Jeff Bezos

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stands beside a rocket engine nozzle skirt during the first tour of his private space company Blue Origin's headquarters and plant outside Seattle, Wash., on March 8, 2016. (Lee Roop/lroop@al.com)

Jeff Bezos' people knew there would be questions when he invited America's space press to Kent, Wash., this week. It was the first ever tour of Blue Origin, the rocket company he's building with his Amazon billions, so they knew.

But they really didn't know. Reporters threw hundreds of questions at an affable Bezos during a tour and roundtable. Here's a "greatest hits version" of a four-hour conversation.

Q: Why does Bezos want to explore space?

A: There are "two reasons to go into space," he said. "Use the resources in space to protect the Earth, and it's a glorious adventure."

Q: What is Blue Origin doing to make that exploration happen?

A: "It's a fact that over the past 50 years, we haven't made that much progress in space travel. It's just a fact. There are a bunch of reasons for it, but the big one is we don't have the puzzle pieces in place to allow it to explode with entrepreneurial passion."

Q: What's missing?

A: Affordable "heavy lift capability to get meaningful payloads" into space, Bezos said. That's why Blue Origin's focus is building reusable rocket engines to use and sell other space companies and reusable boosters for itself. "What I know you cannot afford is to throw hardware away," he said.

"I'm very excited about being the premier supplier of propulsion to other companies," Bezos said. "Rocket engines are so difficult to develop that you shouldn't keep them to yourself. You can build a very good business that's helpful to other companies by sharing your propulsion technology."

As for boosters, Bezos asked reporters to imagine balancing a broomstick in the palm of their hands. That's doable. Now, imagine a pencil. A toothpick. Extremely difficult. The thought experiment explains Blue Origin's approach and its challenges.

"As hard as launching is, landing is even harder," Bezos said, "but once you get (vertical landing) right, it's very scaleable."

Bezos' current New Shepard booster is the toothpick. It's landed vertically twice and flew the second time with very little tune-up. The engine wasn't even removed.

Blue Origin's mantra: Launch, land, repeat.

Q: What is the business case for all this?

A: "The business case for lowering the cost of access to space is very strong, and it happens in two ways. First of all, there are people who are launching satellites today who would love, as long as you can demonstrate your reliability, for their costs to be lower. The other thing that happens, if you really make a substantial change in the cost, a factor of 10 or more, people will come up with new space applications that didn't make sense when launches were $100 million."

Q: Blue was founded in 2000. How is it growing, and how much room does it have to grow in Kent?

A: "We're bursting at the seams... and just leased a new building a few blocks from here to put engineers in."

Blue, as employees call it, has 600 employees now and will be over 1,000 in 2017, Bezos said. Most are working on the next-generation BE-4 engine ("Blue Engine 4") and the company's own planned orbital spacecraft.

Q: Where did the name Blue Origin come from?

A: "It's because Earth is a great planet to be from. It's the blue planet, and it's our origin."

Q: Why has Blue been so secretive?

A: "I've always said that space is very easy to over-hype. There are very few things in the world where you can get more attention. The ratio of attention you can get to what you've actually done can be extreme. (Laughs) I've always thought that it's not helpful. I've always said the same thing: We'll talk about Blue when we have something to talk about. It's a long pipeline to fill. In this business, there's a lot of price of admission, just getting the basics down."

Q: Why is Bezos talking now?

A: "The big change is stuff is finally coming out of this long pipeline. It took a long time to get the pipeline filled and now really exciting, cool stuff that's not just hype is coming out the other end. And it's exciting to talk about, and we want the world to know."

Q: Compare Blue Origin today with Amazon's early days.

A: "Most of that was one foot in front of the other. You look at the original business plan for Amazon, it was just books ... we'd add something and customers would like it. I predict Blue Origin will be the same."

Q: Is Blue's planned space tourism business to make money? Some people might say it's a frivolous use of all this technology for rich people.

A: "Those people would be wrong. If you look at the early days of almost any technology, one of the drivers of that technology is entertainment or tourism, and it's very healthy."

Bezos cited barnstormers in the early days of airplanes and microprocessors for computer gaming.

"GPUs (graphic processing units) were completely developed for gaming. Now everybody including us - Amazon and Blue - uses GPUs for things like computational fluid dynamics and machine learning."

Q: Does Blue have a waiting list to fly?

A: "There are thousands of people, but we're not taking deposits. I would like us to be closer so I can give people at least a somewhat informed schedule of when they would actually be able to fly."

Q: Does Bezos have a desire to go into space?

A: "Yes, I do, but I want to do it on Blue Origin vehicles. I do want to go into space. You can buy seats on Soyuz from the Russians to go into space and I've thought about doing that. It's not what drives me. I don't just want to do that. I want to change the whole cost structure of accessing space. That's what's important to me. But, yes, I do want to go, and I will go."

Q: Where is all this going? What is the big picture?

A: "My view is there will be a great inversion. Right now, what happens is we use heavy industry on Earth to send 'vitamins' into space. We have the gigantic silicon factories that make things like microprocessors. Gigantic machines that make these tiny little 'vitamins.'

"The microprocessor, that's just one example, but the pattern applies in many, many ways. The idea you're going to make a modern Intel processor in space today is unfathomable. You need so much infrastructure. So you make it on Earth and you carry it into space.

"And that's how it's gonna start. It's gonna start that all the heavy industry is on Earth ... then we will get gross materials in space to build things like radiation shielding ... maybe we'll be able to find water, and we'll make rocket propellant from that ... and start out making these simple things in space.

"And then sometime in the next few hundred years, there will be a big inversion where we will realize we shouldn't be doing heavy industry on Earth for two reasons: It's very polluting and, two, we don't have access to enough energy here to do it.... We'll make the microprocessors in space and just send the little tiny bits back to Earth. All of the advanced heavy fabrication and manufacturing will get done in space, and Earth can be zoned residential and light industrial ... universities and houses and so on.

"A lot of people will live in space. It will be very pleasant. You might not have terraformed Mars in that time - in fact, you won't - but you can have very nice space stations."