Amazon.com founder Bezos to build rocket facility in West Texas

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3217961/

Jan. 13, 2005 | 2:53 p.m. ET

Amazon founder reveals space plans: After two years of work behind closed doors, Amazon founder and chief executive officer Jeff Bezos is laying out the blueprints for his Blue Origin suborbital space effort.

The Seattle-based venture will build an operations and test facility on a portion of a ranch near Van Horn in West Texas, according to a report in the Van Horn Advocate.

The Texas center will start small, but over the next six or seven years, Bezos plans to work up to flight testing for a vertical-launch-and-landing craft that could bring three or more people to the edge of space — a concept that sounds more like John Carmack's Black Armadillo than Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne.

Check back for the full story later today in "The New Space Race."

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

1. Instead of building himself a spaceship

Why doesn't he re-hire some of the thousands he laid off?

[crispini]

2. Hey, that's kinda cool.

Didn't Bezos have a ship in the X prize race? It wasn't Rutan's, was it?

Armadillo Aerospace is just up the road from me. I wish I had some kind of technical something to offer them, but I don't. I really enjoyed following their saga though. Wonder what they'll do now?

I am really hoping to see us in outer space in a big way before I die...

[crispini]

3. OMG, there's a new space prize!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6436127/

Anyone who wants to follow in the shoes of Burt Rutan and win the next big space prize will have to build a spacecraft capable of taking a crew of no fewer than five people to an altitude of 250 miles (400 kilometers) and complete two orbits of Earth at that altitude. Then they have to repeat that accomplishment within 60 days.

While the first flight must demonstrate only the ability to carry five crew members, the winner will have to take at least five people up on the second flight.

And one more thing: They have to do it by Jan. 10, 2010.

Those are just some of the rules that govern who wins the $50 million "America’s Space Prize," an effort by Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nevada, to spur the development of space tourism in low Earth orbit.

This is so fecking cool!