Today, Blue Origin—the private spaceflight company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—officially revealed Blue Moon, the company's lunar lander designed for towing cargo—scientific payloads or humans—to and from the moon. At the event, Blue Origin's Founder Jeff Bezos opened things up at the Washington, DC Convention Center by giving a pretty grim outlook for continued energy consumption on Earth, and instead pondered another plan. Instead of going to a distant planet that's too far away, what if we built our own planets, or as Bezos called them, "O'Neill Worlds," named after physicist and space activist Gerard O'Neill. "This is going to take a long time," said Bezos at the announcement. "How are we going to build O'Neill colonies? I don't know and no one in this room knows. But we need gateways." This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. After this strange, realistic pitch for an Elysium sequel, Bezos gave a first glimpse at how Blue Origin plans to achieve this far-fetched dream: the Blue Moon lunar lander. Bezos said the lander will be able to transport between 3.6 to 6.5 tons of cargo and will run on liquid hydrogen. This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. Will be powered by the BE-7 Engine. It will be fired for the first time this summer. pic.twitter.com/S0LWGZwKGD — Matt Blitz (@WhyBlitz) May 9, 2019 In addition, Bezos provided details on the engine that will power the lander—the BE-7 engine, which will be test fired for the first time this summer. In a digital recreation of Blue Moon in action, also revealed at today's event, it appears the lander comes equipped with several robotic helpers, including a lunar rover built for exploring the moon's surface. Blue Origin also announced that Blue Moon would be ready to ferry human cargo as early as 2024. Animation of Blue Moon deploying a lunar rover. "Jeff laid out a rational reason to do this. That's what's been lacking," said Greg Johnson, head of the New Shepard program and retired NASA astronaut told Popular Mechanics at the event. "Everyone's been putting the pieces together, step by step this is what we have to do. My hope is that it makes everyone enthusiastic for a private/public partnership that gets us back to the moon." All of this lunar news follows several weeks of speculation about Blue Origin’s potential moon exploration, spurred by a mysterious tweet in April showing a photo of a ship belonging to legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton. Blue Origin's ambitious lunar arrival fits nicely with NASA's new directive from Vice President Mike Pence to return astronauts to the moon by 2024, a mission which Bezos says he "loves," saying "it's time to go back to the moon—this time to stay." For NASA, the leading idea is the space agency's proposed Gateway project, an ISS-like space station that will host up to four astronauts held in cis-lunar orbit. Companies like Lockheed Martin have pitched landers adjusted for this tight deadline and other international partners will help build the station. In April, William H. Gerstenmaier, Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA, told Popular Mechanics that "the Gateway was designed to be adaptable for different roles and we believe its architecture and capabilities can support the new timeline." But an orbital space station so far from home will need as much help as it can get. We're not sure if Amazon will partner with NASA to help support future lunar missions, but a dedicated cargo lander that runs on liquid hydrogen seems like a worthwhile tool to have in your arsenal. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io<doc-sep>Amazon boss, Blue Origin founder and world's richest man Jeff Bezos has pulled the wraps off his latest project: a lunar lander, which he hopes will help put humans back on the moon by 2024 – and beyond. The lander, named Blue Moon, will have two variants: the one Bezos presented on stage, which will be able to carry a payload of 3.6 metric tons to the lunar surface, and another that can carry 6.5 metric tons and will be suitable for carrying humans. Blue Moon will blast off aboard New Glenn – Blue Origin's next generation rocket – and will be feature a new descent engine specially designed for carrying hefty loads to the moon. This engine powered by liquid hydrogen, which could be harvested from the moon's deposits of polar ice. To go boldly, and affordably Unlike Elon Musk, whose main focus with his company SpaceX is colonizing Mars, Bezos says that mankind's future is firmly on Earth, and the reason for exploring space is to improve life for everyone back on terra firma. He says the moon is the key to expanding our reach into space. He suggests that by using the ice at its poles to create rocket fuel, then taking advantage of its low gravity to get into orbit, we could drastically reduce the resources needed to travel further, thereby slashing costs and making more ambitious missions feasible. Before that can happen, though, the moon needs infrastructure, so Blue Moon is designed to carry all kinds of materials and objects, with customizable fittings for different payloads. It will also be able to handle landing on steep inclines, and the use of hydrogen rather than solar power means it'll be able to keep operating during the long lunar nights. Via Blue Origin<doc-sep>WASHINGTON — Blue Origin is shooting for the moon! The private spaceflight company revealed the first life-size mockup of its new lunar lander, named "Blue Moon," here at the Washington Convention Center today (May 9). "This is an incredible vehicle, and it’s going to the moon," Blue Origin founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos told a room full of spectators after the curtain dropped to reveal the big, shiny spacecraft. Blue Moon is designed to carry rovers and other large payloads to the lunar surface, but it could also take astronauts to the moon, said Bezos, who also founded Amazon.com and is the richest person in the world. To modify Blue Moon for a crewed spaceflight, the company would top the spacecraft with an attachable, pressurized ascent vehicle. Before launching astronauts to the moon, Blue Origin would first test out the lunar lander with an uncrewed mission, Bezos said. While Bezos did not explicitly state that Blue Origin plans to offer its new vehicle to NASA for the agency's ambitious push to land American astronauts on the moon in 2024, a newly posted description on the company's website states that the crew-carrying variant of Blue Moon "has been designed to land an ascent vehicle that will allow us to return Americans to the moon by 2024." (Blue Origin representatives had mentioned Blue Moon before, but they hadn't given us a good look until today.) Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: Blue Origin) Image 2 of 4 (Image credit: Blue Origin) Image 3 of 4 (Image credit: Blue Origin) Image 4 of 4 (Image credit: Blue Origin) NASA has not yet selected a lander for that historic trip, so Blue Moon may be a contender. Just last month, Lockheed Martin revealed its proposed plans to build a lunar lander. Lockheed's lander (which has yet to receive a proper name) would be part of the company's "early Gateway" infrastructure for a sustainable human presence on the moon. Whether NASA astronauts can really make it to the moon by 2024 is still a subject of debate, but a few things are certain: private companies and other space agencies around the world are gearing up for a new wave of lunar exploration, and Blue Origin has entered the new moon race.<doc-sep>
Half a century after humans first set foot on the lunar surface, the world’s richest man has revealed a huge new lunar lander that he says will return humanity to the moon by 2024. Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon and founder of the spaceflight company Blue Origin, unveiled the latter company’s Blue Moon lander on Thursday at a flashy press event in Washington. The Blue Moon lander resembles a bigger, boxier cousin of the lunar modules used during NASA's Apollo program. Blue Origin The four-legged lander could carry two to four passengers and has an upper deck designed to hold different types of cargo. Its liquid hydrogen-powered rocket engine generates 10,000 pounds of thrust, according to the company. Fully loaded with fuel, it weighs about 33,000 pounds and has a payload capacity of up to 6.5 metric tons, or more than 14,000 pounds. That’s enough to carry four large lunar landers at once, Bezos said. “This is an incredible vehicle, and it’s going to the moon,” he said. The spidery-looking spacecraft resembles a bigger, boxier cousin of the iconic Apollo lunar modules that landed 12 NASA astronauts on the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its four landing pads, though, are noticeably smaller — something Bezos pointed out during the event. “I was sure that those landing pads were too small,” he said. “And I asked about that, and the answer is these are not too small. The ones on the lunar Apollo lander are too big because we were very worried about how soft the lunar surface was.” The lander will likely ride aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, a 313-foot-tall booster that is still in development. It will be equipped with radio and laser-based communications gear, as well as a LiDAR system that uses laser beams to scan the lunar surface and guide the craft to its landing site. In addition to landing humans and cargo on the moon, the lander will be able to deploy small moon-orbiting satellites during its descent to the lunar surface, according to Bezos. Blue Origin hasn’t revealed any specific launch dates for Blue Moon, but Bezos said the hydrogen-powered BE-7 rocket motor would be test-fired for the first time this summer. He said the Blue Moon lander is part of his broader vision of future generations living off Earth in orbiting space colonies. He's not the only billionaire with lofty space ambitions. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is designing an interplanetary vehicle known as Starship that he hopes will be used to one day colonize Mars. SpaceX is also planning to fly the first private passenger, a Japanese billionaire, on a mission around the moon in 2023. Under direction from the Trump administration, NASA is aiming to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 and is developing a skyscraper-size rocket, known as the Space Launch System, to fly beyond Earth's orbit. An uncrewed test flight of the rocket is tentatively scheduled for 2020, but the booster's development is already three years delayed and has been plagued by budget issues. Want more stories about space? SIGN UP FOR THE MACH NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM.