Bezos said commercial spaceflight today is expensive because it prioritizes reliability, which has the industry stuck on conservative launch systems. He thinks we need more practice to prove the worth and safety of reusable rocket systems.

Early in aviation history, barnstormers used airplanes for theatrical stunts to entertain crowds. USAF via Wikimedia Commons

Jeff Foust: The aviation industry is a mature, strong safe industry. Commercial spaceflight is still well on its way to hitting that goal. Where do you see the parallels between aviation and commercial space, and what role will Blue Origin play in that?

Jeff Bezos: I really do think we're at the barnstorming phase. It's a very interesting analog to early aviation, because a lot of industries — new technologies — are first used for entertainment. It's happened over and over again across industries, and of course, barnstorming was one of the first commercial things that small aircraft could do a long time ago. You see that today.

A very prominent case today is in machine learning and artificial intelligence. GPUs [graphics processing units] are instrumental in doing machine learning, but they weren't invented for machinery — they were invented to play video games.

One of the things that I'm very excited about with New Shepard, which is our suborbital tourism vehicle, is using that to get a lot of practice. One of the equilibriums we're at today with space launch is that we don't practice enough. The most-flown vehicles may fly a couple dozen times a year launching payloads into orbit. Anything we do just a couple of dozen times a year, you never get really good at.

Let's say that you're going to have some surgery. You should make sure that the surgeon does that operation at least five times a week. There's real data that backs up the fact that the practice effect makes that surgery much safer if your surgeon is doing it at least five times a week. And so we need to be going to space very frequently in a very routine way. One of the reasons that aviation is so safe today is because we do have so much practice. There are a bunch of reasons why it's safe — that's one of them.

We need to have [more] missions. If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable; reliability becomes much more important than cost, and it's hard to get off of that equilibrium. It actually drives you the wrong directions, where you have fewer launches and very expensive satellites, and that's what you see happening in many cases.