Jeff Bezos Reveals Lunar Lander For NASA’s Moon Mission 2024

Jeff Bezos can’t beat Elon Musk to Mars but will beat him to the moon.

The chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin on Thursday unveiled “Blue Moon,” his company’s robotic lunar lander, which will ferry the supplies and construction materials needed to build the U.S.’ first manned lunar base. Bezos also revealed a model of his company’s small lunar rover.

"This vehicle is going to the Moon," said Bezos of Blue Moon during an exclusive presentation to select media and space industry executives as he revealed a same size model of the massive lander.

With a huge monitor showing an animated video of Blue Moon, Bezos ticked-off the specs and capabilities of his robotic lander. He revealed Blue Origin has been working on the moon lander for the past three years.

He described Blue Moon as “a very large lander” that can soft land, in a precise way, 3.6 metric tons on the lunar surface. Stretch variants of Blue Moon can land 6.5 metric tons. He claims this machine can transport a great variety of payloads, including four of Blue Origin’s small lunar rovers.

Blue Moon will be powered by a high performance liquid hydrogen engine, which will help a lot when landing on the moon. Bezos also said resorting to liquid hydrogen as a fuel will allow them to derive hydrogen from the water on the Moon for refueling.

Blue Moon will use Lidar to detect surface features on the moon to land safely. It aims to support the U.S. government's bid to return to the moon by 2024. NASA's Moon Mission will be exploring the moon's south pole. Its target will be the Shackleton Crater, which is believed to have huge deposits of frozen water and has been identified as a prime site for a lunar base.

“I love this,” Bezos said of vice president Mike Pence’s moon mission timeline. “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.”

NASA now sees a lunar mission as the pathway to other beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) destinations such as Mars and the outer planets in the solar system. Boeing’s much delayed Space Launch System (SLS) will take Blue Moon to the Moon.

During his presentation, Bezos also talked about his grand, multigenerational vision of one day building enormous space colonies close to Earth as a way of expanding humanity to a trillion people. He wants to to use Blue Origin, and Blue Moon, in the first effort to attain this grandiose vision.

Bezos pointed out Blue Origin work should help develop an infrastructure for space that'll give millions of people access to space travel while unlocking the potential of countless future entrepreneurs and artists. This job needs to be done because the Earth is "finite."

"The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins," said Bezos during a talk last February. "Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be."