Jeff Bezos Envisions Amazon-Like Delivery Service For The Moon
Norman Vincent Peale once said, "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is taking that advice literally, and he's hoping the United States government will help him in his endeavor. In a proposal sent to the Trump administration, Bezos explains his interest in developing a lunar spacecraft and setting up shop near a crater at the south pole. Welcome to a world where upstart space entrepreneurship is now a thing.
The proposal Bezos sent is tied to Blue Origin, a privately funded space company he founded back in September 2000. What Bezos wants is for the government to back a shipment service to the moon that would not be unlike Amazon's shipment operations that exists on Earth. The difference is these wouldn't be shipments of smartphones and diapers to homes across the country, but deliveries of gear for experiments and cargo for habitats.
Should this come to fruition, Blue Origin would create a lander for touching down on the aforementioned crater. The landing spot is important because the south pole is where is water and near constant sunlight, the latter of which would allow scientists and researchers to tap into solar energy. The ultimate goal of all this would be to make "future human settlement" on the moon a reality.
"It is time for America to return to the Moon—this time to stay," Bezos stated in an email to The Washington Post. "A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this."
We've come a long way since first setting foot on the moon. Elon Musk recently announced that his company, SpaceX, is planning to fly two private citizens on a tourist trip around the moon by next year. It's an aggressive timeline, but if even if SpaceX is a little late, it still underscores that space travel is no longer the sole domain of NASA and other such agencies around the world.
Blue Origin doesn't anticipate flying humans right away. Instead it wants to setup a bunch of cargo shipments. It would do this through a spacecraft called the Blue Moon. It is capable of carrying up to 10,000 pounds of material an can fly on top of several different rockets, such as NASA's Space Launch System, the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V, and its own New Glenn rocket that is in development.
The proposal Bezos sent is tied to Blue Origin, a privately funded space company he founded back in September 2000. What Bezos wants is for the government to back a shipment service to the moon that would not be unlike Amazon's shipment operations that exists on Earth. The difference is these wouldn't be shipments of smartphones and diapers to homes across the country, but deliveries of gear for experiments and cargo for habitats.
Should this come to fruition, Blue Origin would create a lander for touching down on the aforementioned crater. The landing spot is important because the south pole is where is water and near constant sunlight, the latter of which would allow scientists and researchers to tap into solar energy. The ultimate goal of all this would be to make "future human settlement" on the moon a reality.
"It is time for America to return to the Moon—this time to stay," Bezos stated in an email to The Washington Post. "A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this."
We've come a long way since first setting foot on the moon. Elon Musk recently announced that his company, SpaceX, is planning to fly two private citizens on a tourist trip around the moon by next year. It's an aggressive timeline, but if even if SpaceX is a little late, it still underscores that space travel is no longer the sole domain of NASA and other such agencies around the world.
Blue Origin doesn't anticipate flying humans right away. Instead it wants to setup a bunch of cargo shipments. It would do this through a spacecraft called the Blue Moon. It is capable of carrying up to 10,000 pounds of material an can fly on top of several different rockets, such as NASA's Space Launch System, the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V, and its own New Glenn rocket that is in development.
