Jeff Bezos stands next to the copper lining for a BE-4 engine nozzle in his Blue Origin rocket factory. (credit: Eric Berger)

On Thursday night, just hours after John Glenn died, the Smithsonian Institution’s held its 2016 American Ingenuity Awards banquet. This year the magazine honored Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, and as part of the ceremony former astronaut Mae Jemison read a rather extraordinary letter John Glenn had written less than two weeks before, on Nov. 28.

The letter commended Bezos for his achievements with Blue Origin, which mark critical steps toward developing a low-cost, reusable launch system. Blue Origin plans to offer suborbital tourism flights in 2018 aboard its New Shepard vehicle, and it has announced plans for ambitious orbital and deep space flights soon thereafter. Bezos wants to enable millions of people to live and work in space.

Glenn praised Bezos for a vision of space travel accessible not to just highly trained pilots and engineers, such as himself, but for all of humanity. “You understood that to realize that vision, we would have to be able to get to space more often and more inexpensively. So you and your Blue Origin team began designing rockets that can be reused over and over again,” Glenn wrote.