CEO of Amazon (NGS:AMZN) Jeff Bezos also owns Blue Origin; a space engineering company that he plans on using to put people on the moon by 2023—if not sooner.

Bezos funds his space engineering company with a cool billion dollars each year.

The Blue Moon Project

According to reports, the company’s “Blue Moon” project is onto its next phase and remains on target to see its first manned flight to the Moon in 2023. Bezos and co have never mentioned a time-frame for this expedition before today and 2023 is only 4.5 years away so is that really a possibility?

Maybe so. The era of commercial space travel may truly be upon us as he is not alone. NASA also expects to be making manned flights to the moon by next year and Space X’s Elon Musk is going a whole planet better by marking manned trips to Mars into his 2022 calendar.

Blue Origin

In an interview with Geek Wire, Blue Origin business development director A.C. Charania said that the project was “our first step to developing a lunar landing capability for the country, for other customers internationally, to be able to land multi metric tons on the lunar surface. Any permanent human presence on the lunar surface will require such a capability.”

Is Amazon planning a small utopia on the moon and in only five years? (Anyone else imagining 50ft marble statues of Jeff Bezos?)

But if anyone was to deliver “multi metric tons” of goods to the moon than who better than Amazon? The company is currently taking on UPS (NYSE:UPS) and FedEx (NYSE:FDX) with its new shipping service so it will truly have all areas covered: land, air, sea and now, space.

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What is even more surprising is that Blue Origin is promising public passenger flights aboard its New Shepard Spacecraft starting next year. The tickets are expected to go on sale in 2019 but at a cost that “We [Amazon] haven’t decided”.

So while we might not be quite at the stage of building small cities on the moon, at least we’ll be able to visit first to see if we like the neighbors. 

Featured Image: DepositPhotos.com/vitacop