If Jeff Bezos has his way, we'll be getting Amazon Prime deliveries on the moon in the not so distant future. The Amazon magnate and owner of aerospace company Blue Origin announced that he wants to enable "future human settlement" of the moon by transporting goods and people to a lunar colony.
"It is time for America to return to the moon—this time to stay," Bezos told The Washington Post. "A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this."
The Post obtained a "proprietary and confidential" white paper that outlines the proposed delivery service. (It's no surprise the Bezos-owned Post got the scoop.) Amazon has been distributing the white paper to NASA leadership and members of the Trump administration, urging NASA to make "incentives to the private sector to demonstrate a commercial lunar cargo delivery service."
Bezos predicted the delivery service could be up and running by mid-2020. However, Bezos is competing in the private space race against Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire and SpaceX owner whose desire is to colonize Mars.
"Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission," Bezos said in an email to The Post. "I'm excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen."
A lunar settlement is a bold objective, especially as the news follows days after a glitch in Amazon servers' code caused a $150 million outage that brought down many sites and services across the internet. After all, the stakes are much higher in space.
