Jeff Bezos unveils Blue Moon lunar lander, plans for huge space colonies
Excerpt:
Blue Moon was in development for three years and Bezos said Thursday that the larger variant of the lander will be able to bring Americans back to the moon by 2024. It'll be able to carry the rover that could do scientific missions and shoot off small satellites.
"It's time to go back to the moon, this time to stay," Bezos said.
The year 2024 is also the deadline the Trump administration has set for NASA to return astronauts to the surface of the moon, something Bezos referenced on stage.
Bezos isn't the only billionaire pursuing lofty space dreams. Elon Musk's SpaceX is further along in developing larger rockets for orbital space travel. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is also working on space tourism. At least in the first few years, commercial space travel is expected to be so prohibitively expensive that only the superrich will be able to use these new services.
However, Bezos said Thursday that the early work of Blue Origin should help develop an infrastructure for space that'll give millions of people access to space travel and unlock the potential of countless future entrepreneurs and artists. A major need to do this work, he said, is because the Earth is "finite," so expanding to space will become a necessity one day to ensure humanity doesn't fall into rationing and stagnation.
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"The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins," Bezos said during a Yale Club talk in February. "Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be."
Aside from these huge goals, Blue Origin this year is starting with space tourism flights, in hopes of growing its revenue and training itself for consistent flights outside Earth's orbit.
Blue Origin first announced Thursday's press event last month with a cryptic tweet including only the date and an image of the Endurance, the ship Ernest Shackleton sailed to the Antarctic as part of a failed attempt to cross the frigid continent more than a century ago.
Excerpt:
Blue Moon was in development for three years and Bezos said Thursday that the larger variant of the lander will be able to bring Americans back to the moon by 2024. It'll be able to carry the rover that could do scientific missions and shoot off small satellites.
"It's time to go back to the moon, this time to stay," Bezos said.
The year 2024 is also the deadline the Trump administration has set for NASA to return astronauts to the surface of the moon, something Bezos referenced on stage.
Bezos isn't the only billionaire pursuing lofty space dreams. Elon Musk's SpaceX is further along in developing larger rockets for orbital space travel. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is also working on space tourism. At least in the first few years, commercial space travel is expected to be so prohibitively expensive that only the superrich will be able to use these new services.
However, Bezos said Thursday that the early work of Blue Origin should help develop an infrastructure for space that'll give millions of people access to space travel and unlock the potential of countless future entrepreneurs and artists. A major need to do this work, he said, is because the Earth is "finite," so expanding to space will become a necessity one day to ensure humanity doesn't fall into rationing and stagnation.
Full story at site
"The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins," Bezos said during a Yale Club talk in February. "Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be."
Aside from these huge goals, Blue Origin this year is starting with space tourism flights, in hopes of growing its revenue and training itself for consistent flights outside Earth's orbit.
Blue Origin first announced Thursday's press event last month with a cryptic tweet including only the date and an image of the Endurance, the ship Ernest Shackleton sailed to the Antarctic as part of a failed attempt to cross the frigid continent more than a century ago.
