Amazon founder Jeff Bezos answered questions from reporters for nearly four hours Tuesday while leading the first-ever tour of his Blue Origin rocket plant outside Seattle, but he clearly had a favorite.
"What would surprise Wernher von Braun if he could see this plant?" a reporter asked, and Bezos' eyes lit up. "That's an excellent question!" he said.
"A lot would be very familiar," Bezos said. The basics of rocketry haven't changed since "the greatest hits from the '60s," he said, but what has changed are "the manufacturing techniques you use."
A 2013 expedition led by Bezos recovered one of the Apollo 11 engines that first sent men to the moon from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and Bezos called those Saturn-era engines "incredible, hand-welded works of art."
But von Braun "would be amazed," Bezos said, "at the manufacturing techniques" of today. He mentioned additive manufacturing (3-D printing) and modern computer simulation, which can dramatically speed new model parts. And he said Blue Origin can literally "model combustion inside a chamber" on its computers.
No signs in front
Wearing a brown sweater, blue shirt and jeans, Bezos met 11 reporters at Blue Origin's plant in Kent Washington just south of Seattle. Built by Boeing to build the massive drills that dug the undersea tunnel linking England to France, the 300,000 square-foot factory has no signs out front to identify it reflecting the company's legendary secrecy.
Blue Origin team members ready the New Shepard Crew Capsule during assembly. (Blue Origin)
Blue Origin's 600 employees are diverse and range from aerospace veterans to 30-something engineers trained in schools from the University of Alabama in Huntsville to Purdue. They bring their dogs to work, and they all enter past a meeting area with "a single coffee pot" Bezos said encourages casual interaction. On the way, they pass a round, open gas fire pit whose flames rise into the bottom of a two-story rocket model built Jules Verne style. The effect is like rocket exhaust, and the model's upper story opens into an intricately designed, Steam Punk-style conference room.
Space collectibles real and fanciful fill the lobby - that's a U.S.S. Enterprise model used in two "Star Trek" movies over there - and a wall mural shows Blue Origin's logo and guiding motto "Gradatim Ferociter," Latin for "step by step, ferociously."
Bezos led reporters down two flights of stairs to a sprawling and spotless main factory floor where teams are building capsules and fuel tanks for Blue Origin's New Shepard space tourism rockets, named for first American astronaut Alan Shepard. Photographs were not allowed due to legal security restrictions.
The company has "thousands" of waiting customers and plans to fly its first test pilots in 2017 and paying passengers in 2018, Bezos said. "By the time anybody goes on it," he said of New Shepard, "you should be able willing to bring your mom and kids." Bezos left little doubt he will be a passenger, too.
State of the art
The sprawling plant is state of the rocket-building art with milling machines the size of combines and 3D-printers that build blocks of space age alloy one powdered line at a time and then use lasers to carve parts from those blocks.
The company has two product lines now: the New Shepard rocket and a new BE-4 engine (Blue Engine 4) designed to power the new Vulcan rocket being developed by United Launch Alliance for assembly at the company's plant in Decatur, Ala. Later plans for "scaling up" New Shepard for larger missions.
Bezos has degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton and has been fascinated with space "since I was five years old." A personal fortune estimated at $58 billion is funding Blue Origin, and Bezos considers himself "incredibly fortunate" to do that. He "won a lottery called Amazon," Bezos said, and now "can fulfill my childhood dream."
Lobby of Blue Origin headquarters in Kent, Washington. (Blue Origin photo)
Michael Krene, development leader of Blue Origin's new BE-4 engine, worked on rocket engines including the Space Shuttle Main Engine for 19 years at Rocketdyne. Watching Bezos interact with reporters and employees on the floor, where he constantly chimed in to add to his young engineers' presentations, Krene said his boss's commitment is real and deep.
"He doesn't just want to make it happen," Krene said. "He wants to be a part of making it happen."
Bezos is typically at the plant on Wednesdays, and he talked about his work routine. He doesn't like multi-tasking, Bezos said, and only pursues what he's passionate about. Those things "give me energy," Bezos said.
A Bezos day sounds like a series of meetings and conversations where he enters a space, listens, questions and seeks consensus. Blue Origin's employees pay attention to him on the tour, but seem comfortable with him and talk confidently and without notes about their specialties.
Talking about Amazon
Bezos himself talked easily and laughed loudly on the tour, and he joked about Amazon. When one reporter asked how rocket engines built in Washington get to Blue Origin's test facilities in west Texas, another reporter joked, "Amazon, right?" Bezos replied, "Two-day delivery."
In a conference room over lunch, which for him was a salad with a little luncheon meat on the side, Bezos answered questions in turn from each reporter present. He was polite and open, and his eyes lit up at questions he liked. "It's my total pleasure," he said at one point. "I hope you can sense that I like this."
Bezos wouldn't discuss finances or the size of his investment in Blue Origin, but everything else was fair game. He delayed another meeting to stay longer, waving off a subordinate's time check warning, but he left quickly when he decided a second round of questions had reached a point of "diminishing returns."
Reporters weren't allowed to take photographs inside the Blue Origin rocket plant during their first ever tour of the facility March 8, 2016, because of federal laws designed to keep rocket technology from hostile foreign hands. But founder Jeff Bezos did pose for snapshots with visiting reporters, and AL.com NASA reporter Lee Roop did not miss the opportunity.
Bezos talked about his serious reasons for pursuing spaceflight, and he rejected the suggestion that space tourism is essentially a frivolous pursuit. Technologies from airplanes to computers were improved by the demands of barnstormers and gamers, he said. "If you look at the early days of almost any technology, one of the drivers of the technology is entertainment," Bezos said. "It's not frivolous."
Asked about SpaceX founder Elon Musk and the duo's relationship, Bezos said, "I know him. We've talked to each other many times. I think we're very like-minded about a lot of things. We're not twins in terms of our conceptualization of the future or how space should develop, but there's a lot of similarities."
Asked if the trajectory of Blue Origin and Space are similar, Bezos said, "Not really. I don't know a lot about the comparison points. I know a lot about Blue Origin, but I know very little about other space companies except for what I read in the press."
Bezos said, "All I can tell you is I want a lot of ways to go into space, and I hope all of these companies succeed."