Jeff Bezos unveils the lunar lander Blue Moon and plans to create huge space colonies

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, unveiled Thursday a lander for the new moon, Blue Moon, accompanied by a smaller rover.

"It's an incredible vehicle and it's going on the moon," Bezos said at a press conference held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, where he was standing in front of the new LG. on the scene.

At the event, Bezos, the world's richest person according to Forbes, described a grand, multigenerational vision of creating a day of huge space colonies near the Earth, as a means of 39, expand humanity to one billion people. This concept, devised by the physicist Gerard O Neill in 1975, was evoked by Bezos during some interviews during the past year. He is looking to use Blue Origin and the new LG as the first steps in this effort.

"It's Maui at its best day all year – no rain, no storms, no earthquakes," he said about these future space colonies, though He then added that it would be up to future generations to build these gigantic structures. He described these science fiction concepts to a relatively small audience, consisting of a hundred or more people, while he was walking through the scene wearing a gray jacket and a jeans. The dark ballroom was bathed in blue light and the walls decorated with twinkling stars.

Blue Moon has been in development for three years and Bezos said Thursday that the biggest variant of the LG will be able to bring Americans back to the moon by 2024. She will be able to carry the rover capable of flying. perform scientific missions and shoot small satellites.

"It's time to return to the moon, this time to stay," said Bezos.

The year 2024 is also the deadline set by the Trump administration at NASA to send astronauts back to the moon's surface, which Bezos has referenced on stage.

Bezos is not the only billionaire to pursue big space dreams. Elon Musk's SpaceX is developing larger rockets for orbital space travel. Virgin Galactic by Richard Branson is also working on space tourism. At least in the early years, the cost of commercial space travel should be so prohibitive that only the super-operator can use these new services.

However, Bezos said Thursday that Blue Origin's early work should help develop an infrastructure for space that will give millions of people access to space travel and unlock the potential of space. Countless future entrepreneurs and artists. A major need to do this work, he said, is that the Earth is "finished", so expanding the space will become a necessity to ensure that humankind do not fall into rationing and stagnation.

"The solar system can support a trillion humans, and we would then have 1,000 Mozart and 1,000 Einstein," Bezos said during an interview at the Yale Club in February. "Think how incredible and dynamic this civilization will be."

In addition to these huge goals, Blue Origin is starting flights this year with space tourism, hoping to increase revenues and train for regular flights out of Earth's orbit.

Last month, Blue Origin announced Thursday's press conference with an encrypted tweet containing only the date and an image of Stamina. The ship Ernest Shackleton went to Antarctica as part of an unsuccessful attempt to cross the icy continent more than a century ago.

Seeking to inspire the next generation to continue the development of space, Bezos announced the establishment of the Club for the Future, which will focus on space-related activities for kindergarten youth to grade 12 The first rows of the event included dozens of kids who were the inaugural members of the new club.

The rare public appearance of Bezos as founder of a space start-up comes at a pivotal moment for Blue Origin. Last week, she launched and laid for the fifth time one of her New Shepard suborbital rockets, bringing the company closer to its goal of reliably developing rockets reliably to make space travel much more accessible.

In addition, Blue Origin has stated several times in recent months that it was intended to launch a new character in New Shepard for the first time later this year, thus paving the way for customers who pay to make the experience of microgravity.

The Bezos company is also building a larger rocket, New Glenn, that will compete with orbital class rockets like the SpaceX Falcon 9 for commercial satellites and other large payloads.

Blue Origin is rapidly expanding its footprint at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it manufactures New Glenn on land leased to NASA. The first launch of the big rocket of Blue Origin could take place from 2021.

As part of this space race, SpaceX, Amazon and others plan to send into orbit thousands of satellites that will one day be able to transmit broadband Internet to millions of people around the world. The SpaceX system calls Starlink and that of Amazon, which was revealed for the first time last month, is dubbed the Kuiper project. At the same time, Blue Origin is working with the satellite operator Telesat on another Internet satellite project.

Over the past year, Bezos has spoken in public at a number of notable gatherings, including a Wired Conference in San Francisco, the Economic Club in Washington DC, and the Yale Club in New York. Yet he has rarely organized his own press events in recent years. One of the last times he spoke for his own announcement was in 2014 for the failed Fire phone.

Next month, he is scheduled to speak at his new MARS Science and Technology Conference in Las Vegas.

His appearance in Washington Thursday comes after a difficult start to the year with his divorce of his long-time wifeMacKenzie quickly turned into a stupid tabloid controversy that accused him of accusing the National Enquirer of blackmail.

Originally released at 14:02
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