Blue Origin plans to establish a colony on the moon, with the first step in 2023, or sooner. The firm, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, confirmed in a story this week that the Blue Moon project is moving ahead with plans to land on the moon within that timeframe, as a stepping stone toward a more ambitious settlement.
Business director A.C. Charania told GeekWire at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace conference last week that “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. I think we are very excited to now implement this long-term commercial solution with NASA partnership.”
Charania said at the conference that the first step in Blue Moon is to develop the capability “to be able to land multi metric tons on the lunar surface” as “any permanent human presence on the lunar surface will require such a capability.”
It’s not the first time Blue Origin has outlined such a plan. Bezos explained in May 2017 that he believes the company should build a permanent human settlement “on one of the poles of the moon,” sending supplies initially and using “advanced robotics with machine learning systems on board” to lay the foundations for future colonization.
Bezos noted that the discovery of water ice at the moon’s poles in the last decade changes the approach to such a settlement, as scientists can use the resource to produce oxygen.