Jeff Bezos Wants To Have A Moon Colony Up And Running By 2023

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO and the world’s richest man, hopes to have a colony on the Moon by 2023, The Express is reporting. This would happen via his space-development company, Blue Origin.

Bezos spokesperson AC Charania, chairman of Blue Origin, said the project will be called “Blue Moon.”

“Blue Moon is on our roadmap and because of our scale, because of what we see from the government, we brought it a little bit forward in time.”

For the past few years, the space-exploration industry has had its sights set on Mars. That still remains a long-term goal, for both private investors, such as Elon Musk, as well as governments. But the community has recently turned its attention back to the Moon, 40 years after Man last stood on the surface.

The Trump administration, for example, recently announced plans to return to the Moon. As previously reported by the Inquisitr, the administration has a much less ambitious goal of putting humans on the Moon in 10 years, not five, like Bezos wants to do. And Trump wants to send robots up there first.

From a space-exploration standpoint, colonizing the Moon makes perfect sense. There are resources up there – resources that can be tapped and used for getting spacecraft, and eventually, humans, onward to Mars. In essence, the Moon could be a “pit stop” for Martian exploration.

As reported by the Inquisitr, space expert Paul D. Spudis says that the Moon’s poles should be the destination for any attempts at colonization. That’s where there’s water, which could be extracted with comparatively little effort and with minimal damage to the satellite.

Bezos’ plan is largely in line with both the Trump administration’s plans and with Spudis’ recommendations. Specifically, Bezos wants to aim for the poles, and he wants to send robots up there first.

Last May, during a talk at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, Bezos explained that he expects to send cargo and bots up there first. The bots would do the heavy lifting, so to speak, to get the Moon ready for habitation.

“There you would want to preposition a whole bunch of equipment and supplies before the humans show up and some of those things might need to be assembled on the surface of the moon and that’s the kind of thing that could be done by advanced robotics with machine learning systems on board.”

As of this writing, there is no firm date of when Bezos intends to send his first spacecraft to the Moon.