Jeff Bezos Named 2018 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award Winner

The 2018 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Jeff Bezos in recognition of his warnings about existential risks and his work on space exploration which will eventually improve the survival chances of humanity by having humanity being based in more than one location.
 
Jeff said, “For better or worse, it is really not a part of our culture to look at things defensively. We rarely say, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to do something about that existential threat.’ Maybe one day we’ll become extinct because of that deficiency in our nature.”
 
Besides Jeff’s little hobby of Amazon, he is owner of Blue Origin. Blue Origin is an American privately funded aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company headquartered in Kent, Washington. Founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the company which in 2017 hired NASA Silver Snoopy Award winner Robert Smith as CEO, is developing technologies to enable private human access to space with the goal to dramatically lower costs and increase reliability. Blue Origin is employing an incremental approach from suborbital to orbital flight, with each developmental step building on its prior work. The company motto is Gradatim Ferociter, Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously”.
 
Blue Origin has become a part of a “dramatic metamorphosis” of the space industry in recent years, having moved into the orbital spaceflight technology business in 2014, initially as a rocket engine supplier for others via a contractual agreement to build a new large rocket engine, the BE-4, for major US launch system operator United Launch Alliance (ULA). ULA is also considering the BE-3, Blue Origin’s smaller rocket engine used on New Shepard, for use in a new second stage — the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage (ACES) — which will become the primary upper stage for ULA’s Vulcan orbital launch vehicle in the 2020s. By 2015, Blue Origin had also announced plans to also manufacture and fly its own orbital launch vehicle from the Florida Space Coast, known as the New Glenn.