Amazon Joins the Lunar Race with the Unveiling of ‘Blue Moon’

Jeff Bezos, the richest man of the world and the head of space company Blue Origin has recently announced his intent to participate in the new race to the Moon, as he unveiled the lunar lander named ‘Blue Moon’ and announced that it would be used to transport equipment and also human beings to the Moon by 2024.

Jeff Bezos, who heads both Amazon and space company Blue Origin, in his presentation introduced Blue Moon as an incredible vehicle as he declared, “It’s an incredible vehicle, and it will go to the Moon”. The vehicle is capable of carrying scientific instruments and also rovers for humans.

The goal of the vehicle, which has been developed in the past three years, is to land on the Moon’s south pole, which is known for ice. Water there can be exploited to produce hydrogen, which in turn could fuel future exploration of the solar system.

Blue Moon, weigh more than three metric tons and is capable of carrying 3.6 tons of equipment and fuel to the lunar surface. Four legs support the vehicle, with its upper deck, which can be utilized, to fix its equipment can be fixed. A large tank of full of liquefied nitrogen fuel occupies the central part of the vehicle.

55-year-old Bezos, though has not announced any specific date for the first launch of the project, assured that the lander would be in ready as per the timeline announced by President Donald Trump and that is by 2024.

He said, “We can help make that timeline, but only because we started three years ago. It’s time to go back to the Moon, this time to stay”.

He also outlined his broader vision to build an infrastructure on the Moon that would sustain the colonization of space by future generations of humans and shift all the polluting industries off the Earth.

This would also involve the construction of an artificial world in space, inspired by designs that were first proposed by the late physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, who is one of Bezos’s heroes, with an intention to give humanity an escape route in case of limited resources on Earth.

Blue Origin is presently working on two other major projects namely the New Shepard, which is a suborbital rocket with the capacity to fly tourists into space and New Glenn, a heavy lift, which is partly a reusable launch rocket. The New Shepard rocket has made its maiden trial into space last year, achieving a height of 66 miles in April 2018.