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Billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos recently unveiled the model of a lunar lander built by his rocket company Blue Origin and extolled his goals for the moon in a strategy to capitalize on the Trump administration's new willingness to create a lunar outpost in just five years.
The world's richest man and the general manager of Amazon.com Inc. acted an arm and a black drape behind him revealed the two-story model of the unmanned undercarrier dubbed Blue Moon during of an hour presentation at the Washington Convention Center. only a few blocks from the White House.
The LG will be able to deliver payloads on the lunar surface, deploy up to four smaller rovers and launch satellites orbiting the moon, Bezos told the public, which included Nasa officials and potential customers of Blue Moon.
His media event followed the announcement on 26 March by Vice President Mike Pence that NASA was planning to build a lunar orbiting space platform and place American astronauts on the South Pole of the Moon. from here 2024 "by all means necessary" four years earlier than expected.
"I like that," said Bezos about the timeline of Pence. "We can help meet that timetable, but only because we started three years ago. It's time to return to the moon, this time to stay. While Bezos praised Pence's timeline, the billionaire has been the target of repeated criticism from President Donald Trump, who nicknamed him "Bozo." Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which Trump has frequently targeted in his reports against the media.
In their lunar ambitions, however, Trump and Bezos are very much in harmony. In 2017, Trump made the return to the moon a priority for the US space program, claiming that a mission to return astronauts to the moon's surface would lay the groundwork for a possible journey to put humans on Mars. If he was re-elected next year, 2024 would be the last full year of Trump's term.
During his presentation, Bezos unveiled the model of one of the proposed rovers, roughly the size of a golf cart, and introduced a new rocket engine called BE-7, capable of to propel a thrust of 45,000 kg.
BLUE ORIGIN'S AMBITIONS The private company Blue Origin, based in Kent, Washington, is developing its New Shepard rocket for short-haul tourism trips and a heavy-duty launch rocket called New Glenn for launch of satellites. Last month, a Blue Origin official told Reuters that the new Glenn rocket would be ready by 2021. Bezos announced Thursday that the launch of a human aircraft on suborbital flights would take place later this year. year on New Shepard.
Blue Origin has previously evoked a human outpost on the moon.
During his presentation, which sometimes looked more like a teacher's lecture than a business plan, Bezos did not address any specific launch program for the lander nor mission. specific.
NASA has set its sights on the South Pole of the Moon, a region believed to contain enough recoverable ice water to synthesize additional fuel rocket, as well as drinking water to support astronauts.
Bezos, anxious to bring Blue Origin closer to commercialization, emphasized its broader vision of creating a future in which millions of people live and work in space. He mentioned two important issues: reducing launch costs and using resources already in space.
"One of the most important things we know about the moon today is that there is water there," Bezos said. "It's in the form of ice. It is in craters permanently shaded on the poles of the moon. His announcement was made about two months before the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, and he began his presentation with a video of this event.
Last month, Bezos did not respond to his company's Twitter poster, teasing the event with a photo of the ship used by explorer Ernest Shackleton on a 1914 expedition to Antarctica. Industry sources said the image was probably a reference to an impact crater on the lunar south pole bearing the man's name, suggesting that the Blue Origin lander was targeting this location.
Its vision is shared by competing private space companies, backed by a billionaire, such as Elon Musk SpaceX, and historical operators in the aerospace sector such as United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin.
Posted in Dawn, Business and Finance Weekly, May 13, 2019
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