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Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin To Offer 'Amazon-Like' Moon Delivery By 2020 (geekwire.com)
Less than a week after Elon Musk's SpaceX announced it would soon offer space tourists a cruise around the moon, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has announced that he would be launching an Amazon-like service shipping supplies, experiments, and crew to the Moon by 2020. From a report: Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space venture has proposed sending a robotic lander to the moon's south polar region by 2020, as an initial step toward an "Amazon-like" lunar delivery system and eventually a permanently inhabited moon base. The report says the company's seven-page proposal, dated Jan. 4, has been circulating among NASA's leadership and President Donald Trump's transition team. It's only one of several proposals aimed at turning the focus of exploration beyond Earth orbit to the moon and its environs during Trump's term.
Last I checked, Blue Origin was strictly suborbital right now. Do they really expect to go from suborbital to lunar surface in only three years???
Or are they planning on getting to Earth orbit atop someone else's boosters, and going the rest of the way on their own?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's the three year timeframe that makes it ridiculous.
I'm not saying anything about who makes the rockets, but rather who pays for the investment. There just aren't private groups who can realistically pay the likely hundreds of billions of dollars that such a project would cost, for essentially zero commercial benefit.