Jeff Bezos' Blue Origins To Pay The Way For Amazon In Space

Elon Musk can have his Mars. Jeff Bezos wants the Moon instead. Actually he wants the moon and everything that will go back and forth in between. At the International Space Development Conference last Friday, the Amazon CEO laid out his grand vision for all his space travel investments. And while part of it includes setting up lunar settlements, his ultimate, and almost unspoken, goal is to reduce the cost of carrying cargo to and from Earth, the Moon, and other space stations. In other words, Amazon Space Prime.

Musk's SpaceX and Bezos' Blue Origin have been racing each other in the space travel industry. But while SpaceX's ambitions are more grandiose, Blue Origin's plans strike closer to home, literally and figuratively. It's reusable rockets, for one, have only flown into sub-orbital space and hasn't even reached altitudes that will take it closer to the moon.

In an interview with Geekwire, Bezos argues that his plans are also more achievable in the short-term than a full blown Mars colonization. Blue Origins is inviting NASA into a public-private partnership to build a lunar lande but will do that on its own if necessary. Bezos sees the moon as a "match made in heaven" for mining resources for oxygen and even rocket fuel.

That said, the moon is really more of a pit stop for what Bezos is proposing: space stations for heavy industry. That would remove the stress being put on the Earth by such plants and factories, leaving the planet free for residential and light industrial use. He doesn't talk about how waste will be handled in the darkness of space.

Ultimately, Blue Origin's goal is to make the transport of cargo more economical. It's not as interested in setting up colonies as it is in supporting both the construction and the maintenance of such colonies by carrying cargo between these locations. Which is pretty much what makes Jeff Bezos one of the richest men on Earth.