Out of This World

The future is on Lauren Sánchez's mind from wedding planning to an all-female trip to outer space. There's the fate of the planet to consider too.

- Chloe Malle

It’s a little early, ladies,” says Jeff Bezos, and he erupts with his signature machine-gun laugh. His fiancée, the newscaster turned helicopter pilot turned philanthropist Lauren Sánchez, has just asked Bezos to make us margaritas. It is 2 p.m. “We’ve had a long day!” she says, with a coy smile.

Indeed, Sánchez has already taken me on a helicopter tour of the vast West Texas ranch where Bezos spends holidays and launches rockets from his Blue Origin space facility. We have also descended 500 feet to the base of the so-called 10,000 Year Clock, a subterranean engineering feat envisioned by Bezos with next generations in mind. “It represents thinking about the future,” Sánchez says.

Sánchez, 53, and Bezos, 59, have their eyes trained on their own future. In May, Bezos proposed to Sánchez with a pink diamond, possibly viewable from space and definitely viewable through a paparazzo’s long lens aimed at the prow of Koru, Bezos’s three-masted sailing yacht, the largest in the world, which kicked off her maiden voyage with a newly engaged couple unabashed in their deckside canoodling. Portmanteau pending (BezChez?), the couple were seemingly everywhere this summer. You couldn’t open a tabloid without a new snap (courtesy of paparazzi or Sánchez’s Instagram) of them blissfully bobbing around Europe: Bezos emerging from the water like a Mediterranean He-Man in palm-print swim trunks, his fiancée captioning the photo “Is it just me, or is it hot outside?”; the couple flanked by security and a group of