Jeff Bezos’ Blue Moon Lander and Utopian Future Need These Science Fiction Visions

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Moon Lander and Utopian Future Need These Science Fiction Visions

5 years ago
Anonymous $9jpehmcKty

http://www.newsweek.com/blue-origin-jeff-bezos-moon-lander-concept-video-1423101

In a Thursday presentation, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a lunar lander and announced plans, not just for a return to the moon by 2024—“this time to stay,” Bezos said—but also a utopian vision for the human colonization of space, retasked from the 1970s work of physicist Gerard K. O’Neill. Anchored in hardware, including a lunar rover (designed to stack four at a time atop the showcase lunar lander) and the chrome skeleton of a BE-7 thruster, Bezos tasked his rocket company Blue Origin with building the infrastructure for subsequent generations to fully exploit space.

“We’re going to build a road to space. And then, amazing things will happen,” Bezos said. The same causality is echoed throughout the bluntly named “Going to Space to Benefit Earth” event, which intentionally left the messy middle out of the generations between Blue Origins’ current plan, re-accomplishing the moon missions of 1969 to 1972, and Bezos’ distant ambition: spectacular space platforms housing a trillion humans.