The heavy lift: Blue origin's next rocket engine could power our return to the moon

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the richest person on Earth, is of course a man who thinks big. But exactly how big is only now becoming clear. "The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins," he told a private aviation group at the Yale Club in New York City this past February. "Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be." The pragmatic entrepreneur went on to say that "the first step [is] to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle." And that's precisely what he is doing with his private aerospace firm, Blue Origin. Blue Origin is not just a company; it's a personal quest for Bezos, who currently sells around US 1 billion of his own Amazon stock each year to fund Blue Origin's development of new spacecraft. The first, called New Shepard, is a suborbital space-tourist vehicle, which should make its first crewed flight later this year. But it is the next, a massive rocket called New Glenn, that could enable cheap lunar missions and kick-start Bezos's grand vision of human beings living all over the solar system. New Glenn's first stage will use seven enormous new BE-4 engines, each powered by methane (the same fuel used in some of Amazon's less-polluting delivery vans in Europe). Like SpaceX's Falcon booster, the New Glenn's first stage will also use its engines to steer itself gracefully back down to a landing ship for reuse.