Billionaire Jeff Bezos unveils concept lunar lander and plans for orbital space colonies in Blue Origin presentation
If the first Space Race in 1950s and 60s was Cold War politics with hostility disguised as exploration, the second Space Race, which we are living through now, currently appears to be a battle of the bank accounts. The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, founder of online retailing behemoth Amazon, yesterday revealed that his plans for growing space venture Blue Origin include an uncrewed landing near the moon’s South Pole by 2024, with a view to setting up permanent colonies. He also spoke of plans to build orbital “space colonies” housed in rotating cylinders with simulated gravity, accommodation and vegetation.
Blue Origin is already a player in the private space sector, competing with fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX and has been developing its vertical takeoff and landing New Shepard spacecraft for some years: it first flew in 2015, and is planned to undertake its first crewed flight this year. New Shepard is a suborbital vehicle, but the company plans to launch a larger vehicle, New Glenn, in the near future (both spacecraft are named after early US astronauts; Bezos has already announced that New Glenn’s successor will be called New Armstrong).
In yesterday’s announcement, details of which were kept confidential prior to the event, with only a cryptic picture of Edwardian explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance surrounded by ice as a “trailer” as a clue to what it might be, Bezos unveiled the design of a lunar lander called Blue Moon which, he said, will be able to take a 6.5 metric tonne payload, initially comprising scientific equipment – and eventually including humans – to the lunar surface by 2024. The Shackleton link turned out to be a clue to the planned landing site: the Shackleton Crater, near the moon’s South Pole. Shackleton is potentially interesting as a landing site because it is believed to house deposits of water ice in its shadowed areas. In 2017 Blue Origin detailed its plans to land at Shackleton in a submission to a Congressional subcommittee on space, although Bezos did not confirm that yesterday.
Blue Moon is a multifunctional, double-decker lander, capable of deploying up to four rovers and launching orbital satellites from its landing site. A future version will include an ascent stage to carry human crew. Bezos indicated that his company has been working on the concept for the past three years, which is why he was so confident that he could meet the 2024 deadline. In March, Vice President Mike Pence tasked NASA with completing a space platform in lunar orbit and a crewed lunar landing by the same year. “It’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay,” Bezos said. The water on the moon would be valuable both as a drinking resource for astronauts and as a source of fuel, he added: Blue Moon is hydrogen fuelled.
The even more grandiose part of Bezos’ announcement involved Blue Origin’s plans to build space stations based on a concept first proposed by physicist Gerard O’Neill, comprising cylinders that would rotate in orbit in such a way that the centripetal force would simulate gravity on its inner surface. First proposed in 1976 in a book called The High Frontier, O’Neill cylinders will be illuminated by reflected sunlight or a sun-like artificial light and would be able to support plant life. “This is Maui on its best day, all year long,” Bezos enthused. “No rain. No earthquakes. People are going to want to live here.”
Space X is currently ahead of Blue Origin, with rockets already reaching orbit and its Dragon capsule regularly resupplying the International Space Station. Its plans for crewed flight suffered a setback when the abort engines of the Crew Dragon test capsule misfired during engine trials in April, destroying the vehicle.
The Engineer plans to revisit Blue Origin and Space X’s plans in more detail and go into the engineering challenges in an upcoming issue focusing on space in July, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
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This is nothing more than an ego trip by someone with too much money! Why on earth isn’t he trying to help with the many issues we’re grappling with here on earth? He could be spending his many millions on trying to reverse climate change, or preserving rain forests, or cleaning up our oceans, or better protecting our national parks …. the list goes on. All he and his other big tech buddies seem intent on is creating yet more pollution every time one of these rockets goes into space, and then creating yet more space junk. There is no way we are going to be able to relocate to other habitable planets before we destroy this one!!
Bezos donated $2bn towards education last year, although he is estimated to be worth $157bn.
The idea of spending the twighlight years in say 0.5g gravity appeals but who wants to live in a world where it never rains?
It would rain, but there wouldn’t be hurricanes.
I would remind the space entrepreneur, and the would be space colonist, that space remains and always will be a most dangerous place, intent on killing anything but bacterial spores (perhaps), and possibly water bears (tardigrades). One would never be more than one eventful collision away from loss of atmosphere.
I am of for sincere concern for mankind but as our education grows so does our desire, at least in some minds, is to apply the knowledge gained to make advances and overcome challenges. The Earth climate has been changing for millions of years and the land masses have been moving around over those millions of years. I am all for being aware and measuring those changes but do wish the attempts at changing it could be approached more rationally and realistically.
Some of today’s protesters would have protested against the invention of the wheel because we have legs!!!
Mel says “Some of today’s protesters would have protested against the invention of the wheel because we have legs!!!” Reminds me of the story of the Union rep watching a mechanical digger who says that if it wasn’t for the digger, 100 of his members would have jobs digging the trench with spades. To which his colleague replies, if it wasn’t for your spades, 10,000 of your members would be digging it with teaspoons! Progress…
I think Arthur C Clarke had the same idea … in 1973 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama
Found this online calculator for designing your own personal artificial gravity solution 🙂 http://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/SpinCalc.htm
I am sure I am missing something here, or am I?
To feel the effect of gravity surely you would need to be anchored to a point on the ground (circumference of the sphere / tube) somehow? Otherwise surely you would be floating in space at 0g with the ground spinning around you.
Even if anchored to the ground the moment you moved you would put a delta between you’re velocity and that of the ground and either increase or decrease your personal effective gravity.
So really the problem is ‘How to create a gravity field (gravitational force) that keeps people in contact with a ground plane in a generally ~0g environment.
Please enlighten me if i’m missing a fundamental here.
The idea behind the O’Neill cylinders is that they rotate to provide artificial gravity through centrifugal force.
I tend to agree with you Geof, to experience centripetal force ( and associated centrifugal reaction) one would need to be rotating about a remote axis. Barring a compact black hole , for this to happen one would need a reactive surface as you infer. Again I think you are correct regarding the velocity delta and that is probably why the NASA ONeill renderings show such a large structure, to keep that velocity delta to a manageable level. I thought the way this effect was rendered in ‘the Martian’ movie was reasonably consistent in that the astronauts started at zero gravity at the central axis but gained ‘gravity’ as they slid down the ladder such as to ‘fall’ onto the rotating floor. I don’t know if the movie advisors had any physicists to calculate what the diameter and angular velocity would need to emulate 1 g. As you said, skipping or jumping could be interesting.