Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to Race Elon Musk to the Moon

Two of America’s pioneering magnates look set to launch an informal race to return man to the Moon. Elon Musk, CEO of astronautics startup SpaceX, has already unveiled plans to venture to the Lunar surface – the last man on the moon was the recently-deceased Gene Cernan, who was part of 1972’s Apollo 17 Lunar mission – and now Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of both Amazon and rival space company Blue Origin, is proposing the establishment of Lunar trade routes to support future manned habitats on the Moon, according to the Washington Post.

“The latest to offer a proposal is Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump’s transition team about the company’s interest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy,” the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport writes. “The memo urges the space agency to back an Amazon-like shipment service for the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable “future human settlement” of the moon. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.)”

“It is time for America to return to the Moon — this time to stay,” Bezos told The Post. “A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.”

Amazon delivers pretty much everywhere else by this point. Why not the Moon, too?