ON OCTOBER 9, 1957, five days after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first ever satellite into orbit, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood before an unusually hostile press corps in the Old Executive Office Building. For days, his administration had downplayed the significance of the Soviets’ feat. But by now the country had grown increasingly alarmed, and he needed to respond.
Eisenhower entered the room at 10:31 a.m., and decided to get right to it, asking, “Do you have any questions for me?”
The very first question he faced, from United Press International, was blunter than he was used to: “Mr. President, Russia has launched an Earth satellite. They also claim to have had a successful firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile, none of which this country has done. I ask you, sir, what are we going to do about it?”
In the midst of the Cold War, the Soviets’ launches were seen as acts of aggression, expressions of military superiority. In a memo to the White House, C. D. Jackson, a former special assistant to the president who had served in the Office of Strategic Services, wrote that it was “an overwhelming important event—against our side.… This will be the first time they have achieved a big scientific jump on us, ostensibly for peaceful scientific purposes, yet with tremendous military overtones. Up to now, it has generally been the other way around.”
If the Soviet Union could put a satellite into orbit, it’s hold the ultimate high ground and could, many feared, rain down missiles on American cities from space. Life magazine compared Sputnik to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord and urged the country to “respond as the Minutemen had done then.” Then Texas senator Lyndon Johnson fretted that “soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.”
Eisenhower’s answer to the reporter’s pointed question was, in essence, that the country was working on it. The real response to the Soviets would come a few months later, when during his 1958 State of the Union address, he talked about the creation of a new agency within the Defense Department that would have “single control in some of our most advanced development projects.” This agency would be in charge of “anti-missile and satellite technology” at a time when “some of the important new weapons which technology has produced do not fit into any existing service pattern.”
The Soviets’ launch of Sputnik opened a new frontier—space—one that “creates new difficulties, reminiscent of those attending the advent of the airplane a half century ago,” he said.
The new organization would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Born from what the secretive agency now calls the “traumatic experience of technological surprise,” ARPA would be a sort of elite special force within the Pentagon made of its best and brightest scientists and engineers. But because it would transcend the traditional services—the army, navy, air force—many in the defense establishment looked askance at it.
Eisenhower didn’t care. To keep up with the Soviets, the nation needed to move past “harmful service rivalries,” he said.
Some of the top brass in the Pentagon were charged with single-handedly picking top talent for ARPA, renamed DARPA in 1972—the “D” for “Defense.” Successful candidates would have to not only be smart and efficient, but they’d also have to be morally strong and confident, able to stand up to generals and admirals that might resent their very presence and consider them outsiders.
They were encouraged to push boundaries, and create new, futuristic technologies that aimed at keeping the nation several steps ahead.
“In the 1960s you could do really any damn thing you wanted, as long as it wasn’t against the law or immoral,” Charles Herzfeld, who directed ARPA from 1965 to 1967, told the Los Angeles Times.
WILFRED MCNEIL, THE Pentagon’s comptroller, helped recruit top talent to help run the agency. One of his top choices was Lawrence Preston Gise, a stolid and principled former navy lieutenant commander. Born in Texas, Gise had served during World War II, and service records show he was assigned to the USS Neunzer, a destroyer, and then to various administrative jobs. He also served as an assistant director at the Atomic Energy Commission, starting in 1949, and was promoted to assistant director in 1955.
By the height of the Cold War, Gise found himself in the middle of an agency that was developing the hydrogen bomb. As a young employee, he had participated in a secret meeting in 1950 to discuss the development of the bomb with some of the agency’s top officials, including its then-chairman Gordon Dean.
Gise was intrigued by the possibilities of ARPA, and what it represented at the dawn of the Space Age. But he was also aware that political pressure was mounting against its formation. With a family to support, he hedged his bets, making sure he would have a landing spot, just in case this experimental agency didn’t work out.
“So the agency was controversial even before it was formed,” Gise said in a 1975 history of ARPA. “My deal with McNeil was I would come over and handle the administrative side of the business with the assurance that if the agency went up in blue smoke that he would absorb me in his immediate office, and he had a job set up for that purpose. But it was that tenuous back in those days.”
Gise was well respected by the agency’s director, Roy Johnson, who had left a high-paying job as an executive at General Electric for the post at ARPA. His goal was to ensure the country caught up and passed the Soviets, focusing much of his energy on space.
“Johnson believed that he had personally been given unlimited authority by the Secretary to produce results,” according to the ARPA history. “He really thought that he was supposed to be the czar of the space program.… Johnson perceived that ARPA’s job was to put up satellites. The space program became his principal interest.”
After three years at ARPA, Gise was lured back to the Atomic Energy Commission, which offered him a job in top management. But he continued to work alongside the agency, collaborating on an endeavor known as the Vela Project, which was designed to detect nuclear explosions from space through a high-altitude satellite system. In a message to his colleagues, Gise reported that “ARPA is implementing on a very urgent basis a program to establish its capability for detection of Argus effects”—an apparent reference to Operation Argus, three high-altitude nuclear test explosions over the South Atlantic Ocean in 1958.
Gise would continue to serve at the Atomic Energy Commission until 1968, when he wanted to close a factory that politicians wanted to keep open. The politicians prevailed, and Gise retired to his ranch in South Texas.
He was young, just fifty-three years old. But he was looking forward to life on the ranch. Plus, he had a young grandson to tend to, a remarkable little boy with big ears and a wide smile, who shared his middle name:
Jeffrey Preston Bezos.
IN ADDITION TO being a top defense official, Gise was a dedicated family man, who looked after Bezos’s mother, Jackie, after she got pregnant with Jeff. She was just seventeen when Jeff was born and Jackie married his father, Ted Jorgensen. Gise supported them, flying the couple to Mexico to get married, then hosting another ceremony at their house.
He paid his son-in-law’s tuition at the University of New Mexico, but Jorgensen dropped out. Then, Gise tried to land him a police department job, but that didn’t work out, either.
Neither did the marriage. The young parents soon got divorced, and Jackie took her son and moved back in with her parents in Albuquerque.
Jackie got a job at the bank of New Mexico and met a hardworking man there named Miguel Bezos, known as Mike, who had fled Cuba shortly before the Cuban missile crisis. They fell in love and got married when Jeff was four. Mike Bezos adopted him and raised him as his own. Gise made Jorgensen promise to stay away.
“I’ve never been curious about him,” Bezos told Time about his biological father. “My real father is the guy who raised me.”
Bezos’s passion for space started when he was five years old on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. As young as he was, he could tell he was watching something historic.
“It really was a seminal moment for me,” he said. “I remember watching it on our living room TV, and the excitement of my parents and my grandparents. Little kids can pick up that kind of excitement. They know something extraordinary is happening. That definitely became a passion of mine.”
The family lived in New Mexico and Texas and later in Florida. But after school got out for the year, Bezos was shipped off to the ranch, where he spent every summer from the ages of four to sixteen.
Located in Cotulla, a small town about 90 miles south of San Antonio, it was rural and isolated, a place where Bezos learned the value of self-reliance from his grandfather. “Pop,” as Bezos called him, was patient and gentle and taught his grandson to live a rancher’s life, fixing windmills and laying pipe. On the ranch, Bezos learned to vaccinate and castrate cattle, and brand them with the ranch’s Lazy G logo. And when the D-6 Caterpillar bulldozer broke, Pop and his eager grandson built a crane to lift the huge gears out.
It was, Bezos recalled in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, a nonprofit, “an incredible, incredible experience. Ranchers, and anybody I think who works in rural areas, they learn how to be very self-reliant. And whether they’re farmers, whatever it is they’re doing, they have to rely on themselves for a lot of things.”
Bezos spent a lot of time with his grandfather, who he said was “always incredibly respectful of me even when I was a little kid. And would entertain long conversations with me about technology and space and anything I was interested in.”
His grandparents were also members of a “Caravan Club,” striking out across the United States and Canada, sometimes taking their inquisitive grandson along for the ride.
“We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers,” Bezos said in 2010 during a graduation speech at Princeton. “I loved and worshipped my grandparents, and I really looked forward to these trips.”
He recalled one trip, when he was about ten, “rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car.” Pop Gise was at the wheel. Bezos’s grandmother, Mattie, was beside him, smoking as she always did on these trips, filling the car with a smell that Bezos couldn’t stand.
Bezos remembered an antismoking campaign advertisement he’d recently heard about the perils of smoking that said that every puff takes about two minutes off your life. Even at age ten, Bezos loved coming up with math calculations in his head, estimating how far they’d be able to travel on a tank of gas, what they’d spend at the grocery store. And with his grandmother puffing away on the front passenger seat, and an open road with little else to occupy his expansive mind, Bezos decided to do the math.
“I estimated the number of cigarettes per day, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on,” he told the Princeton graduates. “When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, ‘At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!’”
He expected his grandparents would be awed by his precociousness. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.”
But instead the car was silent, except for the sound of his grandmother’s sobs.
“While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway,” Bezos said. “He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow.
“Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be.
“We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, ‘Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.’”
Bezos spent his summers on the ranch, even though the stifling heat would often drive them to huddle indoors. They’d watch soap operas. Days of Our Lives was a favorite. His grandparents encouraged playing board games and reading, and Bezos discovered that the county library, which was not much larger than a one-room schoolhouse, had an extensive science fiction collection that had been donated by a town resident.
The library “had maybe a few hundred science fiction novels. All of the classics,” Bezos recalled. “There was a whole shelf of them there, and over several summers I worked my way through that collection.”
The visits to the library “started a love affair for me with people like [Robert] Heinlein and [Isaac] Asimov, and all the well-known science fiction authors that persists to this day.”
The ranch, where the big sky opened up dark and deep, was an ideal place for a starry-eyed kid who dreamed of one day becoming an astronaut to indulge his science fiction fantasies.
AT HOME, BEZOS spent a lot of time watching Star Trek, his favorite. But in the fourth grade, when he was nine years old, he figured out how to play a Star Trek game on a computer at school. It was 1974, before the advent of the personal computer; his elementary school had one mainframe with a teletype connected to an acoustic modem. Not that anyone at the school knew how to use it. “But there was a stack of manuals, and me and a couple of other kids stayed after class and learned how to program this thing,” he recalled, eventually figuring out that it had been preprogrammed with the Star Trek game.
“And from that day forward all we did was play Star Trek,” he said.
Later, he’d even named his dog Kamala, after the character on Star Trek.
By the time he got to high school, Bezos’s passion for space merged with his prodigious intellect and curiosity. In high school, he wrote an essay titled “The Effect of Zero Gravity on the Aging Rate of the Common Housefly” that won him a trip to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
His idea was to test how the weightless environment in space reduced stress on the body’s systems. Bezos thought to start out with a creature with a very short life span—the common housefly—to test whether you could see any biological changes in a short amount of time aboard the space shuttle, compared with a control group of flies kept on the ground.
He was a finalist, not a winner, so NASA never did fly his experiment to space. But he and his physics professor got to spend a couple of days at Marshall. It didn’t have the cachet of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the astronauts launched into space, or the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they trained. Rather, it was where NASA built its rockets, the home to many of its most accomplished engineers and sharpest minds.
When he was “really young I wanted to be an astronaut,” he said. “I went through many phases and wanted to do many different things. I wanted to be an archaeologist—and this was pre–Indiana Jones. I didn’t have Indy on the mind. Many kids sort of have ideas of what you want to do and so on and the thing that never went away was my fascination with space. And then I realized I didn’t want to be an astronaut. I was really more interested in the engineering side of it.”
Marshall was the perfect place, then, for someone as eager and inquisitive as Bezos, an inveterate tinkerer who said that “our garage was basically science fair central.” His mother joked that she was singlehandedly keeping Radio Shack in business by buying him parts for the projects he was building in the garage.
“Will you please get your parts list straight before we go?” she’d chastise him. “I can’t handle more than one trip to Radio Shack per day.” He had such concentration that as a toddler in Montessori School, his teachers would have to pick him up—in his chair—to keep him moving from task to task.
Under the leadership of Wernher von Braun, one of the fathers of rocketry, the Marshall Space Flight Center was where NASA built the F-1 rocket engine that powered the Saturn V rocket to the moon. The engines were massive, towering nearly 20 feet high and more than 12 feet wide, and weighed 18,000 pounds. They were monuments to engineering that in a cluster of five burned through liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants at more than 15 metric tons per second. Bezos was in awe of their power, 1.5 million pounds of thrust, and the intricate mechanics that went into the most powerful liquid fuel engine ever to fly.
The trip only strengthened his enthusiasm for space. If he’d fed himself a steady diet of science fiction fantasy in the books he’d devoured as a kid, now he was exposed to actual hardware—the equipment that made space dreams real.
“He raved about it,” said Joshua Weinstein, a friend from high school.
At Miami Palmetto High, their class was full of exceptionally talented kids who would go on to great things. “It was a hard class to stand out in, but Jeff did,” Weinstein said. Bezos did so academically, graduating first in his class. He enjoyed school, was a voracious reader, and wanted to please his teachers.
“I was very difficult to punish for my parents because they would send me to my room, and I was always happy to go to my room because I would just read,” he said. Once he was laughing too loudly, and lost his library privileges, which he said “was really inconvenient for me.”
But he also had a cunning, rebellious wit, laying booby traps across the house. “I think I occasionally worried my parents that they were going to open the door one day and have 30 pounds of nails drop on their heads or something,” he said.
Weinstein remembered how Bezos had been carrying on—loudly—when a stern teacher named Bill Henderson chastised him.
“Mr. Bezos!” he bellowed.
“It’s Jeff to you,” Bezos bellowed back. “Only my friends call me Mr. Bezos!”
The class broke out into laughter—and the teacher did, too.
As valedictorian, his speech at graduation was about space. For even a brilliant eighteen-year-old, it was a precocious glimpse into the future. He talked about plans to colonize space, to build habitats like space hotels, and the day when millions of people were living among the stars. Earth had limited resources and so his idea was to get humanity off its surface, into space so as to protect the planet. He concluded by saying, “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!”
“The whole idea is to preserve the Earth,” he told the Miami Herald at the time, saying it should be designated as a national park.
Space, and humanity’s future in it, was something he had been thinking and reading about for some time.
“He said the future of mankind is not on this planet, because we might be struck by something, and we better have a spaceship out there,” Rudolph Werner, the father of Bezos’s high school girlfriend, told Wired magazine.
THE TALK OF space hotels, with amusement parks, yachts, and colonies for 2 to 3 million people in orbit—all a way to help preserve Earth—these were not the elements of a normal high school graduation speech. They were the science fiction–fueled musings of one of “Gerry’s kids”—the devotees of Gerard O’Neill, a Princeton physics professor and space visionary, whose book The High Frontier became a manifesto for such enthusiasts as Bezos.
Years before Bezos gave his graduation speech, the professor had gained widespread attention for his plans to colonize space. In 1974, the New York Times had covered a conference O’Neill hosted at Princeton, gathering some of the nation’s leading engineers. The article came in the post-Apollo hangover, when NASA’s budget had been gutted and interest in space waned. But the piece carried a sensational headline: “Proposal for Human Colonies in Space Is Hailed by Scientists as Feasible Now.” It helped put O’Neill, and his ideas, on the map.
“The initial goal would be construction of a small colony of about 2,000 people at a site, along with the orbital path of the moon, known as the L-5 libration point,” the article read. It quoted O’Neill as saying that most “dirty” industry could move into space, allowing the preservation of Earth, which, O’Neill said, would become a “worldwide park, a beautiful place to visit for vacation”—words that Bezos would echo in his graduation speech years later.
In 1977, the year The High Frontier was published, O’Neill appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to talk about the possibility of space colonies. That year, Dan Rather also profiled O’Neill on 60 Minutes, offering up the professor as the father of the next Space Age.
“Now some serious scientists are talking about whole colonies in space,” Rather said during his opening. “Not on the moon, Mars or Jupiter, but on man-made planets. And populated not by scientists and astronauts alone, but by hundreds of thousands of just plain folks looking to get away from an overcrowded Earth running short of energy, water and clean air.
“Far-fetched? That’s what we said twenty years ago about walking on the moon. Today, nothing seems far-fetched.”
O’Neill offered a special kind of hope at a time of despair over limited resources. His ideas were fantastic, hard to believe and easy to deride. Colonies in space were outlandish, ridiculous. But O’Neill showed they could be real. He had done the math. He had drawn the designs. He even made them part of his curriculum.
On campus, O’Neill was a popular professor, who was warm and welcoming with students, if eccentric, with severely cut bangs and a thin, angular face that made him look a little like Star Trek’s Spock, one of Bezos’s favorite characters. O’Neill strove to make his introductory course, Physics 112, applicable “to contemporary (your lifetime) problems,” he wrote in the notes for his first-day-of-classes lecture. “Not historical. Emphasis on physics relevant to present-day civilization.”
For O’Neill, there was no greater question than how to move civilization into space. He had focused his career on this challenge, and this was the problem he wanted his students to wrestle with. And so his exams were peppered with questions asking them to calculate the escape velocity for Phobos, a moon of Mars, how to turn asteroids into habitats, and the energy requirements for space colonies:
“Assume that a small colony of 5,000 people is located in the asteroid belt, 2.7 times as far from the Sun as is the Earth. What must be the diameter of the parabolic mirror used by the colony to bring its land area of 3×105 m2 up to the same sunlight intensity that the Earth receives on a clear day?”
Even though Bezos arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1982 wanting to major in physics, he never took O’Neill’s introductory class. Bezos was on the advanced track right from the beginning. He switched to computer science and electrical engineering after he got to quantum mechanics and realized that he was “never going to be a great physicist,” he said. “There were three or four people in the class whose brains were so clearly wired differently to process these highly abstract concepts.”
But at Princeton, his interest in space was as strong as ever, and he was a regular at O’Neill’s seminars, which were open to anyone on campus. O’Neill would “encourage those very capable students who weren’t excited by ordinary coursework, inviting them to extra seminars that looked at applying physics to large-scale projects for the benefit of humanity,” O’Neill’s friend Morris Hornik recalled.
At those seminars, O’Neill posed a pointed question to the students: “Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”
After Apollo, many thought Mars should be the next destination, and that humans should tick off visiting the planets of the solar system like racking up states on a cross-country road trip. But O’Neill rejected this idea.
“We are so used to living on a planetary surface that it is a wrench for us to even consider continuing our normal human activities in another location,” he wrote in The High Frontier.
The key question was “whether the best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely. Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable: the best site is ‘somewhere else entirely.’”
BY THE TIME Bezos was a senior, he became the president of the Princeton chapter of a student organization called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. SEDS, as it was known, was started a few years before at MIT by Peter Diamandis, who wanted to increase awareness of space—and would eventually go on to found the Ansari X Prize, a 2004 contest between private companies to launch the first-ever commercial vehicle into space.
At Princeton, SEDS was a small and somewhat lonely group. Despite the popularity of Star Wars, which had come out a few years before, space was not high on anyone’s list. So the kinds of people it attracted were die-hard space geeks, who did not always fit into the rigid social hierarchy of one of the nation’s most exclusive schools.
Karl Stapelfeldt, who became the chapter’s president, was two years ahead of Bezos at Princeton and remembered him as being an “interested, loyal SEDS member.” The group would meet once or twice a month, raise money for field trips to museums.
“We’d get together and watch shuttle launches, all gathered around the TV,” Stapelfeldt recalled. “I always liked to say it was kind of a NASA ROTC. We were all interested in being involved in the space program in some way.”
Stapelfeldt did. After receiving a doctorate at Caltech, he eventually became the chief scientist at NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program.
SEDS, and its relentlessly forward-looking, positive message, was just the sort of thing that interested Kevin Polk, who was a year behind Bezos at Princeton. An inquisitive and thoughtful student, Polk was a devotee of O’Neill and science fiction author Robert Heinlein.
“It seemed to me we had an infinite future in space,” he said.
When Polk showed up at a SEDS meeting in the spring of 1985, Bezos had become the group’s president and could tell how enthusiastic Polk was about space.
“Jeff and two other guys just sort of looked at one another and said, “Great! You’re vice president.”
Polk wanted to prove himself by fueling interest in the group and attracting a large crowd to the group’s meetings. He had a friend, an accomplished illustrator, design posters advertising SEDS’s first meeting of the school year. The posters depicted the tower of Nassau Hall, the university’s venerable administration building, blasting off into space with the Princeton Tiger mascot waving in the foreground.
For a student-run group, the fliers were “lavishly rendered,” Polk recalled, and Bezos was touched by it—and the note from the illustrator saying she hoped it would suit their needs.
“His jaw dropped and he said, ‘What a service-oriented individual your friend is,’” Polk recalled.
The posters worked. More than thirty people came to the meeting. Bezos was pleased to be holding court in the front of the room, talking excitedly about the mission of SEDS and O’Neillian notions of spanning out into space by the millions. Years of reading science fiction came pouring out in a soliloquy that was even further out there than his high school graduation speech.
One way to colonize space, he said, was to transform asteroids into habitats. Yes, he said, people could hollow out the giant rocks, and then live in them. All you had to do, he explained, was use solar mirrors to melt and soften the asteroid, then once it had turned to lava, you injected a massive tungsten tube into the center and flood it with water.
Hitting the molten core, the water would immediately turn to steam, inflating the asteroid like a balloon—and, voilà, there was your habitat. The idea had been around for some time, since futurist Dandridge Cole wrote about turning asteroids into habitats in the 1950s. But as Bezos carried on, a student in the back of the class interrupted Bezos, jumping to her feet with anger.
“How dare you rape the universe!” she shouted. She then stormed out. All eyes turned to Bezos, who didn’t miss a beat.
“Did I hear her right?” he said. “Did she really just defend the inalienable rights of barren rocks?”
O’NEILL DIED IN 1992, and never saw his vision get close to becoming reality. But he had touched off a movement by offering hope, his friend Morris Hornik recalled during his memorial service:
“That vast, almost Earth-like colonies could be constructed out of the materials and energy always available in space. That these could become self-sufficient, and that, in his words, ‘The human race stands now on the threshold of a new frontier, whose richness surpasses a thousand fold that of the western world 500 years ago.’”
By then, Bezos had left Princeton, moved to New York, where he worked in finance. He eventually took a job at D. E. Shaw & Co., a Manhattan-based hedge fund. Being mired in the cutthroat world of Wall Street didn’t leave a lot of time to ruminate about space or to carry on his O’Neillian dreams.
But in 1993, when he was twenty-nine, he went to an auction at Sotheby’s that was selling artifacts from Russia’s space program. Amazon didn’t yet exist, and Bezos couldn’t keep up with the deep-pocketed collectors that Sotheby’s attracted. Still, he had his eye on a chess set designed to be played in zero gravity. The set, which the catalog described as “a specially-designed mechanical (non-magnetic) chess-set for use in spaceflight,” had flown on Russian missions in 1968 and 1969. Sotheby’s expected it to sell for between $1,500 and $2,000.
It was a relatively low-cost item in a catalog that featured the first eating utensils used in space, which sold for $6,900, a trio of moon rocks that went for $442,500, and a space capsule that brought in $1.7 million.
Bezos bid on the chess set, but lost out to an anonymous buyer who was vacuuming up many of the items. Still, there was another item that caught Bezos’s eye—a hammer that, according to the catalog, was designed “for no rebound of the striking part of the hammer after the stroke, which is extremely important for its use under weightless conditions.”
It “was a really cool object,” Bezos said later, “because they hollowed out and put metal filings inside the head of the hammer so that when you strike something it doesn’t recoil as much.”
But he lost out on that, too. Bezos simply didn’t have the money to keep pace with more moneyed bidders. Space, and even its artifacts, seemed as far away and inaccessible as ever.
AFTER STUDYING THE staggering growth of the Internet, Bezos left New York for Seattle in 1994 to start Amazon. The company’s success was like hitting the lottery; at least that’s how Bezos described it. And with his blitzkrieg through the ranks of the Fortune billionaire’s list, he was freed to pursue almost anything. To those who knew him well it came as no surprise that what he wanted to do more than anything was to start a space company.
Not that he talked about it much. Even his high school friend Joshua Weinstein knew nothing about Blue Origin until reading about it in the news in 2004. Which was odd. Because he had just spent an afternoon in Washington with his old buddy Bezos at the National Air and Space Museum, who said not a word about his ambitions in space.
By chance, Bezos and Weinstein just happened to both be visiting the nation’s capital at the same time. Growing up outside of Miami, they’d lived a block apart. “I grew up in his house, and he in mine,” Weinstein said. But now they lived on separate coasts—Bezos in Seattle, where he ran Amazon; Weinstein in Maine, where he was a reporter at the Portland Press-Herald.
Given his lifelong passion for space, it was natural that Bezos played the role of docent at the museum that day.
“He already knew everything about everything,” Weinstein said.
Weinstein kept waiting for people to recognize his companion. He was rich and famous, and had been Time magazine’s person of the year five years before. But amazingly, no one seemed to recognize him. Or if people did, they left him alone, allowing him to wander around like any other tourist.
Years later, as his fame and fortune grew, Bezos would be followed around by security, men in suits with squiggly wires in their ears, part of the $1.6 million Amazon spent annually to keep him safe. But now he blended in with the midweek crowd, quiet and unassuming, comfortably anonymous.
There were the massive F-1 engines on display that powered the Saturn V rocket to the moon. The lunar roving vehicle. There was also a series of Russian space paraphernalia, donated by the anonymous buyer who had outbid Bezos a decade before on the chess set.
Now a few of the artifacts were at the museum, and the donor had revealed himself: former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot. “He didn’t let me win anything,” Bezos said years later. Years later, Sotheby’s came into possession of another recoilless hammer. This time, the auction house gave it to Bezos as a present.
AS THEY TOURED the museum, Bezos didn’t mention his unsuccessful foray into space antiquities. Nor did he mention that he had started a space company of his own. He kept it under wraps, as secretive as when he purchased all that property in West Texas.
Blue Origin’s website at the time was low-key, revealing little. Bezos’s name didn’t appear anywhere on it, though it did give away that the company’s goal was creating an O’Neillian “enduring human presence in space.”
By mid-2004, the company had more than doubled the size of its design team, hiring some of the country’s best aerospace engineers from the space shuttle program, Kistler, and the DC-X program, the government’s attempt to build a rocket that could take off and land.
“If you have a genuine passion for space and are excited by the prospect of building space hardware, we’d like to hear from you,” the site said.
But its “Jobs” page ad was less welcoming, even arrogant. Applicants needed to be “highly qualified and dedicated individuals who meet the following criteria:
“You must have a genuine passion for space. Without passion, you will find what we’re trying to do too difficult. There are much easier jobs.
“You must want to work in a small company. If you can happily work at a large aerospace company, you’re probably not the right person.
“Our hiring bar is unabashedly extreme. We insist on keeping our team size small (measured in the dozens), which means each person occupying a spot must be among the most technically gifted in his or her field.
“We are building real hardware—not PowerPoint presentations. This must excite you. You must be a builder.”
For years, Bezos had been limited to being merely a dreamer lost in science fiction books, O’Neill’s teachings, his grandfather’s stories. But now he had decided to see what he could do about making those fantasies reality. About one day a week, he was stealing away from his day job at Amazon to quietly indulge his other passion—Blue Origin, where his team was quietly pursuing the hard work of building a transportation network to the stars, creating the heavy-lifting infrastructure that would open the cosmos the way the railroads helped open the American West.
Except for a few flights a year, human spaceflight was as difficult as it had ever been. In the course of Bezos’s life, it had advanced very little, if at all. His goal with Blue Origin, then, was to create the infrastructure that finally would allow for humanity to stretch out to the stars.
Once that was in place, “then we get to see Gerard O’Neill’s ideas start to come to life, and many of the other ideas from science fiction,” he said at a speech years later. “The dreamers come first. It’s always the science-fiction guys: They think of everything first, and then the builders come along and they make it happen.
“But it takes time.”
He was patient, willing to take his time. “You have to be very long-term oriented,” he told Charlie Rose. “People who complained that we invested in Amazon for seven years would be horrified by Blue Origin.”
At Amazon, Bezos had been obsessive for years about maintaining its startup culture, even as the company grew, reminding employees that it would always be Day 1 there. In a 1997 letter to shareholders, he wrote that it was “Day 1 for the Internet, and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com.” Twenty years later, “Day 1,” the name of the Amazon headquarters building, was still a rallying cry. “Day 2 is stasis,” he wrote in 2017. “Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
On June 12, 2004, he wrote a “Day 1” letter for Blue Origin—“blue” for “the pale blue dot” that is Earth, “origin” for where humanity began—a vision statement outlining the principles that would guide the company:
“We are a small team committed to seeding an enduring human presence in space,” he wrote. “Blue will pursue this long-term objective patiently, step by step. By dividing our work into small but meaningful increments, we hope to generate as many useful intermediate results as possible. Each step, even our first and simplest, will be challenging. And each step will lay the technical and organizational foundation for the next.”
The first suborbital vehicle would be called New Shepard, he wrote, after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space. But even then, Bezos had larger ambitions. “At some point, Blue will shift its focus from New Shepard to a crewed orbital vehicle program. Orbital vehicles are significantly more complex than suborbital vehicles, and the transition to orbital systems will stretch Blue’s organization and capabilities.”
Given the enormity of the challenge, “we believe local hill climbing is our best way forward.”
That would require a steady approach, into unknown terrain. “We have been dropped off on an unexplored mountain, without maps, and the visibility is poor,” he wrote. “Every once in a while, the weather clears up enough for us to glimpse the peak, but the intervening terrain remains largely obscured.”
But there would be some bedrock principles to guide them. “Don’t start and stop—keep climbing at a steady pace. Be the tortoise and not the hare. Keep expenditures at sustainable levels. Assume spending will be flat to monotonically increasing. Do not fall for the unreasonable hope that the path will get easier as we go up.”
Bezos was both a dreamer and a builder, and had created Blue Origin as a laboratory where the two could meld together. In 2005, an interviewer from Time magazine asked what he was reading.
He replied that he’d just finished an Alastair Reynolds science fiction novel “about Earth being destroyed by nanobots.” That was the dreamer answering. The builder in him was focused on something else: “I’ve been reading about rocket-engine development.”
BLUE ORIGIN’S FIRST test vehicle was an odd contraption, a sort of science fair experiment gone wild. Named Charon, after the Pluto moon, it consisted of four Rolls-Royce Viper Mk. 301 jet engines that the company had acquired from the South African Air Force.
“They were ancient,” Bezos said. “I think they were literally 1960s engines. I remember when they arrived at Blue, and the team opened the crates that they were in. Huge spiders came out. Huge South African spiders. And they were like, ‘AHHHH!’”
Charon looked like a massive drone and stood on four legs each equipped with a saucer-shaped disk at the foot to help it touch down softly on landing. The engines were pointed down, not sideways, to provide vertical lift—and landing.
On March 5, 2005, at Moses Lake, nearly a three-hour drive east of Seattle, Charon flew. Not particularly high, just 316 feet, or just over half the height of the Seattle Space Needle.
The launch wasn’t the main goal. It was the landing Blue Origin was trying to perfect. The vehicle was fully autonomous, meaning it had been preprogrammed with software that allowed it to fly on its own. After hovering at a few hundred feet, Charon descended back to the ground, where it touched down softly, while kicking up a cloud of dust.
It was a small first step. But for the first time, Blue had left Earth—and returned.