Blue Origin is hosting a media event later today in Washington, D.C. TechCrunch will be on the ground, reporting live, though details around precisely what will be announced are still pretty minimal. According to new reporting from Reuters, however, boss-man Jeff Bezos is set to unveil his plans to help the U.S. government establish a lunar outpost over the next five years.
That word arrives via “people familiar with the matter.” Blue Origin hasn’t responded yet — though we’ve only got to wait until around 4PM ET time to find out what the company will reveal via its “update on our progress and share our vision of going to space to benefit Earth.”
The subject is nothing new for Bezos and Blue Origin, of course. This time last year, the world’s richest man discussed his hopes for space travel. “In the not-too-distant future — I’m talking decades, maybe 100 years,” he told a crowd at the Space Development Conference in L.A., “it’ll start to be easier to do a lot of the things that we currently do on Earth in space, because we’ll have so much energy. We will have to leave this planet. We’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.”
As Reuters notes, VP Mike Pence recently discussed the White House’s own hopes for an astronaut lunar outpost being established by 2024. He singled out NASA, but even with an ongoing war of words between Trump and Bezos, it seems likely what the cabinet would be open to working with private space organizations like Blue Origin.
Source: TechCrunch
