogether. They go to Earth for vacation. Yeah, same way that, you know, you might go to Yellowstone National Park for vacation. People will, and people will get to choose whether they live on Earth or whether they live in space, but they'll be able to use much more energy and much more material resource in space than they would be able to use on Earth.
Interviewer: One of the interesting ideas you had is to move the heavy industry away from Earth. So people sometimes have this idea that somehow space exploration is in conflict with the celebration of the planet Earth, that we should focus on preserving Earth. And basically your idea is that space travel and space exploration is a way to preserve Earth. Interviewee: Exactly. This planet, we've sent robotic probes to all the planets. We know that this is the good one.
Interviewer: Not to play favorites or anything, but... Interviewee: But Earth really is the good planet. It's amazing. The ecosystem we have here, all of the life and the lush plant life and, you know, the water resources, everything. This planet is really extraordinary. And of course, we evolved on this planet. So of course, it's perfect for us, but it's also perfect for all the advanced life forms on this planet, all the animals and so on. And so this is a gem. We do need to take care of it. And as we enter the Anthropocene, as we humans have gotten so sophisticated and large and impactful, as we stride across this planet, you know, that is going to... As we continue, we want to use a lot of energy. We want to use a lot of energy per capita. We've gotten amazing things. We don't want to go backwards. You know, if you think about the good old days, they're mostly an illusion. Like in almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was, say, 50 years ago or 100 years. We live better lives, by and large, than our grandparents did and their grandparents did and so on. And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates, like almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be. And we get, you know, antibiotics and all kinds of life-saving medical care and so on and so on. And there's one thing that is moving backwards and it's the natural world. So it is a fact that 500 years ago, pre-industrial age, the natural world was pristine. It was incredible. And we have traded some of that pristine beauty for all of these other gifts that we have as an advanced society. And we can have both. But to do that, we have to go to space. And all of this really, the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita. And when you look at, you know, you do want to continue to use more and more energy. It is going to make your life better in so many ways. But that's not compatible, ultimately, with living on a finite planet. And so we have to go out into the solar system. And really, you could argue about when you have to do that, but you can't credibly argue about whether you have to do that.
Interviewer: Eventually, we have to do that. Interviewee: Exactly.
Interviewer: So you don't often talk about it, but let me ask you on that topic about the Blue Ring and the Orbital Reef space infrastructure projects. What's your vision for these? Interviewee: So Blue Ring is a very interesting spacecraft that is designed to take up to 3,000 kilograms of payload up to geosynchronous orbit or in lunar vicinity. It has two different kinds of propulsion. It has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion. And so you can use Blue Ring in a couple of different ways. You can slowly move, let's say, up to geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion. That might take, you know, 100 days or 150 days, depending on how much mass you're carrying. And then reserve your chemical propulsion so that you can change orbits quickly in geosynchronous orbit. Or you can use the chemical propulsion first to quickly get up to geosynchronous and then use your electrical propulsion to slowly change your geosynchronous orbit. Blue Ring has a couple of interesting features. It provides a lot of services to these payloads. So it can be one large payload or it can be a number of small payloads. And it provides thermal management, it provides electric power, it provides compute, provides communications. And so when you design a payload for Blue Ring, you don't have to figure out all of those things on your own. So kind of radiation-tolerant compute is a complicated thing to do. And so we have an unusually large amount of radiation-tolerant compute on board Blue Ring, and your payload can just use that when it needs to. So it's sort of all these services, it's like a set of APIs. It's a little bit like Amazon Web Services, but for space payloads that need to move about in Earth's vicinity or lunar's vicinity.
Interviewer: A-W-S-S. Okay, so compute in space. So you get a giant chemical rocket to get a payload out to orbit, and then you have these admins that show up, this Blue Ring thing that manages various things like compute. Interviewee: Exactly. And it can also provide transportation and move you around to different orbits.
Interviewer: Including humans, you think? Interviewee: No, but Blue Ring is not designed to move humans around. It's designed to move payloads around. So we're also building a lunar lander, which is, of course, designed to land humans on the surface of the moon.
Interviewer: I want to ask you about that, but let me actually just step back to the old days. You were at Princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist. Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewer: What attracted you to physics, and why did you change your mind and not become... Why are you not Jeff Bezos, the famous theoretical physicist? Interviewee: So I loved physics, and I studied physics and computer science, and I was proceeding along the physics path I was planning to major in physics, and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. And the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun. I really loved it. And I was very good at programming and doing those things, and I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely. But I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist. That's why I went to Princeton in the first place. It was definitely... And then I realized I was going to be a mediocre theoretical physicist. And there were a few people in my classes, like in quantum mechanics and so on, who they could effortlessly do things that were so difficult for me. And I realized, like, you know, there are a thousand ways to be smart. And to be a really... You know, theoretical physics is not one of those fields where the, you know, only the top few percent actually move the state of the art forward. It's one of those things where you have to be really... Just your brain has to be wired in a certain way. And there was a guy named... One of these people who was convinced me... He didn't mean to convince me, but just by observing him, he convinced me that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist. His name was Yosanta. And Yosanta was from Sri Lanka. And he was one of the most brilliant people I'd ever met. My friend Joe and I were working on a very difficult partial differential equations problem set one night. And there was one problem that we worked on for three hours. And we made no headway whatsoever. And we looked up at each other at the same time, and we said, "Yosanta." So we went to Yosanta's dorm room and he was there. He was almost always there. And we said, "Yosanta, we're having trouble solving this partial differential equation. Would you mind taking a look?" And he said, "Of course..." By the way, he was the most humble, most kind person. And so he took our... He looked at our problem and he stared at it for just a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds. And he said, "Cosine." And I said, "What do you mean, Yosanta? What do you mean, cosine?" He said, "That's the answer." And I said, "No, no, no, come on." And he said, "Let me show you." And he took out some paper and he wrote down three pages of equations. Everything canceled out. And the answer was cosine. And I said, "Yosanta, did you do that in your head?" And he said, "Oh, no, that would be impossible. A few years ago, I solved a similar problem. And I could map this problem onto that problem. And then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine." I had a few, you know, you have an experience like that, you realize maybe being a theoretical physicist isn't what the universe wants you to be. And so I switched to computer science and, you know, that worked out really well for me. I enjoy it. I still enjoy it today.
Interviewer: Yeah, there's a particular kind of intuition. You need to be a great physicist applied to physics. Interviewee: I think the mathematical skill required today is so high. You have to be a world-class mathematician to be a successful theoretical physicist today. And it's not, you know, you probably need other skills too, intuition, lateral thinking, and so on. But without the, without just top-notch math skills, you're unlikely to be successful.
Interviewer: And visualization skill, you have to be able to really kind of do these kinds of thought experiments. And if you want a truly great creativity, actually, Walter Isaacson writes about you. Puts you on the same level as Einstein. Interviewee: Well, he's, that's very kind. I have, I'm an inventor. If you, if you want to boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. And I look at things and I can come up with atypical solutions and, you know, and then I can create a hundred such atypical solutions for something. 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny. But one of those 100 is like, hmm, maybe there is, maybe that might work. And then you can keep going from there. So that kind of lateral thinking, that kind of inventiveness, in a high dimensionality space where the search space is very large, that's where my inventive skills come, that's the thing I'm, if I, I self-identify as an inventor more than anything else.
Interviewer: Yeah, and he describes in all kinds of different ways Walter Isaacson does that creativity combined with childlike wander that you've maintained still to this day, all of that combined together. Is there, like if you were to study your own brain, introspect, how do you think? What's your thinking process like? We'll talk about the writing process of putting it down on paper, which is quite rigorous and famous at Amazon. But how do you, when you sit down, maybe alone, maybe with others, and thinking through this high dimensional space and looking for creative solutions, creative paths forward, is there something you could say about that process? Interviewee: It's such a good question and I honestly don't know how it works. If I did, I would try to explain it. I know it involves lots of wandering, so I, you know, when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going. So to go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention, real invention, not incremental improvement. Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor and everything you do. You have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking. That requires wandering and you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people, they feel like wandering is inefficient and, you know, like when I sit down to a meeting, I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem because if I did, then I'd already, I know there's some kind of straight line that we're drawing to the solution. The reality is we may have to wander for a long time. And I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a number, you know, a group of smart people and spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth. So, like, you know, sometimes you wake up with an idea in the middle of the night and sometimes you sit down with a group of people and go back and forth and both things are really pleasurable.
Interviewer: And when you wander, I think one key thing is to notice a good idea and to maybe to notice the kernel of a good idea maybe pull at that string because I don't think a good idea has come fully formed. Interviewee: A hundred percent right. In fact, when I come up with what I think is a good idea and it survives kind of the first level of scrutiny, you know, that I do in my own head and I'm ready to tell somebody else about the idea, I will often say, "Look, it is going to be really easy for you to find objections to this idea, but work with me. There's something there. There's something there and that is intuition because it's really easy to kill new ideas in the beginning because they do have so many easy objections to them. So you need to kind of forewarn people and say, "Look, I know it's going to take a lot of work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let's get started on that. It'll be fun." So you got that ability to say cosine in you somewhere after all.
Interviewer: Maybe not on math. In a different domain. There are a thousand ways to be smart, by the way. And that is a really, like, when I go around and I meet people, I'm always looking for the way that they're smart and you find it is, that's one of the things that makes the world so interesting and fun is that it is not, it's not like IQ is a single dimension. There are people who are smart in such unique ways. Yeah, Interviewee: You know, there's a thousand ways to be smart, sir.
Interviewer: You just gave me a good response to when somebody calls me an idiot on the internet. Interviewee: Well, they might tell you, yeah, but there are a million ways to be dumb.
Interviewer: Yeah, right. I feel like that's a Mark Twain quote. Interviewee: Okay.
Interviewer: All right. You gave me an amazing tour of Blue Origin rocket factory and launch complex in the historic Cape Canaveral. That's where New Glenn, the big rocket we talked about is being built and will launch. Can you explain what the New Glenn rocket is and tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works? Interviewee: Sure. New Glenn is a very large heavy lift launch vehicle. It'll take about 45 metric tons to LEO, a very large class. It's about half the thrust, a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn V rocket, so it's about 3.9 million pounds of thrust on liftoff. The booster has seven BE-4 engines. Each engine generates a little more than 550,000 pounds of thrust. The engines are fueled by liquid natural gas, liquefied natural gas, LNG, as the fuel and locks as the oxidizer. The cycle is an ox-riched stage combustion cycle. It's a cycle that was really pioneered by the Russians. It's a very good cycle. And that engine is also going to power the first stage of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United Launch Alliance rocket. Then the second stage of New Glenn is powered by two BE-3U engines, which is an upper stage variant of our New Shepard liquid hydrogen engine. So the BE-3U has 160,000 pounds of thrust, so two of those 320,000 pounds of thrust. And hydrogen is a very good propellant for upper stages because it has very high ISP. It's not a great propellant in my view for booster stages because the stages then get physically so large. Hydrogen has very high ISP, but liquid hydrogen is not dense at all. So to store liquid hydrogen, if you need to store many thousands of pounds of liquid hydrogen, your liquid hydrogen tank gets very large. So you get more benefit from the higher ISP, the specific impulse. You get more benefit from the higher specific impulse on the second stage. And that stage carries less propellant so you don't get such geometrically gigantic tanks. The Delta 4 is an example of a vehicle that is all hydrogen. The booster stage is also hydrogen and I think that it's a very effective vehicle but it never was very cost effective. So it's operationally very capable but not very cost effective.
Interviewer: So size is also costly. Interviewee: Size is costly.
Interviewer: So it's interesting, rockets love to be big. Everything works better. What do you mean by that? You've told me that before. It sounds epic but what's it mean? Interviewee: I mean when you look at the physics of rocket engines and also when you look at parasitic mass, let's say you have an avionics system so you have a guidance and control system. That is going to be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is going to be for a tiny rocket and so that's just parasitic mass that is very consequential if you're building a very small rocket but is trivial if you're building a very large rocket. So you have the parasitic mass thing. And then if you look at for example rocket engines have turbo pumps. They have to pressurize the fuel and the oxidizer up to a very high pressure level in order to inject it into the thrust chamber where it burns. And those pumps, all rotating machines in fact, get more efficient as they get larger. So really tiny turbo pumps are very challenging to manufacture and any kind of gaps, you know, are like between the housing for example and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel, there has to be some gap there. You can't have those parts scraping against one another and those gaps drive inefficiencies. And so, you know, if you have a very large turbo pump, those gaps in percentage terms end up being very small. And so there's a bunch of things that you end up loving about having a large rocket and that you end up hating for a small rocket. But there's a giant exception to this rule and it is manufacturing. So manufacturing large structures is very, very challenging. It's a pain in the butt. And so, you know, it's just, you know, if you have, if you're making a small rocket engine, you can move all the pieces by hand, you can assemble it on a table, one person can do it. You know, you don't need cranes and heavy lift operations and tooling and so on and so on. When you start building big objects, infrastructure, civil infrastructure, just like the launch pad and the, you know, all this, we went and visited and took you to the launch pad and you can see it's so monumental.
Interviewer: Yeah, it is. Interviewee: And so just these things become major undertakings, both from an engineering point of view, but also from a construction and cost point of view.
Interviewer: And even the foundation of the launch pad, I mean, this is Florida, like, isn't it like swampland? Like, how deep do you have to go? Interviewee: You have to, at Cape Canaveral, in fact, at most ocean, you know, most launch pads are on beaches somewhere in the ocean side because you want to launch over water for safety reasons. The, yes, you have to drive pilings, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of pilings, you know, 50, 100, 150 feet deep to get enough structural integrity for these very large, you know, it's, it's, yes, these turn into major civil engineering projects. I just have to say everything about that factory is pretty badass.
Interviewer: You said tooling, the bigger it gets, the more epic it is. Interviewee: It does make it epic. It's fun to look at. It's extraordinary.
Interviewer: It's humbling also because humans are so small compared to it. Interviewee: We are building these enormous machines that are harnessing enormous amounts of chemical power, you know, in very, very compact packages. It's truly extraordinary.
Interviewer: But then there's all the different components and, you know, the materials involved. Is there something interesting that you can describe about the materials that comprise the rocket, so it has to be as light as possible, I guess, while withstanding the heat and the harsh conditions? Interviewee: Yeah. I play a little kind of game sometimes with other rocket people that I run into where say, "What are the things that would amaze the 1960s engineers?" Like, "What's the change?" Because surprisingly, some of rocketry's greatest hits have not changed. They are still, they would recognize immediately a lot of what we do today, and it's exactly what they pioneered back in the '60s. But a few things have changed. You know, the use of carbon composites is very different today. You know, we can build very sophisticated, you saw our carbon tape laying machine that builds the giant fairings. And we can build these incredibly light, very stiff fairing structures out of carbon composite material that they could not have dreamed of. I mean, the efficiency, the structural efficiency of that material is so high compared to any, you know, metallic material you might use or anything else. So, that's one. Aluminum lithium and the ability to friction stir weld aluminum lithium. Do you remember the friction stir welding that I showed you? This is a remarkable technology. It was invented decades ago, but has become very practical over just the last couple of decades. And instead of using heat to weld two pieces of metal together, it literally stirs the two pieces. There's a pin that rotates at a certain rate, and you put that pin between the two plates of metal that you want to weld together, and then you move it at a very precise speed, and instead of heating the material, it heats it a little bit because of friction, but not very much. You can literally, immediately after welding with stir friction welding, you can touch the material and it's just barely warm. It literally stirs the molecules together. It's quite extraordinary.
Interviewer: Relatively low temperature, and I guess high temperature is what makes it a weak point. Interviewee: Exactly. So with traditional welding techniques, you may have whatever the underlying strength characteristics of the material are, you end up with weak regions where you weld. And with friction stir welding, the welds are just as strong as the bulk material. So it really allows you, because when you're, you know, let's say you're building a tank that you're going to pressurize, you know, a large, you know, liquid natural gas tank for our booster stage, for example. You know, if you are welding that with traditional methods, you have to size those weld lands, the thickness of those pieces, with that knockdown for whatever damage you're doing with the weld, and that's going to add a lot of weight to that tank.
Interviewer: I mean, even just looking at the fairings, the result of that, the complex shape that you're that it takes, and like, what it's supposed to do is kind of incredible, because people don't know it's on top of the rocket, it's going to fall apart. That's its task. But it has to stay strong sometimes, and then disappear when it needs to. That's right. It's a very difficult task. Interviewee: Yes. When you need something that needs to have 100% integrity until it needs to have 0% integrity, it needs to stay attached until it's ready to go away, and then when it goes away, it has to go away completely. You use explosive charges for that. And so it's a very robust way of separating structure when you need to. Exploding.
Interviewer: Exploding. Yeah. Interviewee: Little tiny bits of explosive material, and it just, it'll sever the whole connection.
Interviewer: So if you want to go from 100% structural integrity to 0% as fast as possible, it's explosives. Use explosives. The entirety of this thing is so badass. Interviewee: Okay.
Interviewer: So we're back to the two stages. So the first stage is reusable. Interviewee: Yeah.
Interviewer: Second stage is expendable. Interviewee: Second stage is liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, so we get to take advantage of the higher specific impulse. The first stage lands downrange on a landing platform in the ocean, comes back for maintenance, and get ready to do the next mission. I mean, there's a
Interviewer: A million questions, but also, is there a path towards reusability for the second stage? Interviewee: There is, and we know how to do that. Right now, we're going to work on manufacturing that second stage to make it as inexpensive as possible. Sort of two paths for a second stage. Make it reusable, or work really hard to make it inexpensive so you can afford to expend it. And that trade is actually not obvious which one is better. Even in terms of cost, even like time, cost, all the time. And I'm talking about cost. You know, space flight, getting into orbit is a solved problem. We solved it back in, you know, the 50s and 60s.
Interviewer: Making it sound easy. Interviewee: The only thing that, the only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit, which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new, you know, endeavors that lots of startup companies, everybody else can do. So that's, we really, that's our, one of our missions is to, you know, be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit so that there can be, you know, a kind of a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
Interviewer: I like how you said getting to orbit is a solved problem. It's just the only interesting thing is reducing the cost. You know, you can describe every single problem facing human civilization that way. I mean, the physicists would say everything is a solved problem. We've solved everything. The rest is just, what Rutherford said that it's just stamp collecting. It's just the details. Some of the greatest innovations and inventions and, you know, brilliance is in that cost reduction stage, right? And you've had a long career of cost reduction. Interviewee: For sure. And, you know, when you, what does cost reduction really mean? It means inventing a better way.
Interviewer: Yeah, exactly. Interviewee: Right? And when you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer. So, you know, whatever it was, I don't know how many thousands of years ago, somebody invented the plow. And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive. And so, it is a big deal to invent better ways. That's how the world gets richer.
Interviewer: So, what are some of the biggest challenges on the manufacturing side and the engineering side that you're facing in working to get to the first launch of New Glenn? Interviewee: The first launch is one thing, and we'll do that in 2024, coming up in this coming year. The real thing that's the bigger challenge is making sure that our factory is efficiently manufacturing at rate. So, rate production. So, consider if you want to launch New Glenn, you know, 24 times a year. You need to manufacture an upper stage, since they're expendable, every, you know, twice a month, you need to do one every two weeks. So, you need to be, you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate. And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place. And the same thing. So, every upper stage has two BE3U engines. So, those engines, you know, you need, if you're going to launch the vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month. So, you need an engine every week. So, you need to be, that engine needs to be being produced at rate. And that's a, and there's all of the things that you need to do that, all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures, the right people. Process, et cetera. So, it's one thing to build a first article, right? So, that's, you know, to launch New Glenn for the first time, you need to produce a first article. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is everything that's going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce New Glenns at rate.
Interviewer: So, the first one is produced in a way that's, enables the production of the second, the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth. Interviewee: You can think of the first article as kind of pushing, it pushes all of the rate manufacturing technology along. You know, in other words, it's kind of the, you know, it's the test article in a way that's testing out your manufacturing technologies.
Interviewer: The manufacturing is the big challenge. Interviewee: Yes, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like any of it is easy. I mean, the people who are designing the engines and all of this, all of it is hard, for sure. But the challenge right now is driving really hard to get to, is to get to rate manufacturing and to do that in an efficient way. Again, kind of back to our cost point, if you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way, you haven't really solved the cost problem, and maybe you haven't really moved the state-of-the-art forward. All this has to be about moving the state-of-the-art forward. There are easier, easier businesses to do. I always tell people, look, if you are trying to make money, you know, like start a salty snack food company or something, you know, you You write that idea down. Like, make the Lex Friedman potato chips.
Interviewer: You know, this is- Don't say it. The people are going to steal it. Interviewee: But yeah, it's hard. You see what I'm saying? It's like, there's nothing easy about this business, but it's its own reward. It's fascinating. It's worthwhile. It's meaningful. And so, you know, I don't want to pick on salty snack food companies, but I think it's less meaningful. You know, at the end of the day, you're not going to have accomplished something amazing.
Interviewer: Yeah, there's- Even if you do make a lot of money on it. Interviewee: Yeah, there's something fundamentally different about the quote-unquote business of space exploration.
Interviewer: Yeah, for sure. It's a grand project of humanity. Interviewee: Yes, it's one of humanity's grand challenges. And especially as you look at going to the moon and going to Mars and building giant O'Neill colonies and unlocking all the things. You know, I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this, but the fruits of this come from building a road to space, getting the infrastructure. I'll give you an analogy. When I started Amazon, I didn't have to develop a payment system. It already existed. It was called the credit card. I didn't have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages. It already existed. It was called the Postal Service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post and so on. So all this heavy lifting infrastructure was already in place and I could stand on its shoulders. And that's why, when you look at the internet, you know, by the way, another giant piece of infrastructure that was around in the early, I'm taking you back to like 1994, people were using dial-up modems and it was piggybacking on top of the long-distance phone network. That's how the internet, that's, you know, how people were accessing servers and so on. And that, again, if that hadn't existed, it would have been hundreds of billions of capex to put that out there. No startup company could have done that. And so the problem, you know, you see in, if you look at the dynamism in the internet space over the last 20 years, it's because, you know, you see like two kids in a dorm room could start an internet company that could be successful and do amazing things. Because they didn't have to build heavy infrastructure, it was already there. And that's what I want to do. I'd take, you know, my Amazon winnings and use that to build heavy infrastructure so that the next generation, you know, my, the generation that's my children and their children, these, you know, those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure. Then there'll be space entrepreneurs who start in their dorm room. Yeah. Like that, that will be a marker of success. When you can have a really valuable space company started in a dorm room, then we know that we've built enough infrastructure so that ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed. I find that very exciting.
Interviewer: They will, of course, as kids do, take all of this hard infrastructure building for granted. Interviewee: Of course. Which is the entrepreneurial spirit. That's an inventor's greatest dream is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted. You know, nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an invention. We pioneered customer reviews, but now they're so commonplace. Same thing with one-click shopping and so on. Yeah. But that's a compliment. That's how, you know, you invent something that's so used, so beneficially used by so many people that they take it for granted.
Interviewer: I don't know about nobody. Every time I use Amazon, I'm still amazed. How does this work? Interviewee: That proves you're a very curious explorer.
Interviewer: All right. All right. Back to the rockets. Timeline. You said 2024. As it stands now, are both the first test launch and the launch of Escapade Explorers to Mars still possible? In 2024? Interviewee: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. For sure, the first launch, and then we'll see if Escapade goes on that or not. I think that the first launch for sure, and I hope Escapade too. I hope? Well, I just don't know which mission it's actually going to be slated on. Yeah. So we also have other things that might go on that first mission.
Interviewer: Oh, I got it. But you're optimistic that the launches will still... Interviewee: Oh, the first launch. I'm very optimistic that the first launch of New Glenn will be in 2024. And I'm just not 100% certain what payload will be on that first launch.
Interviewer: Are you nervous about it? Interviewee: Are you kidding? I'm extremely nervous about it. Oh, man. 100%. I've, you know, every launch I go to, you know, for New Shepard, for other vehicles too, I'm always nervous for these launches. But yes, for sure. A first launch, to have no nervousness about that would be, you know, some sign of derangement, I think, so...
Interviewer: Well, I got to visit the launch, but it's pretty, I mean, it's epic. Interviewee: You know, we have done a tremendous amount of ground testing, a tremendous amount of simulation. So, you know, a lot of the problems that we might find in flight have been resolved. But there are some problems you can only find in flight. So, you know, cross your fingers. I guarantee you, you'll have fun watching it no matter what happens.
Interviewer: 100%. When the thing is fully assembled, it comes up. Interviewee: Yeah. The transporter erector. The erector, yeah. Just the transporter erector for a rocket of this scale is extraordinary.
Interviewer: That's an incredible machine. Interviewee: The vehicle travels out horizontally and then kind of, you know, comes up.
Interviewer: Over a few hours. Interviewee: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing to watch.
Interviewer: Speaking of which, if that makes you nervous, I don't know if you remember, but you were aboard New Shepard on its first crewed flight. How was that experience? Were you terrified then? Interviewee: You know, strangely, I wasn't. You know, I... You ride the rocket. Lesson of Racking. I've watched other people ride the rocket and I'm more nervous than when I was inside the rocket myself. It was a difficult conversation to have with my mother when I told her I was going to go on the first one. And not only was I going to go, but I was going to bring my brother, too. This is a tough conversation to have with a mom. There's a long pause when you told her. She's like, "Both of you?" And it was an incredible experience. And we were laughing inside the capsule and, you know, we're not nervous. The people on the ground were very nervous for us. It was actually one of the most emotionally powerful parts of the experience was not... It happened even before the flight. At 4:30 in the morning, brother and I are getting ready to go to the launch site. And Lauren is going to take us there in her helicopter. And we're getting ready to leave. And we go outside, outside the ranch house there in West Texas where the launch facility is. And all of our family, my kids and my brother's kids and our, you know, our parents and close friends are assembled there and they're saying goodbye to us. But they're kind of saying, maybe they think they're saying goodbye to us forever. And, you know, we might not have felt that way, but it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were that they felt that way. And it was sort of powerful because it allowed us to see, it was almost like attending your own memorial service or something. Like, you could feel how loved you were in that moment. And it was really amazing.
Interviewer: Yeah, and I mean, there's just an epic nature to it, too. The ascent, the floating in zero gravity, I'll tell you something very interesting. Zero gravity feels very natural. Interviewee: I don't know if it's because we're, you know, it's like a return to the womb. It just confirmed you're an alien, but that's what you just said. It feels so natural to be in zero G. It was really interesting. And then when people talk about the overview effect and seeing Earth from space, I had that feeling very powerfully. I think everyone did. You see how fragile the Earth is. If you're not an environmentalist, it will make you one. The great Jim Lovell quote, you know, he looked back at the Earth from space and he said he realized "you don't go to heaven when you die, you go to heaven when you're born." And it's just, you know, that's the feeling that people get when they're in space. You see all this blackness, all this nothingness, and there's one gem of life, and it's Earth. It is a gem.
Interviewer: What, you know, you're, you've talked a lot about decision-making throughout your time with Amazon. What was that decision like to be the first to ride New Shepard? Like, what, just before you talked to your mom. Yeah. What, like, the pros and cons. Like, actually, as one human being, as a leader of a company, on all fronts, like, what was that decision-making like? Interviewee: I decided that, first of all, I knew the vehicle extremely well. I know the team who built it. I know the vehicle. The, I'm very comfortable with, like, the escape system. We put as much effort into the escape system on that vehicle as we put into all the rest of the vehicle combined. It's one of the hardest pieces of engineering in the entire New Shepard architecture.
Interviewer: Can you actually describe what you mean by escape system, what's involved? Interviewee: We have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule so that if anything goes wrong on ascent, you know, while the main rocket engine is firing, we can ignite this solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule and escape from the booster. It's a very challenging system to build, design, validate, test, all of these things. It is the reason that I am comfortable letting anyone go on New Shepard. So, the booster is as safe and reliable as we can make it, but we're harnessing, whenever you're talking about rocket engines, I don't care what rocket engine you're talking about, you are harnessing such vast power in such a small, compact, geometric space. The power density is so enormous that it is impossible to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong. And so, the only way to improve safety is to have an escape system. And, you know, historically, rockets, human-rated rockets, have had escape systems. Only the space shuttle did not. But Apollo had one, all of the previous, you know, Gemini, et cetera, they all had escape systems. And we have on New Shepard unusual escapes. Most escape systems are towers. We have a pusher escape system. So, the solid rocket motor is actually embedded in the base of the crew capsule and it pushes. And it's reusable in the sense that if we don't use it, so if we have a nominal mission, we land with it. The tower systems have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission. And so, they get wasted even in a nominal mission. And so, again, you know, cost really matters on these things. So, we figured out how to have the escape system be a reusable, in the event that it's not used, you can reuse it and have it be a pusher system. It's a very sophisticated thing. So, I knew these things. You asked me about my decision to go. And so, I know the vehicle very well. I know the people who designed it. I had great trust in them and in the engineering that we did. And I thought to myself, look, if I am not ready to go, then I wouldn't want anyone to go. A tourism vehicle has to be designed, in my view, to be as safe as one can make it. You can't make it perfectly safe. It's impossible. But, you know, you just have to, you know, people will do things. People take risk. You know, they climb mountains. They, you know, they skydive. They, you know, do deep underwater scuba diving and so on. People are okay taking risk. You can't eliminate the risk. But it is something, because it's a tourism vehicle, you have to do your utmost to eliminate those risks. And I felt very good about the system. I think that's one of the reasons I was so calm inside. And maybe others weren't as calm. They didn't know as much about it as I did.
Interviewer: Who was in charge of engaging the escape system? Did you have? Interviewee: It's automated.
Interviewer: Okay. Interviewee: The escape system is completely automated. Automated is better because it can react so much faster.
Interviewer: So, yeah. For tourism, rockets, safety is a huge, huge, huge priority. For space exploration also, but a tiny, you know, a delta less. Interviewee: Yes. I mean, I think for, you know, if you're doing, you know, there are human activities where we tolerate more risk. If you're saving somebody's life, you know, if you are, you know, engaging in real exploration, these are things where, you know, I personally think we would accept more risk, in part because you have to.
Interviewer: Is there a part of you that's frustrated by the rate of progress in Blue Origin? Interviewee: Blue Origin needs to be much faster. And it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago. I needed, I wanted to come in and Blue Origin needs me right now. And so I had always, when I was the CEO of Amazon, my point of view on this is if I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company, it's going to get my full attention. And I really, it's just how I think about things, it was very important to me. I felt I had an obligation to all the stakeholders at Amazon to do that. And so having, you know, turned the CEO, I was still the executive chair there, but I turned the CEO role over. And the reason, the primary reason I did that is so that I could spend time on Blue Origin adding some, you know, energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster. And we're going to.
Interviewer: What are the ways to speed it up? Interviewee: So I mean, there's, you've talked a lot of different ways to sort of
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