Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin are building a robot to explore the moon

Blue Moon is a concept for
a “large lunar lander” that Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company, Blue
Origin, plans to build and launch.

Blue
Origin

• Jeff Bezos, the richest person on
  Earth, is designing a spacecraft to land on the moon.
• Blue Origin, Bezos’ 18-year-old
  rocket company, announced the plan on Wednesday.
• Bezos has said he wants to move heavy industry off of
  Earth and into space to make “a very beautiful planet” and
  colonize space.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon — and now the richest person on Earth — is
taking another concrete step toward colonizing space.

Bezos’ 18-year-old rocket company, Blue
Origin, announced on Wednesday that it’s “in the conceptual
design phase of a large lunar lander.”

The goal of the mission, called Blue Moon, is to
land on the moon and scout it for resources like water, which
can be mined and potentially turned
into rocket fuel. The effort is also part of a larger
multi-partner competition called The Moon Race, which hopes to
spur the creation of a lunar economy (and pick up where the
Google Lunar XPRIZE
left off).

“The future will be better for our children — and our children’s
children — if we use space to benefit life on Earth and enable
millions of people to live and work in space,” Blue Origin’s
written announcement said.

Bezos is selling about $1 billion’ worth of his Amazon stock

every year to fund Blue Origin’s research and development.
That work includes building a suborbital tourism rocket called

New Shepard, as well as a much larger reusable rocket system
called
New Glenn, which is expected to debut in 2020.

Aside from Bezos’ influx of cash, Blue Origin recently won NASA
grants to develop its technologies and a contract to build powerful new BE-4 rocket engines for United
Launch Alliance’s newest rocket system,
Vulcan.

A test firing of Blue
Origin’s methane-burning BE-4 rocket engine.

Blue
Origin

Blue Origin’s announcement about the lunar lander came soon after
Elon Musk revealed that a Japanese billionaire named Yusaku
Maezawa would be SpaceX’s first moon tourist. Musk also gave new
details about his aerospace company’s Big Falcon Rocket system.

Whereas SpaceX’s primary goal is to colonize Mars, Blue Origin’s
is to move heavy industry off of Earth and into space.

Bezos
elaborated on his rationale for this during a
wide-ranging interview with Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel
Springer (Business Insider’s parent company) on April 24 in
Berlin.

“I believe and I get increasing conviction with every passing
year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important
work I’m doing,” Bezos told Döpfner. “We will move all heavy
industry off of Earth, and Earth will be zoned residential and
light industry. It will basically be a very beautiful planet.”

Bezos added: “The solar system can easily support a trillion
humans. And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand
Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited — for all
practical purposes — resources and solar power and so on. That’s
the world that I want my great-grandchildren’s
great-grandchildren to live in.”

Read Blue Origin’s full announcement

Here is the full email announcement that Blue Origin sent on
Wednesday, which included an illustration of the Blue Moon
spacecraft (shown at the top of this story).

Hi There,

Moving heavy industry from Earth into space is at the core of
Blue Origin’s mission. The future will be better for our children
– and our children’s children – if we use space to benefit life
on Earth and enable millions of people to live and work in
space.

The next logical step in this path is a return to the moon. To do
this we need reusable access to the lunar surface and its
resources. Were in the conceptual design phase of a large lunar
lander that will provide that access called Blue Moon.

We are not alone in our drive to return to the moon, and there
have been some exciting updates this week at the 69^th
Annual International Astronautical Congress in Bremen,
Germany.

Blue has joined leading space companies and agencies to support
the creation of
The Moon Race, a non-profit working to launch a competition
for teams looking for a ride to the lunar surface. The goal is
consistent with our aim to land large payloads on the moon that
can access and utilize the resources found there. We’re
supporting this initiative, along with ESA, Airbus, and other
entities seeking to foster the next generation of lunar
exploration – with Blue Moon and New Glenn.

Were also excited to announce a collaboration with OHB SE and MT
Aerospace on a
future Blue Moon mission.

Check out our tweets about
The Moon Race and
OHB announcements for more information.

Gradatim Ferociter!