science

Blue Origin: Bezos company aims to take people to moon by 2024


The tech billionaires’ space race is heating up.

Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin, aims to take people to the moon by 2024, he announced on Thursday.

The company owned by the billionaire Amazon executive has been pushing to establish a lunar base for humans within the next five years.

On Thursday, it made that goal public with the announcement of its new Blue Moon lander, an unmanned aircraft that can carry up to 6.5 metric tons for landing on the moon, allowing it to lay the framework for future human missions. The company has been developing the technology for three years, Bezos said.

“We have been given a gift – this nearby body called the moon,” Bezos said, listing factors that make the moon a good target for space travel, including its proximity to earth, low gravity and ice content.

Eric Berger
(@SciGuySpace)

Meet the Blue Moon lander. pic.twitter.com/R2nnFmVhdY


May 9, 2019

Blue Origin touted the announcement as a chance to “share our vision of going to space to benefit Earth”.

In addition to announcing the moon lander, Bezos spoke at the event about his hopes to create floating spacecraft for human colonies in the future, an idea he has touted in the past. He shared mock-ups of O’Neill cylinders, conceptual space colonies proposed by the physicist Gerard O’Neill that would rotate to simulate gravity and be able to sustain human and plant life.

“This is Maui on its best day, all year long,” Bezos said. “No rain. No earthquakes. People are going to want to live here.”

Blue Origin has conducted several successful launches of a reusable rocket. Blue Origin has previously said it could have the technology to carry tourists by the end of the year.

The news comes as Elon Musk also develops plans to bring humans to Mars with his company SpaceX. Musk previously set the first cargo-carrying Mars mission for 2022 and a crewed mission for 2024.





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