Jeff Bezos says the future is so bright, he "doesn't see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now." Speaking at Italian Tech Week 2025 earlier this month with Ferrari and Stellantis chair John Elkann, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder ...
“Jeff bezos says” has the same level of legitimacy as people going “as a mother”. Yeah he’s rich but he’s also mind numbingly stupid. Why do I care about anything he has to say because none of it is reasonable logical or relevant.
Is rocket doesn’t even get above the karmen line and takes about six people at a time. How are millions of people even going to get into space with that kind of transport system?
Let’s at least hate accurately. Blue Origin is working on a ton of stuff, just super slowly. Their orbital rocket, New Glenn, should have its 2nd launch in a few weeks. They’re working on a space station, Orbital Reef, but I have no idea what the timeline is. They’re also allegedly working on an orbital crew capsule, but that has almost zero public info.
I know about all the stuff he’s working on but even if it all turns out to work the way he claims, it’s not going to be able to transport millions of people into space over the next few years.
If we take the next few years to mean a decade from now then maybe will be at a point where extremely rich billionaires can pay to spend a weekend space on orbital reef or something similar. But I can’t imagine will be at the point of millions of people being in space on a semi-permanent basis, not within a decade, maybe within 50 years depending on how SpaceX fair with starship, but that stretching the definition of soon a bit far.
Elon musk said that starship might be able to transport 100 people at a time, which is musk speak for 15 people. But let’s say it can transport 100 people at a time, it can get to the moon and back again within 6 days, and they have multiple ships so that they can launch pretty much continuously with one launch every 24 hours. That sounds far fetched but it is remotely reasonable so let’s go with it.
Assuming we were already at that level of capability to transport 1 million people to the moon with that method would take nearly 28 years to complete. So we’d be looking at 2048 as the date that 1 million people would be on the moon. But we don’t have that capability yet so there’s also however much lead time we would need to get to that point.
So even if we started now, as in today, it would be nearly the middle of the century before we achieved his goal, yeah that’s not Soon™
Agreed, but your original 2nd paragraph made it seem like Blue is only doing New Shepherd. If Bezos wants a million people in space during his lifetime, he needs to be full speed ahead, “build it and they will come”, on Orbital Reef modules, the rumored 7 seat New Glenn orbital capsule, lunar surface resource extraction and refinement… Massive investments in transportation, science, manufacturing, and tourism in cislunar space.
Instead, I’m guessing the progression will be more like: