![]() O’Neill argued in the 1970s that “we can colonize space, and do so without robbing or harming anyone and without polluting anything” and laid out a vision for how “nearly all our industrial activity could be moved away from Earth’s fragile biosphere within less than a century from now.”įor Bezos, “this is about industrializing space, moving all the polluting industries into space,” said Howard Bloom, a member of the board of governors of the National Space Society, which awarded Bezos the Gerard O’Neill Memorial Award in 2018. He has described these as “very large structures, miles on end, and they hold a million people or more each.”īezos has attributed much of his vision to the influence of the work and writings of the late Gerard O’Neill, a physicist at Princeton University, whom Bezos met as a student. The flights are propelling forward a new industry that hopes to take into outer space growing numbers of tourists, beginning primarily with wealthy individuals who can afford the tickets.īut Bezos, a billionaire who made his fortune building Amazon into a global online marketplace but has dreamed of space travel since he was a child, has said that he believes almost religiously that sustaining the human race will require building space colonies - beginning on the moon - where millions can live and work and develop new resources to meet growing demands on Earth. The New Shepard flight came just a week after Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, traveled to the edge of space aboard the company’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane. “In order to preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space,” according to the company’s vision statement. Bezos’ company has been clear from its founding in 2000 in Kent, Wash., that it is about far more than bringing tourists to space for a few minutes of weightlessness.
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