Blue Origin, the space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has announced that the company has signed an agreement with its first commercial customer. It concerns the French satellite company Eutelsat, for which Blue Origin will put satellites into orbit.
At a satellite conference in Washington has Bezos announced this news on Twitter. Bezos said he couldn’t hope for a better partner than Eutelsat. According to the CEO of the French company, Rodolphe Belmer, the first satellite should be launched in 2021.
That will happen with a new rocket, the New Glenn. earlier left Bezos already see a photo of a rocket motor that will power this new rocket. New Glenn is a further development of the New Shepard rocket. New Glenn will be able to fly back to Earth on his own. The rocket will have about twice the thrust of the current Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX, the company of Elon Musk. Blue Origin will compete directly with SpaceX, United Lauch Alliance and France’s Arianespace in the field of satellite launches.
Bezos has also been thinking about space tourism for a while. In 2015, he already made it clear that space tourism is the first step for humanity to live and work in space. Recently, he has repeated this wish. According to Bezos, we need a civilization that lives in space. Space tourism is an important first step for that, according to the Amazon founder: “There are many historical cases where entertainment has been the driving force behind technologies that turn out to be very practical for other purposes.”
Earlier this month it became clear that Bezos has plans to deliver items to order on the moon with Blue Origin. That has to be done with a special lunar lander called Blue Moon. The intention is that there will be permanent habitation on the moon and that Blue Origin will provide supplies. It would be a kind of Amazon service for space. The plans should become reality in the middle of the next decade, although the first mission could already take place in 2020.
In 2016, Blue Origin successfully put its New Shepard rocket back on the ground after launch. New Shepard reached an altitude of just over 100 kilometers. The booster rockets re-ignited at an altitude of about 1,100 meters to help the New Shepard make a soft landing. In 2015, Blue Origin first launched the New Shepherd, but the booster portion of the rocket crashed during landing. Since then, the rocket has made five successful launches.