Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Bezos about Blue Origin and Amazon. Jeff also admitted the obvious that Blue Origin’s progress has been too slow and Elon Musk is a great business leader.
0:00 – Introduction
0:24 – Texas ranch and childhood
4:02 – Space exploration and rocket engineering
16:36 – Physics
26:10 – New Glenn rocket
1:08:59 – Lunar program
1:18:55 – Amazon
1:36:16 – Principles
1:54:56 – Productivity
2:05:34 – Future of humanity
Bezos prefers to have meetings based upon a 6-page memo instead of powerpoint presentations. Jeff thinks it is too easy to hide sloppy thinking behind a power point presentation.
Blue Origin is making solar powered cryocoolers so that hydrogen in fuel tanks on the moon or in space will have far less evaporation.
Blue Origin is part of group making an expandable lunar lander that would take 3 tons to the moon. The lander would stay on the moon.
They have made a 7% efficient solar cell made from simulated lunar regolith.
They can get oxygen from lunar regolith.
There are lot of winners in the internet. Bezos believes that there will be a lot of winners in space.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Bezos is also interested in building rotating space colonies, rather than colonizing Mars:
Forget Musk’s Martian Ambition—Jeff Bezos Thinks Humans Should Live In Giant Cylindrical Space Stations:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2023/12/15/forget-musks-martian-ambition-jeff-bezos-thinks-humans-should-live-in-giant-cylindrical-space-stations
How if Jeff can’t even get to Orbit after 23 years?(Blue Origin was founded in 2000).
“Bezos is also interested in building rotating space colonies, rather than colonizing Mars:”
My Musk joke.
The deep dark secret of Elon Musk…
He’s a planetary chauvinist. He wants to hog all the mass.
Jeff did a very wise decision. He hired SpaceX.
Don’t you kind of have to be IN space, to be a winner in space? Isn’t it a bit of an issue that they still haven’t reached orbit?
Nah. As soon as Falcon 9 and Heavy were proven, Bezos should have cut his losses on Launch and focused where SpaceX isn’t – in-space operations. The work on oxygen extraction and printing solar cells from lunar regolith is a better representation of the direction to take.
I guess that he MIGHT be able to do the lunar landing/return-to-orbit better than SpaceX, because Elon insists on the ‘one big spaceship to rule them all’ approach. As crew return to lunar orbit becomes a critical capability, it would benefit massively from lunar oxygen production, and the smaller the ship the better to minimize oxygen (and fuel) demand. Maybe to the point of just having the crew sit on an open platform in their spacesuits, at least for return to orbit from the Moon. Terrifying or Exhilarating? Both?
Musk’s ‘one big spaceship to rule them all’ is based on conservation of finite engineering resources: Sure, it’s nice if you can have the hardware designed specifically for the task at hand, but maybe the engineering manpower you need to do that is better deployed further improving your jack of all trades rocket, if it’s actually capable of doing the job?
The fact that SpaceX has been launching stuff into space for a long, long while now, while BO is still testing hardware, suggests that he was right about that approach.