“It’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.” Billionaire Jeff Bezos announced his plans for space colonization on Thursday, starting with the moon. The world's richest man revealed the plans for the secretive project from his spaceflight company, Blue Origin, and announced his plan to create the building blocks for interplanetary travel and settlement. "We're going to build a road to space," Bezos said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday afternoon, adding that he doesn't know how the colonies would be built but there are "certain gates, certain precursors" that would need to be established to ultimately meet that goal and Blue Origin was going to lead the way. One key piece of infrastructure is "Blue Moon," the company's lunar lander, which has been in the works for three years, a jeans and blazer-clad Bezos said. “It’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay,” Bezos said, as a part of a rambling, long-winded talk about space, which planets are best (Earth), and comparing Amazon Prime deliveries to space payloads. The Amazon founder was referring to comments by Vice President Mike Pence, who said it is the mission of the United States to return Americans to space in the next five years. 'It’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.' Despite repeatedly praising Earth as "the best planet," Bezos identified pressing problems such as hunger, poverty, pollution and rampant energy use -- and said he intends to focus on finding solutions for long-range problems before they become "urgent problems." His inspiration? American physicist Gerard O'Neill, who became interested in the idea of space colonization in 1969. Bezos extolled his belief in the idea that humans could live in environments that were ideal and create colonies where heavy industry can be carried out without subjecting the earth to atmospheric pollution. He also did refer to coming back to Earth. 'Earth is the best planet. It is not even close. Don’t even get me started on Venus' “Earth is the best planet. It is not even close. Don’t even get me started on Venus," Bezos said. The Amazon founder identified two initial goals that Blue Origin would focus on: a radical reduction in launch costs and establishing resources for space. Like Elon Musk's SpaceX, Blue Origin has focused on reusable rockets. Blue Origin would begin by sending human's into space in 2019 on New Shepard -- a suborbital vehicle designed for space tourism -- which uses liquid hydrogen, an incredibly efficient fuel source. “We’re going to be flying humans in New Shepherd this year," Bezos said.<doc-sep>Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has unveiled an unmanned Moon lander and a new rocket engine developed by his Blue Origin space program with an eye toward getting in on the ground floor of space colonization. The two-story unmanned 'Blue Moon' lander can carry up to four smaller rovers and several satellites, Bezos said, showing off a mockup of the module at a media event in Washington. He hopes to make Blue Moon NASA's go-to for delivering payloads to the Moon's surface, part of a concerted effort to involve his company in constructing the basic infrastructure on which the Moon colonies of the future will depend. "We are going to build a road to space," Bezos told the audience. "And then amazing things will happen." Bezos is talking about building enormous, rotating habitats in space that can hold upwards of a million people. Some would be cities, some would be natural parks, he said. pic.twitter.com/QHeqN0gz7M — Jacqueline Klimas (@jacqklimas) May 9, 2019 The billionaire shared some of his big ideas about the future of space, describing rotating "habitats" equipped with artificial gravity and plant life and hosting over a million people, and blamed the high cost of celestial experimentation for the fact that despite centuries of dreaming, humanity remains earthbound. But this can't happen today "because the price of admission to do things in space is just too high." Not enough infrastructure, he says. — Jacqueline Klimas (@jacqklimas) May 9, 2019 "My generation's job is to build the infrastructure," Bezos said, suggesting Blue Origin could drive down the costs of space exploration just like Amazon drove down the costs of online retail (at the cost of poor working conditions and low wages). Describing the myriad problems facing Earth, he envisioned a future in which Blue Origin would rescue humanity from a polluted, overpopulated and energy-starved planet. While humanity waits to be uplifted, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket will take tourists on short space-tourism journeys – at $300,000 per ride – starting later this year. Its New Glenn rocket is being developed for satellite launches and is expected to debut in 2021, and the new rocket engine Bezos unveiled, the BE-7, is capable of 4,535kg of thrust. Blue Origin is no stranger to collaborations with NASA – the company received $13 million last year to develop technology for the lander as part of a 'Space Act Agreement' – but Bezos wants the government to work with Blue Origin to build the infrastructure future space colonies will rely upon. With Vice President Mike Pence now determined to build a space platform in lunar orbit and put American astronauts on the south pole of the Moon by 2024, Bezos made a direct appeal to the administration to accept his help in meeting that deadline. To help the deal along, his Washington Post published an article on Thursday focusing on NASA's missed deadlines and blown budgets in its own attempts to return to the Moon that presented Blue Origin as the obvious answer to the government's fiscal space woes. Also on rt.com WaPo journalists ask for benefits after Bezos sinks $5.25mn into self-congratulatory Super Bowl ad It's unclear what will happen if any other countries attempt to get their hands on some of that sweet Moon real estate, since the Outer Space Treaty prevents anyone from owning a piece of the Moon or any other planet outside Earth, but one thing is clear – the Blue Moon lander will be perfect for delivering their Amazon Prime orders. Like this story? 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Forward-looking: Billionaire Jeff Bezos spent an hour on Thursday outlining his vision for the future of his space startup Blue Origin as well as humanity. He wants his company to build the infrastructure that will one day allow future generations to colonize space. At a speech in Washington, Jeff Bezos revealed Blue Moon — a huge lunar lander that can transport 3.6 tons of cargo to the Moon’s surface. The craft has been in development for three years and will be used to shuttle scientific equipment and other payloads, maybe even humans. The Blue Moon will be powered by Blue Origin’s new BE-7 engine, which is capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust. Engineers will be test firing the BE-7 for the first time in West Texas sometime this summer. Bezos indicated that he is behind sending people up as well. Regarding US Vice President Mike Pence’s goal of having humans on the Moon by 2024, the Amazon head said he was all for it. “I love this,” he told the DC crowd. “It’s the right thing to do. 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.” He said that if they equipped the Blue Moon with “stretch tanks” it would be able to transport an additional 2.9 tons of cargo. The extra space would be enough for a “crewed ascent vehicle.” The Washington Post notes that Bezos did not indicate whether he would be seeking contracts from NASA for payload deliveries, but considering that he is reportedly burning through about a billion dollars per year on Blue Origin, contract requests seem likely. However, Bezos stopped short of saying we should colonize the Moon. His vision is to build colonies called O’Neill cylinders, named for their creator Gerard O’Neill. These free-floating colonies are made up of two counter-rotating cylinders as to cancel out gyroscopic effects that would knock them out of alignment to the sun. Each tube would be five miles in diameter and twenty miles long. The rotation would provide artificial gravity and energy would be supplied via solar panels on the tubes’ exterior. Bezos imagines a million people living in each cylinder in climate-controlled utopias. “This is Maui on its best day all year long,” he said. “No rain. No earthquakes. People are going to want to live here.” Of course, this is not likely something that Bezos can finish in his lifetime. He said his job is to “build the road” that could lead to such colonization. The only two obstacles he sees are the costs associated with entering space and discovering ways to utilize off-planet resources. Both problems are priority items that Blue Origin has been working toward with the New Shepard launch system and the Blue Moon lander. He believes that if we can build the infrastructure, future generations can accomplish almost anything in space.