Amazon's Jeff Bezos has his sites set a little further afield - the moon

9 months ago

It’s almost like there’s an arms race between businesses in terms of delivery – getting their products to customers in the quickest, easiest and most innovative way.

But now, the competition has gone one step further than just trialling drones. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is looking into deliveries to the moon.

Bezos owns the space company Blue Origin and has been circulating a white paper to Nasa leadership and Trump’s team about the company’s interest in developing basically a spacecraft that would deliver things to the moon and potentially help humans settle there.

According to the Washington Post, the memo urges Nasa to “back an Amazon-like shipment service for the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable “future human settlement” of the moon.”

So it looks like Bezos is pretty convinced that humans will be settling on the moon in the not-too-distant future, so he is keen to start testing cargo missions there.

This definitely seems to be the time to make the moves on the moon, as it looks like Trump’s administration is much more open to the idea than Obama’s was. SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced this week that by next year he will be flying two people on a tourist trip around the moon – Nasa will be providing technical expertise but no funding to this mission.

Blue Origins is almost exclusively funded by Bezos, and this is a huge bid for partnership with Nasa to develop a program that provides “incentives to the private sector to demonstrate a commercial lunar cargo delivery service.”

If Nasa do agree to partner with Blue Origins, the first mission could apparently be as early as July 2020. The company wants to use the same technology as in the suborbital rocket it has already developed called the New Shepard. The white paper also goes into detail of where the spacecraft would land on the moon, citing one location as prime because it has nearly continuous sunlight and access to water.

As strange as it might seem, Bezos seems to be applying his Amazon-mentality to human settlement on the moon. He writes in the white paper: “Blue Origin is all about cost-effective delivery of mass to the surface of the moon. Any credible first lunar settlement will require that capability.”