Jeff Bezos is going to build a colony on the surface of the moon

The richest man in the world (the current state of Bezos - $ 133 billion) has long vied with Mask on the field of space development. He annually gives $ 1 billion to his aerospace company Blue Origin, which he believes will be much better for humanity in the future than Amazon. Its short-term goal is space tourism, its long-term goal is to help ensure that the people of the future are not tied to one star system. But to make it from the Earth, according to him, will be almost impossible.

On Sunday at the Space Development conference in Los Angeles, Jeff Bezos announced his big ambitions for the moon. He says that if you try, this satellite can be an excellent platform for launching space shuttles. And for this you need to build a suitable infrastructure on it. Bezos invites NASA and ESA to cooperate, but he says that he has enough resources for such a construction even without state support.

We must fly away from this planet. We will fly away and it will make the planet better.

Bezos explains his plan

In the not too distant future - I’m talking about dozens, maybe hundreds of years - it will be much easier for us to do many things that we are now doing on Earth, in space. I'm talking about heavy industry, the movement of large loads. We will have a lot of energy.

Bezos is confident that moving the industry to the moon will help save the Earth’s resources and atmosphere. All heavy industry will move to the satellite, and will be powered by solar energy. The earth will continue to supply minerals and resources unavailable on the moon, but otherwise the lunar base will be self-sufficient.

Constant sunlight for the panels, extensive water reserves under the surface and enough regolith for building buildings (just do not breathe dust!). “It looks almost like someone deliberately putting it that way for us,” says Bezos. - “It would be a shame not to take advantage of this.

The delivery of materials for the creation of the first settlement will be carried out by the new Blue Origin - New Glenn rocket, operating on seven BE-4 rocket engines. She will be able to send five tons of payload to the lunar surface (Amazon's delivery goes to a new scale!). Testing of the rocket will begin in 2020, and the project to build a settlement on the moon will start a few years after that. By the time Jeff Bezos is counting, Blue Origin and NASA will also create a convenient module for landing and lifting from the surface of our satellite.

Similar project Ilona Mask, SpaceX Moon base

SpaceX is also dreaming about its base on the Moon. Only for a slightly different purpose. The presence of the lunar base will be a great advantage for planning and managing missions to Mars, which for Ilona Mask is still the number one priority. According to Mask, a colony on the moon would be an ideal refueling station for Big Falcon missiles before a big flight to the Red Planet. The lunar base would also become an indispensable training center for training astronauts for the subsequent flight to Mars.

Unlike SpaceX, Blue Origin does not think about Mars in the foreseeable future. The moon is still a task in itself. In March 2017, Bezos wrote :

It is time for America to return to the moon - this time to stay. A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is an extremely difficult and worthy goal. I feel that many people will be delighted with this.

One of the engines to New Glenn - according to Bezos, he will rid America of dependence on engines from Russia

By the end of the same year, the US government allowed NASA to begin again to prepare people for landing on, after 45 years of the last successful attempt made by the Apollo 17 crew. Whether Blue Origin's resources will be involved is an open question. So far, all the missiles developed by the company are strictly suborbital. But Bezos says that he will not stop on the way to his goal - until the task is achieved, or until he goes bankrupt. By the way, during the conference over the second perspective, the audience laughed, as if it were a good joke. So this option now seems unlikely. Against the background of another growth of Amazon shares, Bezos is now ahead of billionaire No. 2, Bill Gates, by almost one and a half times, from $ 133 billion against $ 93 billion.

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