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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.
This is just another one of Bezos's "MEE TOO, MEE TOO LOOOK AT MEEEE" moments because he knows that his Blue Origin realisations are far behind Space-X's and will be falling even further behind unless Space-X has another problem.
2017 should be the year that Space-X:
- Returns to Space with a launch every 2-3 weeks
- Finishes and begins launching it's incremental development of Falcon-9 with Falcon-9 Block 5 with much better reusability
- Launches FH
- Relaunches it's first recovered first stage
- Starts launching the Man rated Dragon-2
Meanwhile, Blue-Origin has yet to finish it's first Orbital launcher. Bezos has always had visions of grandeur far beyond the real means of Blue Origin. This is just another example. Stop with the grandiose plans and starts launching if you want to be taken seriously.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I remember when so many people on slashdot and reddit argued that it was impossible for a private company to launch anything into orbit because of the cost and the technical requirements were only in the scope of the largest governments like the US, Russia, Japan and China. That was maybe 7+ years ago. More recently I've read that, yeah, private companies can get to orbit, but they'll never venture beyond Earth orbit because there is no profit in it.
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Once you are in orbit, you are 60% of the way to the surface of the moon (soft landing) and pretty much anywhere else in the solar system.
It may be technically possible to get to the Moon in three years, but it would take a truly massive investment to do so. I don't think that private entities exist that could put forward that kind of investment with little chance of return, and Republicans tend to balk at large spending increases unless they're military. I could see Trump wanting this due to his ego, but I don't think he could get congress on his side for this kind of massive endeavor.
My understanding is the ULA (Lockheed, Boeing, etc.) has tagged Blue Origin to provide the BE-4 engine to be their answer to a reusable vertical landing capable rocket engine the need to compete with SpaceX, and it is supposed to be ready to go in three years. That is still a bit behind similar SpaceX plans and my bet would be that their schedule will slip from planned but it's still anybodies guess how far. Blue Origin did start this rocket engine back in 2011, but didn't mention it publicly till 2014.