Bezos' Blue Origin gets NASA funds for human space flight

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos' project to take paying passengers into space is lining up a big potential customer: NASA. The U.S. space agency is giving $50 million in federal stimulus funds to five companies — including Bezos' firm, Blue Origin — to develop systems to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. The Obama administration is pushing a major revamp of NASA programs that would include shifting some transport duties to private space contractors.

Blue Origin, which is based in Kent, Wash. and operates a launch pad in West Texas, will get $3.7 million to develop "system concepts, key technologies, and capabilities that could ultimately be used in commercial crew human space transportation systems," according to a NASA press release.

The other companies receiving funding are aerospace giant Boeing, Paragon Space Development Corp., Sierra Nevada Corp., and United Launch Alliance.

Obama's plans for NASA include killing the Constellation program — the Ares I rocket and Orion crew capsules designed to return humans to the Moon by 2020 and replace space shuttles. Instead, Obama would spend $6 billion on commercial "space taxi" services to take astronauts to the International Space Station.

Bezos is one of several business moguls — among them PayPal co-founder Elon Musk and British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson — who are developing space vehicles of various kinds. Often mocked as vanity projects, these companies are being taken more seriously given NASA's interest.

Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft is a "vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing" vehicle that would take humans into "suborbital" space — meaning it would enter space without reaching orbit level and return to Earth. I'm not clear on whether New Shepard would have to go beyond suborbital to take astronauts to the International Space Station. Clearly, though, Bezos' little rocket project, by linking up with NASA, just got a whole lot more interesting.

See earlier: Bezos space flight project Blue Origin shows signs of life

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About Eric Engleman

ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.

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