When Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show last October to discuss the Kindle e-book reader, he mentioned in passing that he was reading a book on the history of cryogenics. Not your usual reading fare to be certain, even for a self-professed nerd like Bezos (and particularly when paired with the other book he said he was reading, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road).

That unusual reading choice prompted the Wall Street Journal to ask him about it today when Bezos was announcing the new version of the Kindle. It turns out his interest in cryogenics is tied to his spaceflight venture, Blue Origin:

And what about the reference he made on his October appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show to a book about cryogenics? “It’s a rocket book. Liquid hydrogen turns out to be a very important propellant. I am very interested in space exploration and started a company called Blue Origin that pursues that,” he said. “I didn’t think it was going to be the next Oprah Club pick, but I thought it was only fair to disclose some of my interests.”

And he’s right: that cryogenic book didn’t make the cut for Winfrey’s famous book club. But it will be sure to interest those trying to learn anything new about the ultra-secretive Blue Origin…

Below is a brief snippet of Will Whitehorn’s speech at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference on Friday. In this segment Whitehorn examines some of the other ventures developing suborbital vehicles, including Rocketplane, EADS Astrium, Blue Origin, XCOR, Armadillo Aerospace, and Copenhagen Suborbitals, a little-known Danish firm developing a very minimalist suborbital system. Whitehorn’s theme in this segment is that while some of these ventures may be technically viable, they’re not capable—in his opinion, at least—of expanding to markets beyond tourism.

[Note: the video was shot with a Flip handheld camera, so the quality isn't great, and you'll probably want to crank the sound up.]

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos appeared on The Charlie Rose Show Monday night, primarily to talk about the new electronic book reader that Amazon unveiled earlier in the day. However, at the very end of the show Rose did ask Bezos some questions about Blue Origin, Bezos’s spaceflight venture. A lot of the interview covered familiar ground for those have followed what limited information that the company has released, but there were a few new insights:

• Blue Origin has moved on from its original demonstration vehicle, Goddard, to a second vehicle currently under development. At least one more demo vehicle will follow that second one.
• Bezos said that they’re in no rush to bring a vehicle to market “because we’re trying to build a very safe, well-engineered vehicle.”
• He believes that there is a market for suborbital space tourism, but is skeptical of market studies that have been performed to date because “you don’t really know until you do it.” (That skepticism is not unique to Bezos: Eric Anderson of Space Adventures has expressed similar sentiments in the recent past.)
• Bezos not only had Charles Simonyi, the former Microsoft executive who went to the ISS in April, speak to his Blue Origin employees, Bezos talked with Simonyi while on the station.

The video of the show is available online. (Skip ahead to about the 50:30 point of the interview; the Blue Origin portion takes up the last three minutes or so of the show). I’ve included a rough transcript below as well:

Rose: You own 200,000 acres of land in Texas?

Bezos: Yes.

Rose: What are you going to do with it?

Bezos: Well, when you’re building rockets and launching rockets, it’s nice to have a bit of buffer. [laughter]

Rose: Yeah, what is that that just landed in our yard? [laughter] So, tell me what your dream is.

Bezos: Well, we’re building a vertical takeoff, vertical landing spacecraft that will take three or more astronauts to the edge of space — it’s a suborbital journey, so it’s like what Alan Shepard did. The program’s called New Shepard, paying homage to Alan. So it goes up and you have a few minutes in zero gravity, you can look out and see the limb of the Earth, how thin the atmosphere is of the Earth. People tell me, who have been in space, tell me that it’s a transformative experience. You get up there and, then, this vehicle is going to come back down and land on its tail — it’s reusable, which it very unsual for space vehicles, they’re almost all expendable rockets — and it’s going to come and land on its tail, sort of like a Buck Rogers rocket.

Rose: So what’s the stage of development today?

Bezos: Well, we have flown our first development vehicle. We flew it several times. We’re now working on –

Rose: It went up and came back safely.

Bezos: That’s right. It was this low-altitude demonstration vehicle. We’re now working on our second development vehicle. There will be at least one more development vehicle after that — at least, maybe there will be more. We’re not in any hurry because we’re trying to build a very safe, well-engineered vehicle. We don’t see any reason to rush on this.

Rose: Where does the revenue come on this from?

Bezos: Our motto is “Gradatim Ferociter” [Rose laughs.] It stands for “step by step, ferociously.” So we’re just going to do it one step at a time.

Rose: And so what’s the market for this?

Bezos: Well, this is basically kind of a tourism market.

Rose: Yes, I know.

Bezos: People would pay to go up into suborbital space. I don’t know how big the market is. People have done studies that have tried to size this market, but I’m highly skeptical of such studies, because you don’t really know until you do it. People, well-intentioned people, when they respond to the surveys, will say, “Oh, yeah, I will do that” but they don’t really know.

Rose: But are you more interested in space or more interested in the business?

Bezos: My passion is for space, for sure. But I do think this can be made into a viable business. I think that you have to be very long-term oriented. People who compained that we have invested in Amazon for seven years would be horrified by Blue Origin. [laughter]

Rose: Did you ever talk to Charles Simonyi?

Bezos: Yes, in fact, he came and spoke at Blue Origin and spoke to our employees.

Rose: What did he say about his experience?

Bezos: Actually, I called him while he was up there and talked to him on the phone while he was up there, while he was space shuttle, space station.

Rose: He loved it.

Bezos: He loved being in the International Space Station.

Rose: So why wouldn’t you do that?

Bezos: Well, I want to go on a Blue Origin vehicle, and that’s what we’re working on. I like to build, I’m into building the vehicle. I will go. I definitely will go. I can’t wait, actually.

You can buy a lot of things on Amazon.com, from books and DVDs to clothes and jewelry. Did you know that you can also buy a full-scale replica of Goddard, the Blue Origin spacecraft? It’ll only cost you $9,999,999.00 (on sale from $11,999,999.00!). The product description: “A full sized replica of Goddard. This is a great item which is detailed from the cockpit to the tail. Shown above you can see some of the detail that goes into building these fantastic replicas.” Be warned, however: the shipping weight is just over 22 trillion pounds, so it’s not going to make the UPS guy very happy.

The replica is sold by a vendor named TVPATAM, whose store includes a mix of ordinary items (camera, headphones) and the Goddard replica, along with a Space Rock Paperweight and G Suit (made of “a heavy duty denim twill” in three sizes and four colors), each for $999,999. It looks like someone (perhaps associated with Blue Origin?) has a sense of humor.

(Via collectSPACE and rich text.)

During her presentation at the Space Access ‘07 conference this afternoon, Michelle Murray of FAA/AST mentioned that Blue Origin had a successful* test flight yesterday (March 22), their second under their experimental permit and the first since their initial flight in November. No other information about the flight is available, but I’ll update this as information comes out.

* “successful” here means successful in protecting public safety, the FAA’s primary concern for these tests. There has been no information released about the success of the flight itself.

Update: I fired off a quick query to Blue Origin’s media contact and got the following boilerplate reply: “Blue Origin’s policy is not to comment on or confirm whether any test flights are scheduled or conducted.”

The website for Time magazine has a fairly detailed review article about the emerging space tourism industry. Writer Cathy Booth Thomas talks with a number of the leading companies, including Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, and Benson Space Company, and also covers the more secretive Blue Origin; there’s also coverage if Bigelow Aerospace and developing spaceports, in particular Spaceport America in New Mexico. If you’ve been following the industry you won’t find that much new in this article, although the visit to Necker Island, Richard Branson’s private Caribbean resort where he gathered a number of his Founders late last year, is at the very least entertaining (including the obligatory discussion of sex in space, featuring Branson himself.)

I was just sitting down to lunch when a coworker came up to me and asked, “Have you checked out Blue Origin’s web site recently?”

“Umm, no,” I responded.

“You should,” he responded. And I did, and you should, too: the company has provided a major new update on its web site, in the form of a public letter by Jeff Bezos (dated January 2), as well as some photos and videos of the November 13th first flight of Goddard, the first in a series of vehicles for its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. Some initial notes and analysis:

• The flight itself lasted about 30 seconds, a quick up-and-down flight to an altitude of 285 feet (87 meters). From the grainy video it appears the vehicle, which has a conical, almost capsule-like shape, has nine thrusters in the base, with five arrayed in a cross at the center and four closer to the edges, apparently to provide vectoring.
• This was not the first attempt to launch Goddard: an attempt a few days before was scrubbed because of winds, according to Bezos (they had reserved airspace with the FAA from November 10th through the 13th)
• There were a number of friends and family at the site for the test, and the company provided them with a Jumbotron to better see the launch, entertainment for the kids, and “delicious chuck wagon food”.
• Bezos said his only job at the test “was to open the champagne, and I broke the cork off in the bottle.”
• Bezos said that he has a slow, methodical approach to development: “We believe in incremental improvement and in keeping investments at a pace that’s sustainable. Slow and steady is the way to achieve results, and we do not kid ourselves into thinking this will get easier as we go along.”
• The company has a decidedly retro (think 19th, or even 18th or 17th century retro) logo, complete with turtles (a nod, perhaps, to their methodical approach) and the motto “Gradatim Ferociter”. I quick online check reveals that this means something to the effect of “step by step, with spirit”. I’m sure someone who actually knows Latin can come up with a more accurate and elegant translation…

MSNBC’s Cosmic Log reports that the FAA has issued a temporary flight restriction for the airspace around Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas. The restriction, in effect from 7:30 am through 12:30 pm CST on Thursday through Saturday, is similar to one in effect earlier this month for Blue Origin’s first low-level flight test. Company officials told the local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, that the November 13 test was a success but offered no additional details.

According to MSNBC and the AP, Blue Origin performed its first low-level flight test on Monday morning at about 7:30 am EST from its test site in West Texas. The company, not surprisingly, has released few details about the flight. FAA officials said that the flight lasted “one or two minutes”, but we don’t know how high (prior to the flight it appeared that it would not go much past 600 meters, with airspace reserved to 3,000 meters) nor how successful the test was. Standard operating procedure, really, for Blue Origin.

MSNBC’s Cosmic Log reports that Blue Origin plans to conduct flight tests in the next few days from its West Texas spaceport. A notice to airmen (NOTAM) issued by the FAA sets aside airspace over about 15 square kilometers centered on the launch site up to an altitude of about 3,000 meters, although the flight tests are not planned to go any higher than about 600 meters. The airspace restrictions will be in place from 9 am to 2 pm CST starting today and ending Monday. Other details about the flight tests are, not surprisingly, being kept under wraps by Blue Origin.

El Paso TV station KTSM paid a visit to the front gate of the spaceport and saw “plenty of people traveling in and out of the entrance”; whether that’s a sign of increased activity or not isn’t certain, although locals in the nearest town report increased business in hotels and restaurants. “They welcome the new customers, but don’t know exactly what they’re doing there,” KTSM reports.

The front page of today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about Blue Origin’s spaceport (subscription required), and how Jeff Bezos hasn’t been the most neighborly of people in the area, including putting a neighboring rancher (by the name of Phil Guitar) who has a property boundary dispute into a legal runaround. The article also has what appears to be an aerial photo of the spaceport, but the photo is small and no details about the structures in the image are given.