WASHINGTON: Biru Biru Jeff Bezos on Monday announced he wanted to launch a space station that would accommodate up to 10 people in the second half of this decade, as a race to commercialize the cosmos heated up.
“Orbital Reef,” explained in a press statement as a business park used in space that will support micro research and manufacturing, is a joint venture company with Sierra Space’s commercial space and has support for Boeing and Arizona State University.
“For more than sixty years, NASA and other space institutions have developed orbital space flights and space residence, making us up for commercial businesses to take off this decade,” said Blue Origin Executive Brent Sherwood.
“We will expand access, lower costs, and provide all services and facilities needed to normalize flights.” Private post is one of the few planned in the coming years because NASA considers the future of the International Space Station after the 2020s.
The space body holds a contract with a company called Axiom to develop a space station that will initially be anchored with ISS and then become free flying.
Last week, the Nanoracks space service company, collaborated with Voyager Space and Lockheed Martin, announced a planned space station which will operate in 2027 and known as Starlab.
According to the fact sheet released by blue origin, the Reef Orbital will fly at an altitude of 500 kilometers (310 miles), slightly above the ISS, with residents experience 32 sunrise and sunset a day.
It will support 10 people in a volume of 830 cubic meters (30,000 cubic feet), which is slightly smaller than ISS, in a futuristic module with large windows.
The ISS was completed in 2011 and has long been a symbol of US-Russian space cooperation, although Moscow recently resolves in the future of partnerships.
It is currently considered safe until 2028 and the new administrator Bill Nelson said he hoped to last up to 2030, at that time NASA wanted the commercial sector to step and replace it.
Blue origin now can only fly to a suborbital room with a new Shepard rocket, which destroys the Star Trek actor William Shatner outside the atmosphere, earlier this month.
Other planned projects include new Glenn, rockets that can fly cargo and people to orbit, and a moon lander – despite losing a month contract to compete with SpaceX, and demand NASA to reverse the decision.
Bezos, the second richest person in the world thanks to the giant e-commerce Amazon, established Blue Origin in 2000, with the aim of one day building a floating space colony with artificial gravity where millions of people will work and live, free the earth from pollution.
These colonies will be based on the design by Gerard O’Neill, Professor Physics Bezos in Princeton, and will consist of a rotating cylinder that provides artificial gravity.