Jeff Bezos Goes to Space. Day Three: Reentry

This month has been all about how viewing the Earth from space—even the dicey definition of “space” from a barely-there demarcation of either 50 or 60 miles—will change your life, make you realize that we’re all in this together, and put you face-to-face with God, without a Covid mask.That was readily apparent when Bezos and his three crewmates on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket returned from their 10-minute journey. “It’s indescribably beautiful.” A word he kept using was “inspiration”—space, in his view, was not an infinite void but a life-changing mountaintop that symbolizes what humans could accomplish.Even Virgin’s lead operations engineer, Colin Bennet, who was on the flight, hopped onto the awe train, depicting space as kind of a heaven. The thrills and revelations of space travel are but enablers of the main reason he started Blue Origin: to begin a journey on which millions of human beings would leave the Earth to live and reproduce in space colonies, extending our species to over a trillion souls.He was explicit about it when I spoke to him in 2018: “I like the adventure of space; that's great,” he said. Because what we are doing is something big … We’re going to build a road to space so that our kids—and their kids—can build a future.”He went on to insist that his goal wasn’t escaping Earth, but saving it, as it’s “the only good planet in the solar system.” But as I understood him from hours of conversation in 2018, he sees Earth as a preserve, a haven, that can be conserved once destructive manufacturing is moved to the unimaginable vastness of space, so the natural ecology can prosper. The huge population of humans living in lush galactic colonies—think not of the cramped International Space Station, but massive verdant structures with lakes, shopping malls, and stadiums—can return to their home planet for visits or residencies.This is the dream Bezos has nurtured since high school, when he idolized futurist Gerald O’Neill, who popularized the space colony vision, and the future Blue Origin founder even devoted his own high school graduation speech to the subject. At least, according to the Bezos, that’s the dream.And that’s why I feel that, even though the achievement of suborbital space was pretty much accomplished and shelved in 1961, the flight of New Shepard in the Texas desert this week was worth our close attention.