The founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, is certainly an enterprising fellow. He has started his own space program and is making actual progress.  He bought 165,000 acres of Texas, started a company called Blue Origin, and has hired the best rocket and propulsion people he can find.  The first space race began post-WWII, when there was a frenzied dash by the US and the Soviets to nab the best German rocket scientists their armies could round up.  In the present commercial Space Race, Bezos and other billionaires can pick and choose their staff from the best and brightest space cadets that money can buy.

The link above contains some footage of the spacecraft lifting to a modest altitude and returning gently to the ground.  It lifts off vertically and uses a powered reverse decent to touch down.  The footage shows a launch where the exhaust gasses are not obviously incandescent and there is little or no “smoke”. This suggests to me that there is little in the way of carbonaceous components in the propellant. I wonder if it uses hydrogen peroxide as the propellant, like the famed jet packs use. Anyway, it’s all very hush-hush.

The slogan of the Bezonauts will be Gradatim Ferociter- step by step, fiercely.

Sign me up, boys. I’ll take a window seat.

[Revised 1/10/06]