Joining the Thrillionaires 312
ShipOne. It was the rocket that won the Ansari X Prize
competition.^121 He then co-founded Stratolaunch Systems
that originally had SpaceX as customer before SpaceX
decided to focus on their own rockets.^21
The thrillionaire Jeff Bezos was five years old when
he watched how astronauts landed on the Moon. “NASA
is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire
five-year-olds,” he said.^296 Bezos wanted to become an
astronaut. While dreaming about how he one day would
travel between the stars, he read books by Jules Verne, Isaac
Asimov, and Robert Heinlein.^411
Bezos never became an astronaut. Instead, he founded
the world’s largest online retailer Amazon. But he’s still
dreaming about going to space. “It’s always been one
of his goals,” an investor in Amazon said. “It’s why he
started working out every morning. He’s been ridiculously
disciplined about it.”^411
Like Elon, Bezos believes that we have all our eggs in
one basket so we need to begin living on other planets.
To fulfill the belief, he founded Blue Origin with the goal
of dramatically lower the cost of rockets and increase the
safety of technology that can get humans into space. The
company’s motto isGradatim Ferociter, which is Latin for
“Step-by-Step, Ferociously.”^411
Blue Origin came to the same conclusion as SpaceX:
reusable rockets is the key to success in space. Named
after Alan Shepard, who was the first American to travel
into space and the fifth man on the Moon, Blue Origin’s
rocket is called New Shepard. In a similar way as SpaceX’s