Jeff Bezos

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has purchased 165,000 acres of “desolate” West Texas ranch land on which he plans to build “a spaceport for commercial travel into the beyond.”

An Associated Press wire story by Michael Graczyk reports that Bezos has given an interview on his plans to the local newspaper, the weekly Van Horn Advocate (which does not have the interview available at its website). “He walked in and said: ‘Hi, I’m Jeff Bezos,’ and sat down right in that chair there,” Advocate editor Larry Simpson tells the AP from the newspaper office in the back of his Radio Shack store.

The AP reports, “Over the next 30 to 40 minutes, Simpson said Bezos told him the goal of his venture — known as Blue Origin — was to send a spaceship into orbit that launches and lands vertically, like a rocket.” Says Simpson, “He told me their first spacecraft is going to carry three people up to the edge of space and back. But ultimately, his thing is space colonization.”