“We don’t want to reinvent space travel. What we have to do is make it profitable”

Although AI gurus, former prime ministers of Italy and the United Kingdom and CEOs of giant companies are passing through the Vivatech stages, the figure that has attracted the most attention is Jeff Bezos. The main theater of the event was packed as has not happened with any other speaker. Even Yann LeCun, the so-called ‘godfather of AI‘, he had to speak to some empty seats.

On that stage, alongside Bezos were David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, and Mike Massiminoformer NASA astronaut and the one who asked the questions. The first was obvious: the feeling behind the explosion of the brand new New Glenn rocket of Bezos. The answer was not so obvious, with the tycoon pointing out that the team ‘celebrated’ it in a rather curious way. And the conversation soon focused on the main point of the talk: build the roads to go to space.

Because Blue Origin is in the same race as SpaceXbut also in the same competition as Chinathe race to find a way to reduce launch costs so much that it is viable to constantly put things into orbit. And, apart from infinite money, you only need one thing that Rajoy already said at the time, finding a way to make more of those machines that make the machines that make rockets.

And this is where Prometheus, Bezos’s new AI company, has to do. so much controversy is awakening.

The Moon as a space gas station

“People underestimate (whatever)” was a phrase that was repeated up to three times during the talk. Because Bezos and Limp came to Paris to make it clear that what they are doing is very difficult, but that it is a great leap for humanity.

After talking about the New Glenn explosion, Massimino said “everyone wants to go to the Moon”, and there Bezos expanded because the phrase touches on one of the three key points of Blue Origin’s objective in space exploration (and the rest of the countries and companies that are on the same path). “We will go to Mars and do other things, but the Moon is the first step, the first base“he commented.

There are several reasons. The first, according to the businessman, is that “it is close and we can go in three and a half days and also return in three and a half days. We do not have to wait for it to align with the Earth as happens with Mars. And the reason why we would want to go (and to stay, no less) is because, although he did not say it explicitly, it was printed in the message: the Moon is a space gas station.

We have already said on several occasions that our satellite has a lot of resources that we can use, and the most recent missions have focused, in part, on collecting and studying samples of lunar soil to see what can be done with that material called regolith.

“Now that we are going to go to the Moon to stay, not just to visit it, we need to build fuel with materials that are on the Moon. With electrolysis we can create liquid hydrogen and that is the goal: to create fuel from raw materials on the Moon“, commented Bezos. Because that is the first step to, from there, launch missions further away, such as to Mars.

The reason is that it is ‘cheaper’ to launch rockets from the Moon than from the Earth due to gravity. The rocket does not need as much fuel to take off or as much force, so it is much easier and costs are greatly reduced. The problem is that loading the tanks with liquid hydrogen to go to Mars has the disadvantage that it is a fuel that takes up a lot of space and it is not feasible to leave so loaded from Earth.

That’s where the Moon comes into play again. Because that’s what this is all about: “We don’t want to reinvent space travel. These trips were surpassed 60 years ago. What we want to do is make them profitable.

That’s what Blue Origin is focusing on.” Extracting the materials also comes into play. “The Moon’s gravity is much lower, so you can extract those materials using 28 times less energy per kilo than you would need on Earth.”

What keeps a billionaire who wants to play with rockets up at night

But we must not lose sight of something: this is a business, and Bezos points out that there are many players who want to go to space, but not all of them can make rockets. And there are companies like yours or Musk’s. “Neoconstellations of satellites, resources on the Moon and in low orbit – solar panels, space data centers -, missions on the Moon to stay… there is a lot of demand. I think people greatly underestimate the demand for space travel,” he said.

Beyond the Moon and that Martian objective, he is right in pointing out that low orbit is looking like an electric station during Easter. United States and China are launching military and communication satellites, but Europe does not want to be left behind and Russia, India and Japan are in the same competition. The law of “who comes first, gets the spot” prevails here, and everyone wants to get there first.

The point is that, as Bezos comments, “if the launches are very expensive, the satellites must have a very long life and remain behind technologically, but if we make upload is cheaperwe can speed up times. Limp went on to say that reusable rockets are the way to create these mega satellite constellations, but beyond the problem of fuel, there is that of the rocket itself.

“People underestimate how difficult it is to make a rocket”says Bezos. “You have to push the barriers in all aspects, but what keeps me up at night, and the most difficult thing to achieve, is making the machines that make the machines that make those rockets. Because we don’t want to do it just once: we want to do it hundreds of times a year, which means making hundreds of engines every year and creating that integration to shape everything is complicated.”

There the aforementioned Prometheus comes into play. It is Bezos’ new AI company founded to create artificial engineers who, through artificial intelligence, accelerate all times. The controversy comes from comments about the reduction in employment due to this AI, but for the objective of Bezos and Blue Origin, it is something that is worth it.

If it takes 10 years to create a next-generation jet engine with a team of 10 engineers, with the AI ​​developed by Prometheus engines can be created in five, three or two years with just 10 human engineers. Again, as with fuel and material extraction on the Moon, it’s about making everything profitable, whatever the cost.

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