2021.07.20 杰夫-贝佐斯知道谁为他上太空买单

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Jeff Bezos Knows Who Paid for Him to Go to Space
The world’s richest man commissioned the rocket, but his Amazon empire—the customers and the workers—covered the bill.

By Marina Koren
The New Shepard Blue Origin rocket lifts-off from the launch pad
Joe Raedle / Getty
JULY 20, 2021
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Updated at 1:45 p.m. ET on July 20, 2021.

VAN HORN, Texas—Jeff Bezos really flew to space.

This morning, the richest person on Earth boarded a reusable rocket he dreamed up and funded, launched to the edge of space to experience a few minutes of weightlessness, and then came back down.

Bezos made the trip with three people who decided they trusted him enough with their lives: his brother, Mark Bezos; Wally Funk, a storied aviator; and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. Before today, Bezos’s private space company, Blue Origin, had not flown its rocket with any people on board. By going first, Bezos wanted to prove that his vehicle is safe, and that Blue Origin is finally ready to make its 11-minute suborbital trips an experience people can buy.


The journey was lightning-fast by spaceflight standards. The Blue Origin rocket rose into the sky with a rumble that echoed across the West Texas desert, and about 11 minutes later, it was all over—the passenger capsule parachuted down, and the Bezos brothers, Funk, and Daemen climbed out, grinning widely. The rocket was back on the launchpad, standing tall, after tearing through the atmosphere with a sonic boom. For this crew, Blue Origin had made spaceflight feel almost as smooth as same-day shipping.

The passengers flew on a rocket called New Shepard, named for the astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space. They followed a similar trajectory as Shepard did in 1961, but the Blue Origin experience is thoroughly, well, Amazon-like. Shepard, a military pilot, spent months preparing to fly his NASA capsule. Future Blue Origin customers need only show up a few days before launch for some light training on their fully autonomous ride.

Most people know Bezos primarily as the founder of Amazon—in the least flattering version, an ultra-wealthy boss who overworks his employees and hasn’t always paid his share of federal income taxes. But for Bezos, space came first. He remembers watching Apollo 11’s moon landing on his family’s television as a 5-year-old, and as a high-school valedictorian, he spoke about the importance of space travel. If Bezos were anyone else, the story of his spaceflight, of a dream fulfilled, would be simple and sweet.

But if Bezos were anyone else, he wouldn’t have been able to fulfill this dream at all. At a press conference after the launch, Bezos thanked Blue Origin's engineers, and then added, “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, ’cause you guys paid for all this.” Because of Amazon, he is the richest person on Earth, who controls the daily life of so many others here—not just his employees, but the hundreds of millions of us who partake, sometimes grudgingly, in the products he owns. Bezos benefits when we buy things (Amazon), eat (Whole Foods), read movie trivia (IMDb), rate books (Goodreads), manage our homes (Alexa), catch up on the news (The Washington Post), and go online (Amazon Web Services). We live in the world Bezos built. In that sense, as he floated over the Earth, taking in the beautiful view, he was surveying his kingdom, and adding one more dimension to his realm.

Richard Branson may have beaten Bezos to space, but Blue Origin is working on an even bigger rocket that could fly people and payloads well beyond the edge of space, into orbit around Earth. It’s also developing, with the help of a couple of longtime NASA contractors, technology to return American astronauts to the surface of the moon, by the 2024 deadline that Donald Trump set and that Joe Biden has so far kept. NASA originally chose Elon Musk’s SpaceX for this job, but while Musk joked about the situation—tweeting that Blue Origin “can’t get it up (to orbit) lol”—Bezos directed his staff to formally contest the space agency’s decision. SpaceX’s contract is now on hold.

For Bezos, today’s flight wasn’t just a joyride. The space billionaire still has more to prove. As a businessman, he already has a comfortable hold on the American way of life. As a spaceman, he wants a hold on its way of life among the stars.

The day before he flew to space, Bezos walked around his facility in the West Texas desert, dressed for the part of a cowboy. Big hat, shiny belt buckle, pointed boots—a very different man from tech-scion Bezos, in his puffer vest and aviator sunglasses. He remains buff, the result of an exercise regimen that, according to one of his friends, he took up several years ago so that he could be in good shape for spaceflight.

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Bezos spent the summers of his childhood and early teenage years on his grandfather’s ranch in South Texas, fixing windmills, helping castrate cattle, and working his way through the science-fiction collection of the local library, as the journalist Christian Davenport recounts in The Space Barons, a book about Bezos and the other space billionaires. In college, Bezos was the president of a spaceflight club and attended lectures by Gerard O’Neill, the physicist who dreamed of space stations kept in perpetual motion to produce artificial gravity. “It’s always the science-fiction guys,” Bezos later said, according to Davenport. “They think of everything first, and then the builders come along and make it happen."

It helps, of course, when the builders are billionaires. Bezos founded Blue Origin—named for the pale blue dot where humankind arose—in 2000. He was already extraordinarily rich, and he had little trouble buying up land in West Texas to start developing rocket technology in secret. When the company successfully launched its New Shepard rocket for the first time, in 2015, it announced the news a day later, through a carefully curated press release. Bezos was not in a rush back then; Blue Origin’s mascot is a tortoise, and for years Bezos, who would devote one day of his workweek to Blue Origin, was content to move slowly and let the hare in the industry, Musk, run loose. Occasionally they tussled. After Blue Origin launched a rocket and then landed it upright—a historic first in the rocket business—Musk praised Bezos, but made sure to point out that Blue Origin had reached only the edge of space, not orbit. When SpaceX achieved the same feat with an orbital rocket a month later, Bezos playfully ignored the distinction, congratulating Musk with a “Welcome to the club!” Bezos remained unperturbed as Musk raced ahead—until this year, when that NASA moon contract swung out of reach, and something shifted.


Now Blue Origin has made an effort to draw people into Bezos’s space world. The day before the launch, the usually press-averse Bezos gave interviews to the major TV networks while dressed in his cobalt-blue flight suit, with his fellow passengers at his side. Hours before the flight, in the middle of the night, dozens of reporters gathered at the Van Horn Community Center to board shuttles to Blue Origin’s remote facility north of town. Signs of the space company’s presence are sprinkled around Van Horn—a banner stuck to the Cactus Cantina restaurant on the main drag, a mural of the Bezos brothers painted on the side of an abandoned storefront. The locals speak of the Blue Origin site as if it were a mystical place, shrouded in a force field few can penetrate. It is certainly no Cape Canaveral; a safety briefing for reporters warned of the myriad dangers of the remote site, from hazardous materials to wild hogs. As the press bus drove out of the community-center parking lot and into the darkness, I realized that I had flown nearly 2,000 miles and driven 115 miles to get here, but I had no idea where Blue Origin was taking me. It felt like being invited to a reclusive, eccentric person’s home for dinner, only the host was going to launch into space during the main course.

Bezos’s entire endeavor, historic as it might be, seems to some people like pure excess, the whim of a leader who has lost touch with the average person’s sense of the world. Even some of Blue Origin’s employees have had concerns; in April 2020, as the coronavirus swept across the United States, The Verge’s Loren Grush reported that some workers felt that managers were pressuring them to keep up the pace, prioritizing the development of New Shepard over their health and safety.


As the day of Bezos’s flight drew closer, critics asked him to read the room, to pay more attention to Earth and spend money on problems closer to home. Bezos did—a bit, by billionaire standards—donating $19 million from Blue Origin’s coffers to space-related organizations, and $200 million of his own fortune to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. After his flight, Bezos announced more giveaways—$100 million each to the news anchor Van Jones and the chef José Andrés, who both run nonprofit organizations, to distribute to whatever charities they like.

The criticism of space travel as frivolous is as old as the act itself; in the golden age of NASA, the ire was directed at a government deemed neglectful of its constituents; in the gilded age of private space tourism, it is aimed at billionaires seen as frivolous. But paying attention to Earth and looking toward the stars are not contradictory acts, nor does one come at the detriment of the other. As Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire, recently wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “We don’t actually face a choice between basic human needs and exciting journeys into the universe.” While NASA has some responsibility to get the public’s buy-in for its missions beyond Earth, the space billionaires don’t. They can try, as Bezos and Branson have done, but the sell is harder when part of their motivation is so obviously personal.


For Bezos in particular, selling the value of such a journey is a different challenge from any other he has attempted. People might not like how he runs Amazon, but they need toilet paper, or scissors, or a book, or some other mundane item that the company can provide, faster and with greater customer ease than anyone else. Amazon and Bezos’s other companies have population-size customer bases; Blue Origin, given the cost of a ticket—which remains under wraps, but is rumored to be several hundred thousand dollars—will have far fewer customers, at least in Bezos’s lifetime. No one needs to go to space right now.

But Bezos believes humankind will need to soon—not just the elites who can afford Blue Origin’s services, but all kinds of people. The space-nerd valedictorian told his classmates that people should move to space in order to preserve the Earth, and as an adult he still believes that. Of the space billionaires, Bezos is perhaps the most nostalgic. He has named his rockets after the spacefarers of NASA’s early years, and scheduled his spaceflight for the anniversary of the first moon landing. Bezos once organized a secret, expensive expedition to scour the seafloor off the coast of Florida in search of the discarded engines from the gargantuan rocket that lofted the Apollo 11 astronauts toward the moon. When the hardware was hauled onto the ship, Bezos was on deck, wiping the salty mud off the wreck like it was treasure.


Bezos has made himself a significant character in the story of American spaceflight, intertwining his achievements with those of spacefarers past. Bezos did today what someone else accomplished 60 years ago, but what he can do next, now that he’s back on Earth, sets his achievement apart. Given an opening for business, Bezos will exploit it to its most ambitious, sprawling end. There, at the edge of space, what possibilities did he see?

Marina Koren is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



杰夫-贝佐斯知道谁为他上太空买单
这位世界上最富有的人委托发射火箭，但他的亚马逊帝国--顾客和工人--承担了这笔费用。

玛丽娜-科雷恩报道
新谢泼德蓝色起源火箭从发射台上升空
Joe Raedle / Getty
2021年7月20日

更新于美国东部时间2021年7月20日下午1:45。

德克萨斯州范霍恩-杰夫-贝佐斯真的飞上了太空。

今天上午，这位地球上最富有的人登上了他梦想并资助的可重复使用的火箭，发射到太空边缘，体验了几分钟的失重状态，然后又下来了。

贝索斯与三个决定将自己的生命交给他的人一起进行了这次旅行：他的兄弟马克-贝索斯；著名的飞行员沃利-芬克；以及刚从高中毕业的18岁少年奥利弗-戴门。在今天之前，贝索斯的私人太空公司 "蓝色起源"(Blue Origin)还没有在火箭上载人飞行。贝索斯希望通过先发制人，证明他的飞行器是安全的，而且蓝色起源公司终于准备将11分钟的亚轨道旅行变成人们可以购买的体验。


按照航天标准，这次旅程快如闪电。蓝色起源火箭升上天空，轰隆声响彻西德克萨斯州的沙漠，大约11分钟后，一切都结束了--客舱跳下，贝索斯兄弟、芬克和戴门爬出来，咧嘴大笑。火箭在撕开大气层发出音爆声后，又回到了发射台上，高高站起。对这些船员来说，蓝色起源公司使太空飞行的感觉几乎和当天的运输一样顺利。

乘客们乘坐的是名为 "新谢泼德 "的火箭，该火箭以第一个进入太空的美国人艾伦-谢泼德命名。他们遵循与谢泼德在1961年所做的类似的轨迹，但蓝色起源的经验是彻底的，嗯，亚马逊式的。谢泼德是一名军事飞行员，他花了几个月时间准备驾驶他的NASA太空舱。未来的蓝色起源客户只需要在发射前几天出现在他们的完全自主的飞行器上，接受一些简单的训练。

大多数人知道贝索斯主要是作为亚马逊的创始人，在最不讨人喜欢的版本中，他是一个极端富有的老板，他让员工过度工作，并不总是支付他的联邦所得税份额。但对贝佐斯来说，太空是第一位的。他记得5岁时在家里的电视上观看了阿波罗11号的登月，作为高中毕业演讲人，他谈到了太空旅行的重要性。如果贝索斯是其他人，他的太空飞行、实现梦想的故事将是简单而甜蜜的。

但如果贝索斯是其他人，他根本不可能实现这个梦想。在发射后的新闻发布会上，贝索斯感谢了蓝色起源的工程师，然后补充说："我还想感谢每一位亚马逊员工和每一位亚马逊客户，因为这一切都是你们付出的。" 因为亚马逊，他是地球上最富有的人，他控制着这里许多人的日常生活--不仅仅是他的员工，还有我们数以亿计的人，他们参与了他的产品，有时是勉强地参与。当我们买东西（亚马逊）、吃饭（全食超市）、阅读电影花絮（IMDb）、评价书籍（Goodreads）、管理我们的家（Alexa）、了解新闻（《华盛顿邮报》）和上网（亚马逊网络服务）时，贝索斯会从中受益。我们生活在贝索斯建立的世界里。从这个意义上说，当他漂浮在地球上空，欣赏美丽的景色时，他正在勘察他的王国，并为他的领域增加了一个维度。

理查德-布兰森可能已经在太空中击败了贝佐斯，但蓝色起源公司正在研制一种更大的火箭，可以让人和有效载荷远远超出太空的边缘，进入环绕地球的轨道。它还在美国国家航空航天局(NASA)几个长期承包商的帮助下，开发让美国宇航员返回月球表面的技术，在唐纳德-特朗普设定的2024年最后期限之前，乔-拜登至今仍在坚持。美国宇航局最初选择了埃隆-马斯克的SpaceX公司来做这项工作，但当马斯克对这种情况开玩笑时--在推特上说蓝色起源公司 "不能把它送上（轨道）lol"--贝索斯指示他的工作人员正式质疑航天局的决定。SpaceX的合同现在被搁置了。

对贝索斯来说，今天的飞行并不只是一次兜风。这位太空亿万富翁仍有更多东西需要证明。作为一个商人，他已经对美国的生活方式有了舒适的掌控。作为一名太空人，他希望能在星际间掌握其生活方式。

在飞往太空的前一天，贝索斯在他位于西德克萨斯州沙漠的设施中走来走去，打扮得像个牛仔。大帽子、闪亮的皮带扣、尖头靴子--一个与技术员贝佐斯截然不同的人，他穿着羽绒背心，戴着飞行员太阳镜。他仍然很健壮，据他的一位朋友说，这是几年前他采取的锻炼方法的结果，以便他能以良好的状态参加太空飞行。

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记者克里斯蒂安-达文波特（Christian Davenport）在《太空大亨》（The Space Barons）一书中讲述了贝索斯和其他太空亿万富翁的故事，他的童年和青少年时期都是在祖父位于德克萨斯州南部的农场度过的，修理风车，帮助阉割牛群，并努力阅读当地图书馆的科幻小说收藏。在大学里，贝索斯是一个航天俱乐部的主席，并参加了杰拉德-奥尼尔的讲座，这位物理学家梦想让空间站保持永久运动以产生人工重力。据达文波特说，"总是那些科幻小说家，"贝佐斯后来说。"他们首先想到了一切，然后建设者出现并使之成为现实。"

当然，当建设者是亿万富翁时，这很有帮助。贝索斯在2000年创立了蓝色起源公司--以人类出现的苍白蓝点命名。他当时已经非常富有，他在西德克萨斯州买下土地，开始秘密开发火箭技术，没有什么困难。当该公司在2015年首次成功发射其新谢泼德火箭时，它在一天后通过精心策划的新闻稿宣布了这一消息。贝索斯当时并不着急；蓝色起源的吉祥物是一只乌龟，多年来，贝索斯每周会有一天的工作时间用于蓝色起源，他满足于缓慢前进，让行业中的兔子马斯克自由奔跑。偶尔他们也会发生争执。蓝色起源公司发射了一枚火箭，然后将其直立着陆--这是火箭行业历史上的第一次--马斯克赞扬了贝佐斯，但他一定要指出，蓝色起源公司只到达了太空的边缘，而不是轨道。一个月后，当SpaceX用轨道火箭实现了同样的壮举时，贝索斯嬉皮笑脸地忽略了这一区别，以 "欢迎加入俱乐部！"的口吻向马斯克表示祝贺。在马斯克飞速发展的过程中，贝索斯仍然不为所动--直到今年，当美国宇航局的登月合同摇摇欲坠时，一些事情发生了转变。


现在，蓝色起源已经努力吸引人们进入贝佐斯的太空世界。在发射的前一天，通常不喜欢媒体的贝索斯穿着钴蓝色的飞行服接受了各大电视网络的采访，他的同伴在他身边。在飞行前几个小时，在午夜时分，数十名记者聚集在范霍恩社区中心，准备登上前往蓝色起源公司在城北的偏远设施的班车。航天公司存在的迹象散布在范霍恩周围--一条贴在主干道上的仙人掌酒馆的横幅，一幅贝索斯兄弟的壁画画在一个废弃的店面的侧面。当地人说起蓝色起源基地，就好像它是一个神秘的地方，被笼罩在一个很少有人能穿透的力场中。这里当然不是卡纳维拉尔角；为记者举行的安全简报会警告说，这个偏远的地方有无数的危险，从危险材料到野猪。当记者大巴驶出社区中心停车场，进入黑暗中时，我意识到我已经飞了近2000英里，开了115英里来到这里，但我不知道蓝色起源要带我去哪里。这感觉就像被邀请到一个隐居的、古怪的人家里吃饭，只是主人要在主菜中发射到太空。

贝索斯的整个努力，尽管可能是历史性的，但对一些人来说，似乎是纯粹的过度，是一个与普通人的世界观失去联系的领导者的心血来潮。甚至蓝色起源的一些员工也有担忧；2020年4月，当冠状病毒席卷美国时，The Verge的Loren Grush报道说，一些工人认为管理者在向他们施压，要求他们跟上节奏，将新谢泼德的开发置于他们的健康和安全之上。


随着贝索斯飞行的日子越来越近，批评者要求他读懂房间，更多地关注地球，把钱花在离家近的问题上。贝索斯做到了--按照亿万富翁的标准，他从蓝色起源的库房中拿出1900万美元捐给与太空有关的组织，并从自己的财产中拿出2亿美元捐给史密森尼国家航空航天博物馆。在他的飞行之后，贝索斯宣布了更多的捐赠--向新闻主播范-琼斯和厨师何塞-安德烈斯各捐赠1亿美元，他们都经营着非营利组织，可以向他们喜欢的任何慈善机构分发。

对太空旅行轻浮的批评与这一行为本身一样古老；在美国国家航空航天局的黄金时代，人们的愤怒是针对一个被认为忽视其选民的政府；在私人太空旅游的镀金时代，它针对的是被视为轻浮的亿万富翁。但是，关注地球和仰望星空并不是相互矛盾的行为，也不会因为一个人而损害另一个人。正如新罕布什尔大学的理论物理学家Chanda Prescod-Weinstein最近在《华盛顿邮报》的专栏文章中写道："我们实际上并没有面临在人类基本需求和令人兴奋的宇宙之旅之间的选择。" 虽然美国宇航局有一些责任让公众对其地球以外的任务买账，但太空亿万富翁们并没有。他们可以尝试，就像贝索斯和布兰森所做的那样，但当他们的部分动机如此明显的个人化时，销售就更难了。


特别是对贝索斯来说，推销这种旅行的价值是一个不同于他所尝试的任何其他挑战。人们可能不喜欢他经营亚马逊的方式，但他们需要卫生纸、剪刀、书或其他一些平凡的物品，而该公司可以提供，而且比其他任何人都更快、更方便。亚马逊和贝索斯的其他公司拥有人口规模的客户群；而蓝色起源，考虑到一张票的成本--这仍然是保密的，但据传是几十万美元--至少在贝索斯的有生之年，客户将少得多。现在没有人需要去太空。

但贝索斯认为，人类很快就会需要--不仅仅是能负担得起蓝色起源服务的精英，而是所有类型的人。这位太空爱好者毕业典礼上告诉他的同学们，为了保护地球，人们应该移居太空，而作为一个成年人，他仍然相信这一点。在太空亿万富翁中，贝索斯也许是最怀旧的人。他以美国宇航局早年的航天员的名字命名他的火箭，并将他的航天飞行安排在第一次登月的周年纪念日。贝索斯曾经组织过一次秘密的、昂贵的探险，在佛罗里达州海岸附近的海底寻找将阿波罗11号宇航员送上月球的巨大火箭上废弃的引擎。当这些硬件被拖上船时，贝索斯就在甲板上，像擦拭宝藏一样擦拭残骸上的咸泥巴。


贝索斯使自己成为美国航天故事中的一个重要人物，将他的成就与过去航天员的成就交织在一起。贝索斯今天做了别人在60年前完成的事情，但他现在回到地球后，接下来能做什么，使他的成就与众不同。如果有一个商业机会，贝索斯将利用它来达到最雄心勃勃、规模庞大的目的。在那里，在太空的边缘，他看到了什么可能性？

玛丽娜-科伦是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。