Jeff Bezos: commitment

Transcript context

…Can you actually describe what do you mean by escape system? What’s involved? We have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule, so that if anything goes wrong on ascent, while the main rocket engine is firing, we can ignite this solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule and escape from the booster. It’s a very challenging system to build, design, validate, test, all of these things. It is the reason that I am comfortable letting anyone go on New Shepard. So the booster is as safe and reliable as we can make it, but we are harnessing … Whenever you’re talking about rocket engines, I don’t care what rocket engine you’re talking about, you’re harnessing such vast power in such a small compact geometric space. The power density is so enormous that it is impossible to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong. And so the only way to improve safety is to have an escape system. And historically, human-rated rockets have had escape systems. Only the space shuttle did not, but Apollo had one. All of the previous Gemini, etcetera, they all had escape systems. And we have on New Shepard an unusual escape … Most escape systems are towers. We have a pusher escape system. So the solid rocket motor is actually embedded in the base of the crew capsule and it pushes and it’s reusable in the sense that, if we don’t use it, so if we have a nominal mission, we land with it. The tower systems have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission and so they get wasted even in a nominal mission. And so again, costs really matters on these things, so we figured out how to have the escape system be a reusable. In the event that it’s not used, it can reuse it and have it be a pusher system. It’s a very sophisticated thing. So I knew these things. You asked me about my decision to go and so I know the vehicle very well, I know the people who designed it, I have great trust in them and in the engineering that we did. And I thought to myself, “Look, if I am not ready to go, then I wouldn’t want anyone to go.” A tourism vehicle has to be designed, in my view, to be as safe as one can make it. You can’t make it perfectly safe. It’s impossible, but you have … People will do things. People take risk. They climb mountains, they skydive, they do deep underwater scuba diving and so on. People are okay taking risk. You can’t eliminate the risk, but it is something, because it’s a tourism vehicle, you have to do your utmost to eliminate those risks. And I felt very good about the system. I think it’s one of the reasons I was so calm inside and maybe others weren’t as calm. They didn’t know as much about it as I did. Who was in charge of engaging the escape system? Did you have-…

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