Lifeboat Foundation

Blue Origin believes in a future where millions of people are living and working in space. Why? Because we believe that in order to preserve Earth, our home, for our grandchildren’s grandchildren, we must go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy. If we can lower the cost of access to space with reusable launch vehicles, we can enable this dynamic future for humanity.

It’s a hopeful vision.

Continue reading “Millions of People Living and Working in Space” »

The upper atmosphere of Venus is the most Earth-like location in the solar system.

Popular science fiction of the early 20th century depicted Venus as some kind of wonderland of pleasantly warm temperatures, forests, swamps, and even dinosaurs.

In 1950, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum were soliciting reservations for the first space tourism mission, well before the modern era of Blue Origins, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic. All you had to do was supply your address and tick the box for your preferred destination, which included Venus.

Continue reading “NASA wants to send humans to Venus – and it’s a brilliant idea” »

At Blue Origin, Amazon’s space-obsessed founder is building rockets, and he hopes to someday blast humanity into an extraterrestrial future.

A 4K video tour of the Earth’s moon has been released by NASA, showing off the surface in an extraordinary detail. The footage explores the features of the moon and it is stunning… collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft over a period of nine years, the footage is dubbed as “virtual tour of the moon” in a fascinating 4K detail.

United Launch Alliance, Northrup Grumman and Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, were awarded major Air Force contracts Wednesday totaling more than $2 billion to develop next-generation rockets capable of boosting high-value national security payloads into orbit.

Two of the new rockets will be selected in a second competition, providing assured access to space through the next decade and beyond. In a surprise to some observers, SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company founded by Elon Musk, was not among the latest winners in the Pentagon’s Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program.

The Launch Service Agreements “will facilitate the development of three domestic launch system prototypes and enable the future competitive selection of two National Security Space launch service providers for future procurements, planned for no earlier than fiscal year 2020,” the Air Force said in a statement.

Continue reading “Air Force awards contracts for new rocket prototypes to United Launch Alliance, Northrup Grumman and Blue Origin” »

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force announced on Wednesday it is awarding three contracts collectively worth about $2 billion to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and United Launch Alliance to develop launch system prototypes.

The funding is for the development of competing launch system prototypes geared toward launching national security payloads. Each company will receive an initial award of $181 million.

The Launch Service Agreements are for the development of Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Northrop Grumman’s Omega and ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rockets. The awards are part of cost-sharing arrangements — known as Other Transaction Agreements — that the Air Force is signing with the three companies to ensure it has multiple competitors. The Air Force has committed through 2024 a total of $500 million in OTA funds for Blue Origin, $792 million for Northrop Grumman and $967 million for ULA. SpaceX previously received an LSA award but did not make the cut this time.

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And America’s next great rocket could come from Blue Origin itself.

‘We will be in space with people not too long after that’

“We should be in space within weeks, not months. And then we will be in space with myself in months and not years,” the Virgin founder and CEO told CNBC on Tuesday.

“We will be in space with people not too long after that so we have got a very, very exciting couple of months ahead.”

Continue reading “Richard Branson says Virgin Galactic will be in space ‘within weeks, not months’” »