Jeff Bezos talks about how fragile the Earth is.

Seeing Earth from space has apparently had a great impact on the wealthiest resident on the planet.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos visited suborbital space with three more people on Tuesday (20 July) for the first mission ever launched by his space flight company, Blue Origin. He said he very much liked the rocket and the microgravity volts but was most struck, as astronauts tend to be, by the sight-causing reflections.

"The most profound part, for me, was to look at the Earth, and to look at the atmosphere of the Earth,' he said at a press conference after the flight on Tuesday.

This invigorating air shell looks large enough on the floor. "But above that, it's amazingly slim. It's a very small, fragile thing, and as we move around the globe, we damage it," said Mr. Bezos on greenhouse gas pollution. "It is one thing to give it intellectual recognition. It's a different thing to see for yourself how fragile it is."

Bezos has taken action to help protect this fragile envelope and the rest of our besieged world. Last year, for example, he announced the creation of the Bezos Earth Fund, which is dedicated to fighting climate change and boosting sustainability, and pledged $10 billion to get it up and running. And he now intends to begin spending more of his time on this project, time that was recently released after he left his CEO position at Amazon.

"I will be splitting my time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund," Mr. Bezos said at today's press conference. "And there will be a third thing, and maybe a fourth thing, but I still don't know what it is. I'm not really good at [just] doing anything."

And the long-term goals of Blue Origin have a strong environmental component, Bezos pointed out. In the long run, the company wants to help establish a dynamic aboveground economy, with millions of people living and working in space. Indeed, Blue Origin intends to help move most resource extraction and heavy industry of the planet, so that we don't further strip the planet and foul its soil, air, and waters.

Turning such daring dreams into reality starts with relatively small steps, said Mr. Bezos, such as the first-ever crew launch of New Shepard, the company's suborbital space tourism vehicle.

"We will build a road to space where our children and their children can build the future. We have to do this. We have to do it to solve problems on Earth. This is not an escape," Bezos said.

"It's the only good place in the solar system," he said. "We sent out Robo-probes. She's the one good girl, I promise. So it has to be looked after. And when you go into space and see what fragile he is, you want to take care of him even more. And that's what it comes down to."