Passport to Space: West Texas? Ask Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com

Microsoft's Paul Allen financed Burt Rutan's group that won the Ansari-X Prize. Robert Bigelow, real estate billionaire, recently sent an inflatable space station prototype into space. Now Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com wants to make his mark on the nascent private space development industry.

Bezos is behind the new space launch company, Blue Origin. Bezos has purchased a large ranch in West Texas, with the goal of building it into a successful spaceport for space launch and landing. Here is a news story discussing some of Blue Origin's recent maneuvering:

An environmental study facing scrutiny this week offers a tantalizing glimpse into the secretive West Texas private spaceport project being bankrolled and developed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Under the banner of a Seattle-area company called Blue Origin, a spacecraft dubbed the New Shepard Reusable Launch Vehicle would take off vertically, like NASA's space shuttle. But unlike the shuttle, which glides to earth and lands like an airplane, the spaceship would land vertically.

The craft would hit an altitude of about 325,000 feet before descending and restarting its engine for a "precision vertical powered landing on the landing pad" located in sparsely populated Culberson County about 125 miles east of El Paso.

Those were among the plans detailed in a 229-page draft of an environmental review filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA has responsibility to issue permits and licenses for Blue Origin to go ahead with its launch plans.

A public hearing on the environmental review was scheduled Tuesday in Van Horn, a town of 3,000 and the closest center of population to the space base. Bezos, the 42-year-old billionaire who built Amazon into an Internet sales giant, won't be attending the hearing, Blue Origin spokesman Bruce Hicks said.

The report was assembled by Blue Origin and Tetra Tech Inc., a Pasadena, Calif.-based engineering and technical consulting firm.

The environmental assessment process is "only one of the steps prior to obtaining an experimental permit for a launch operator's license," FAA spokesman Hank Price said. "We have received permit applications from Blue Origin and are evaluating them for safety and other considerations as well."

As many as 10 flight tests lasting as long as a minute and reaching an altitude of about 2,000 feet could be launched this year from the site north of Van Horn on the 165,000-acre Corn Ranch purchased by Bezos. Over the following three years, as many as 25 launches would be made annually, growing in altitude to 325,000 feet and in duration to more than 10 minutes.

Commercial flights, a goal of the project, could begin in 2010, according to the timetable in the document, with as many as 52 a year.

"The flight rate would depend on market demand," said the document filed to the FAA.

The launch site is about 25 miles north of Van Horn and 35 miles south of Guadalupe Mountains National Park on the Texas-New Mexico border. The park contains many of the highest mountains in Texas, including the signature 8,085-foot El Capitan. It can be seen from a distance on Bezos' property amid desert and cattle-grazing terrain and salt lake beds.

Construction would cover 223 acres with buildings, launch and landing pads, storage tanks and parking lots, but that's just over 1 percent of the land. New fencing would be needed to enclose the actual launch site area, defined as some 18,600 acres of desert scrubland and grassland now in use as a private wildlife management area.

Within that fenced area is the likely landing area if something goes wrong with a flight.

....Bezos, who spent summers on his grandfather's ranch in South Texas as a child, has talked in the past of building spaceships that can orbit Earth and possibly lead to colonies in space.

According to its Web site, which offers few details, Blue Origin "is developing vehicles and technologies that, over time, will help enable an enduring human presence in space."

"We are currently working to develop a crewed, suborbital launch system that emphasizes safety and low cost of operations," the Web site says.

Blue Origin has been renovating a suburban site in Kent, Wash., south of Seattle, to design and build spacecraft and engines.

According to the environmental statement, the craft to be launched from West Texas includes one module for propulsion and one "capable of carrying three or more space flight participants to space." The two would be stacked atop one another to form a conical-shaped vehicle about 50 feet tall and 22 feet in diameter at the base.

The reusable propulsion module would have its own avionics and operate autonomously with onboard computers. The crew module would have similar computers and avionics and be equipped with small rocket motors for use in emergencies.

Much more at the source story.

Allen, Bigelow, and Bezos appear to be investing their hard-earned money in a long-shot business sector still in its infancy. The potential payoff is huge, but the investors will have to demonstrate a lot of staying power. Opening a new area of enterprise can be more beneficial to humankind than a million philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

If these successful businessmen can open the door to a permanent human presence in space, free of the interference from western government agencies and totalitarian entities like China, the future of the human experiment will appear much brighter and more likely to succeed. The combination of vision and resources can be potent, if the people who are assigned to get things done are sufficiently inventive and persistent.