Bezos live tweeted the flight today. It seems to have been another success.
[Update a while later]
Travis Bubenik has the story, and some video. No world yet of altitude, but no reason to think it didn’t make it to 100 km.
[Sunday-morning update]
Blue Origin has posted a media gallery.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
They’ve updated their site with a blog post, indicating that it got to 103 km.
There’s hope that Blue Origin will be able to compete with SpaceX with their BE4. Bezos has the money to catch up. Too bad someone with Bezos resources doesn’t want to fund colonization.
You do not “fund” colonization do you? Isn’t it about trying to obtain land and it’s resources for next to nothing?
“You do not “fund” colonization do you?”
Quite true, in a subtle sense. *All* the sustained settlements of the last 500 years had to eventually fund themselves, by producing for a market network. When “investors” tried to back places like Jamestown, they generally found they did not get what they thought they would, and their markets were not what they thought at the start. No one in London’s investor community thought that native tobacco would be a worthwhile cash crop, nor did they back it. That was done by settlers like John Rolfe.
Indeed, settlement only took hold when getting there was cheap enough that settlers could self-fund their trips. *there* is where Bezos and Musk can make their contributions. They and others like them must invest in transportation infrastructure, from reusable launchers to propellant depots to space manufacturing of low-mass cruising spacecraft, for travel between EML-1 and wherever else in the Solar System the settlers think they can make their futures work.
Settlements will require far more than Bezos has, which is why almost everyone who goes will be the investors, if it’s to work.
Indeed, settlement only took hold when getting there was cheap enough that settlers could self-fund their trips. *there* is where Bezos and Musk can make their contributions.
Yup! And good point about markets too.
Tom wrote: “by producing for a market network.”
A tiny nitpic
Most that came over were not producing for a market network as they did not exist. There really wasn’t much heading back to Europe in the early days, some furs, and timbers. Domestically the vast majority were subsistence farmers that did a little bit of barter for what they could not produce. It was the thought of next to free land bought or bartered from the huge land grants given to people like William Penn. Farmers in the states were aquiring property in parcels that were dwarfing the holdings of freeman in england and elsewhere.
The transportation cost is so high that anything the colonists could pay is lost in the noise. That will be true far into the future even if costs are reduced to 10%. In the mean time we lose an opportunity cost.
Mars has all the resources required to be an industrial planet and it is unexploited. This means wild growth if you just add people. It will not be a place where only the hardy survive because just as on earth the environment will be adjusted for human comfort (not terraformed except by huge habitats.)
You do realize only a narrow band of the earth is inhabitable without industry don’t ya? Otherwise we die of exposure. The only difference is every place on mars requires industry to survive. No big deal when we have enough people which could be as few as several dozen… more is better of course. With enough people they can build a paradise where job niches will take many generations to saturate. If you want to start a company, mars will be the promised land… but it needs lots f people that will be expensive to get there.
Or we can wait hundreds of years not developing mars.
Funny, when I looked at the media gallery I thought, meh, I’ve seen this before. Then I quickly realized that’s quite the point, isn’t it?