Two decades ago, Jeff Bezos attended quite a few O’Reilly events and even then one of his favorite topics to talk about was rockets and space. I remember one night at Foo Camp speaking with him about distributed cloud databases for a while, and then the topic turned to his dream of getting to orbit with reusable rockets and what was necessary to accomplish it.

Many talk about it now in terms of a billionaire’s space race between titans of industry. However, I think the deeper story is that today’s launch of New Glenn reaching orbit is the result of long and patient perseverance and the focusing of the dreams of thousands of people by somebody that could continue to carry the torch when the path wasn’t clear.

Even though the booster didn’t make it back to ground in one piece (this time, let’s see how many times it takes for them to stick the landing), it’s awesome to see Blue Origin make their mission goal of putting a satellite into orbit on their first go. Congrats Jeff and Blue Origin.