Executive Q&A: Ariane Cornell Says Blue Origin Will Launch People into Space by the End of 2018

SPACE STATION: Ariane Cornell at Blue Origin’s 260,000-square-foot engineering and manufacturing facility in Kent.

This article appears in print in the April 2018 issue. Click here for a free subscription.

Ariane Cornell is head of astronaut strategy and sales and New Glenn commercial sales director for the Americas at Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company in Kent. Cornell has long aspired to be an astronaut and has the extraordinary job of selling tickets for the upcoming suborbital space tours on Blue Origins New Shepard rocket, as well as finding satellite customers for the companys far larger New Glenn rocket the first steps in Bezos vision of getting millions of people living and working in space.

EARLY YEARS: My [French] mother got her masters and Ph.D. at Stanford, then became a professor at MIT, where she met my father, who was also a professor there. My mother only lasted a couple of Boston winters and told my father that if he really loved her, he could find her on the West Coast. They both taught at Stanford and I grew up in the Bay Area.

ROLE MODEL: Mother stayed in the United States because being a female engineer in France in the 1970s was just unbearable. As a specialist in probabilistic risk analysis, she studied many complex engineering systems, including the space shuttle. When I was about 4, she built this cool, professional model of the space shuttle. She let me paint the belly because it was all black, and I couldnt mess that up too much. That, and hours of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my brother, made me want to be an astronaut. In high school, I earned a scholarship to learn how to fly under the pretext that I wanted to be an astronaut astronauts get their scuba certificates and their pilots licenses. I still havent gotten my scuba certificate.

EDUCATION: As an undergraduate [at Stanford], I studied industrial engineering. My honors thesis was about the future of U.S.-Chinese relations in space. I had several internships at NASA, but the number of astronauts at NASA was limited. I love space so much, I wondered how else I could be a part of it.

CAREER: On graduation, I did aerospace and defense management consulting. I also ran Space Generation, a United Nations-related organization with a network of 1,000 people in 100 countries that provided scholarships to individuals a physics student in Sri Lanka, for example who want to attend big space-related conferences. We were also a voice back to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. I was the only paid employee. It was eye opening. People [outside the United States] value space as a way to bridge the gap between the developing and developed world. They see the power of space beyond this concept of flags and footprints.

MBA: There was this concept of NewSpace [an emerging commercial space industry] and I wanted to be part of it. I realized that if I was going to be an executive in the space industry, I needed more tools in my tool belt, so I went to business school [at Harvard].

BLUE ORIGIN: I was [attracted by] companies like Blue Origin that are taking these big innovative steps on their own and have extraordinary people like our leader who are not only very committed to the vision and have the means to do it, but are also more stable in how they go about marching toward that vision. At Blue Origin, we have the ability to take extraordinary calculated risks, to make innovative jumps, and thats exciting. With such innovations as fully reusable rocket ships and LNG fuel, New Shepard can launch, land and refurbish for less than one-fiftieth the going price of a current on-the-market orbital rocket launch.

SPACE TOURISM: Yes, well have tickets to space. Whodathunk? New Shepard will be flying Blue Origin employees by the end of this year, assuming our test program continues to go well. Within the next year or two, well have paying customers, which is really exciting. I would go in a heartbeat, but we havent released anything yet about who is going or what the cost will be. [Competitors plan to charge $250,000.] … Its about giving ordinary people the opportunity to go over 100 kilometers up to space and to gaze out of these beautiful windows the largest windows that will have ever flown in space. I really do think its going to be one of these life-changing experiences for people. If there are going to be millions of people living and working in space, it cant be just billionaires. Ultimately, the keystone is bringing down the cost of access to space.

SATELLITES: The New Glenn, our big orbital rocket, will [be test launched] in 2020. Initially, it will be flying satellites. When you put a satellite on top of a rocket, you encapsulate it in something called a fairing. Ours is going to be 7 meters in diameter, compared to 5 meters for most rockets. When we show satellite operators the capability we have with New Glenn, you can see the wheels turning in their heads. They say, We can buy one New Glenn flight or two to three other rockets to do the same thing. Were shaking up the market with the New Glenn, which we are very proud of.

VISION: To get millions of people living and working in space, you have to get a lot of infrastructure into space, and thats what has driven the size [of New Glenn]. Initially, you would want to put infrastructure in low Earth orbit, where the International Space Station is. We can launch 45 metric tons per launch into that orbit. Thats a lot. For a long time, people have been talking about generating solar power in space, where you have constant access to the sun. You can beam down the power as opposed to having coal-burning power plants those are the types of ideas we hope to enable. More countries, governments and private businesses will want to use our rockets to put up their satellites, to put up their infrastructure.

GROWTH: When I joined in 2014, Blue Origin had 400 people. Now, we are well over 1,400. Seattle has all this wonderful talent, and we are hiring the best and brightest. Not just people with space and aerospace backgrounds, but also material science, computer science and electrical engineering. We want men and women who are passionate about space or about their domain.