Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos wants to deliver packages to the moon by mid-2020 in order to enable “future human settlement” on the lunar landscape.
The Amazon boss’s space company, Blue Origin, has written a white paper that is reportedly circulating among President Donald Trump’s transition team and NASA’s leadership, according to the Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos. The report hopes to push NASA to back an Amazon-like service that would deliver gear for habitats and experiments by mid 2020.
It also described the company’s interest in creating a Blue Moon spacecraft that could carry a load of 10,000 pounds and touch down near a crater on the south pole of the moon. “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.”
The proposal comes during a time of renewed interest in the Moon. SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently announced that the company will send two tourists on a trip around the moon in 2018, and the Trump administration is thought to be pushing for an affordable and fast return to the Moon before the end of Trump’s term.