Private space flight venture can't be powered on dreams alone

I have always been a “curious” person, although in the present context I mean my own reactions to what I see around me. A week ago I was wandering around the south of Kent when I came across a business campus that was singularly mysterious, located at the corner of 212^th and 76th Ave. S. From the street sides, it was surrounded by a fence, beyond which was a partial moat, trees that obscured the buildings behind them, and even bushes between the trees. Even more curiously, there was nothing identifying the place; two ancient, moss-covered stone markers were outside the fence, one of which only indicated the street address. 

From the railroad track side you can see a long, tall central construction; about half-way up is a window which only provides further fodder for curiosity. Through it I could see what appeared to be a door that opened to a ledge that seemed to go nowhere. Its purpose? Perhaps to observe whatever was going on below—or above. Obviously, there was a desire to keep prying eyes blind to the goings-on within; perhaps to make certain of this, I observed a man walking a dog which was sniffing around the perimeter of the fence.

I was determined to discover the truth behind this mysterious business. I suspected that it might be difficult if not impossible, that this was some secret government operation that the public was to be purposefully kept in the dark about. 

I was only partly correct in this assumption. There was a reason to keep the operation within a “trade secret,” but it only took a one search query with Google to discover that this was a company called Blue Origin, a private aerospace venture founded by Amazon.com mogul Jeff Bezos. Bezos apparently has had a life-long fascination with space travel, and has this "dream" of allowing private individuals (with a lot of money to burn) to take (brief) vacations in space. Its initial “projection” was to begin suborbital manned flights in 2012; however, it is nowhere close to doing so.

Thus the company, founded in 2000, has not surprisingly been “tight-lipped” about the current state of its operation. Space flight is no cakewalk, as the massive expenditures in the 1960s proved; the victorious mission to the moon required 4 percent of the federal budget. In today’s terms, that would be about $150 billion each year, and eight times NASA’s current allotted budget; predictably that “buys” little that inflames the public’s imagination. It would take 100 private billionaires to exhaust their wealth in just one year to manage NASA's annual budget during its peak years. And yet it is a fair question to ask if more money would actually advance the technology required to send manned missions beyond the moon, or establish a “colony” of more than a dozen people on the moon or in orbit. More powerful supercomputers have done little to aid the human brain in developing more powerful and efficient rocket propulsion to send us into the Star Trek Era. 

To date, Blue Origin has not successfully launched even one manned or unmanned suborbital test flight. Currently the plan is to develop a two-stage craft called the “New Sheppard,” said to be able to carry three or more people into suborbital space. The project certainly has advanced “incrementally,” with an apparent priority on allaying any fears that future astronauts for fun and frolic might have. Information concerning the company’s goings-on at its test range in Texas are rather sketchy, but a 2011 mishap to what apparently was a launch vehicle was perhaps the reason for a crew capsule “escape” exercise, in which a full-scale capsule was launched into the sky, and successfully parachuted back to Earth. 

Blue Origin seems to have had more Earthbound success in recent ground tests of its BE-3 liquid hydrogen engine, which managed to go through several stages of propulsion without any apparent hiccup. This engine is to power the actual suborbital launch vehicle; the next stage would be to put a rocket on top of it, and manage a controlled flight. There is no target date for that, although Blue Origin’s attempt to bid for the rights to NASA’s Launch Complex 39A suggested an optimistic timetable of 2018 for the first manned flight. 

Unfortunately, Blue Origin did not win the right to use LC-39A. Another private space flight venture, SpaceX, did. A possible reason for this is SpaceX—based in California and founded by Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk—is somewhat ahead of its competitor in developing working rockets. It’s privately-funded Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch vehicles have both achieved orbit, and its Dragon spacecraft (via the Falcon 9) has the capacity for cargo (and possible human) delivery to the International Space Station. The proposed Falcon Heavy launch vehicle is supposed to be as powerful as the Saturn C-3, which was proposed in the early 1960s for the Apollo moon-shot, but was scrapped in favor of the Saturn V. SpaceX certainly is thinking big; it actually proposes to send a manned mission to Mars, which seems highly unlikely, but it is good to keep the spirits up.   

Blue Origin obviously has some catching up to do, and if you have the know-how, its website lists a host of job opportunities for would-be geniuses to get in on the action.