Billionaire and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, who also backs commercial space flight company Blue Origin, thinks humans are a "couple of decades" away from living in space.
Humanity Would Send Robots To The Lunar Surface, Says Jeff Bezos
In an appearance at the Italian Tech Week earlier this month, Bezos expressed his optimism when asked about humans living in space. "I believe we’ll have, you know, in the next kind of couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space. That’s how fast this is going to accelerate," Bezos said.
Bezos added that humans living in space would do so by choice. "We don't need people to live in space," Bezos said, adding that humans would send robots to get work done "on the surface of the moon or anywhere else," which would be "much more cost-effective than sending humans."
Blue Origin Reveals New Glenn Rocket
Blue Origin recently revealed an updated New Glenn Rocket during the company's NS-36 mission to carry humans to suborbital space. The rocket would play a crucial role in NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorers) mission, which will study Mars’s interactions with Solar Winds.
Elon Musk's Mars Ambitions, Starship Would Expand SpaceX's Dominance
Bezos' space ambitions are in line with fellow billionaire space race participant and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who recently shared in a social media post that humanity would require over "100k humans and 1M tons of cargo" to be shipped to Mars to sustain colonization efforts on the Red Planet.
Musk also reiterated SpaceX's flagship rocket, Starship's role in maintaining the company's dominance in the commercial space flight industry. "Once Starship is flying frequently with real payloads next year, then SpaceX will probably deliver >95% of total Earth payload to orbit," Musk said.
SpaceX also recently updated its website, pricing 1 metric ton of payload at $100 million aboard the Starship rocket for missions to the Moon and Mars by 2028 and 2030, respectively.
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