WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
Billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos unveiled on Thursday a mockup of a lunar
lander being built by his Blue Origin rocket company and touted his moon goals
in a strategy aimed at capitalizing on the Trump administration’s renewed push
to establish a lunar outpost in just five years.
The world’s richest man and
Amazon.com Inc’s chief executive waved an arm and a black drape behind him
dropped to reveal the two-story-tall mockup of the unmanned lander dubbed Blue
Moon during an hour-long presentation at Washington’s convention center, just
several blocks from the White House.
The lander will be able to
deliver payloads to the lunar surface, deploy up to four smaller rovers and
shoot out satellites to orbit the moon, Bezos told the audience, which included
NASA officials and potential Blue Moon customers.
His media event followed Vice
President Mike Pence’s March 26 announcement that NASA plans to build a space
platform in lunar orbit and put American astronauts on the moon’s south pole by
2024 “by any means necessary,” four years earlier than previously planned.
“I love this,” Bezos said of
Pence’s timeline. “We can help meet that timeline but only because we started
three years ago. It’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.”
While Bezos went out of his way
to praise Pence’s timeline, the billionaire has been the target of repeated
criticism from President Donald Trump, who has referred to him as Jeff “Bozo.”
Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which Trump has frequently targeted in his
broadsides against the news media.
In their lunar ambitions,
however, Trump and Bezos are very much in harmony. Trump in 2017 made a return
to the moon a high priority for the U.S. space program, saying a mission to put
astronauts back on the lunar surface would establish a foundation for an eventual
journey to put humans on Mars. If re-elected next year, 2024 would be Trump’s
final full year in office.
At his presentation, Bezos
unveiled a model of one of the proposed rovers, roughly the size of a golf
cart, and presented a new rocket engine called BE-7, which can blast 10,000
pounds (4,535 kg) of thrust.
BLUE ORIGIN’S AMBITIONS
Privately held Blue Origin, based
in Kent, Washington, is developing its New Shepard rocket for short space
tourism trips and a heavy-lift launch rocket called New Glenn for satellite
launch contracts. A Blue Origin executive told Reuters last month New Glenn
rocket would be ready by 2021. Bezos on Thursday said launching humans on
suborbital flights would take place later this year on New Shepard.
Blue Origin has previously
discussed a human outpost on the moon.
During his presentation, which
sounded at times more like a professorial lecture than a business plan, Bezos
did not address a specific launch schedule for the lander or a specific mission
for it.
NASA has set its sights on the
moon’s south pole, a region believed to hold enough recoverable ice water for
use in synthesizing additional rocket fuel as well as for drinking water to
sustain astronauts.
Bezos, intent on moving Blue
Origin closer to commercialization, underscored his broader vision of enabling
a future in which millions of people live and work in space. He mentioned two
important issues: reducing launch costs and using resources already in space.
“One of the most important things
we know about the moon today is that there’s water there,” Bezos said. “It’s in
the form of ice. It’s in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the
moon.”
His announcement came about two
months before the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, and he began his
presentation with video of that event.
Bezos did not address his
company’s Twitter post last month teasing the event with a picture of the ship
used by explorer Ernest Shackleton on a 1914 expedition to Antarctica. Industry
sources said the image was a likely reference to an impact crater on the lunar
south pole sharing the man’s name, raising speculation that Blue Origin’s
lander was targeting that spot.
His vision is shared by competing
billionaire-backed private space ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and aerospace
incumbents like United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing Co and
Lockheed Martin.
Source: www.reuters.com
