Jeff Bezos is popularly known for being the founder of Amazon and, by transitive property, the richest man on the planet. Like Elon Musk, Mr. Bezos does not conform to worldly things. He is also the founder of Blue Origin, a company that develops space vehicles. His first model, the New Sheppard (named after Alan Sheppard, the first American astronaut to reach space) is a reusable sub-orbital rocket that aims to transport tourists and conduct research in microgravity. New Sheppard has flown 11 times without a hitch.
Yesterday afternoon, in a highly choreographed event, Bezos announced its infrastructure plan for lunar colonization, supported by its next-generation rocket called
New Glenn, who will compete with the
Falcon Heavy of SpaceX for the transport of heavy loads to terrestrial orbit and other destinations in the solar system.
New Sheppard and New Glenn
A few weeks after NASA announced an open call for the development of lunar and cis-lunar infrastructure (in the space surrounding the moon), Blue Origin presented
Blue Moon, a
Lander (lander) capable of depositing between 4 and 7 tons of equipment on the lunar surface, capacities much higher than those of any concept presented or developed until today.
The new private space race, led by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, beyond being competitive, is showing signs of complementarity; Where SpaceX’s efforts are focused on Mars and the transport of large volumes of people, while Blue Origin has targeted the moon and the creation of habitability conditions in it.
During his presentation, Bezos threw a subtle dart at SpaceX, arguing that Elon Musk’s vision of establishing a colony on Mars would be impractical.
The CEO of Amazon suggested building space colonies in the orbit of different celestial bodies of our solar system to migrate industrial and mining operations of the earth and thus mitigate the harmful effects that these types of operations have on our Planet.
Contrary to what until very little was thought, the human expansion in the solar system will not be led by governmental agencies like NASA or Roscosmos, but by private initiatives of technological entrepreneurs that are not limited by the bureaucracy and Risk aversion of these organisms that had their origin during the Cold War.
