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Jeff Bezos sets Blue Origin’s sights on building a city on the moon

SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk may have his heart set on building a city on Mars, but Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space vision looks closer to home. He’s gazing at the moon.

“I think we should build a permanent human settlement on one of the poles of the moon,” Bezos said today during a Q&A with kids at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. “It’s time to go back to the moon, but this time to stay.”

Plasma jet engine breakthrough heralds beginning of new era in space travel

A major new breakthrough in jet propulsion technology could revolutionize the aerospace industry, paving the way for plasma jet engines that could carry a craft to the edge of space using only air and electricity.

Berkant Göksel, the lead researcher in a new study by the Technical University of Berlin, says his team have successfully completed tests on plasma engines that could take future aircrafts to altitudes of 30 miles (50km) and beyond.

Moon as unprospected eighth continent that will produce trillionaires

Moon Express is one of only two teams in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition with a verified launch contract for its 2017 lunar mission. In October 2015, Moon Express announced that it had signed the worlds’ first multi-mission launch contract with Rocket Lab USA for 3 lunar missions between 2017 and 2020.

Moon Express sees the moon as critical for humanity to become a multi-world species, and that our sister world, the Moon, is an eighth continent holding vast resources than can help us enrich and secure our future.

MoonEx had been planning to place the International Lunar Observatory (ILO) on the Moon as early as 2018. The plan calls for placement of both a 2 meters (6 ft 7 in) radio telescope as well as an optical telescope at the South Pole of the Moon.

NASA Just Revealed Its 4-Step Plan to Launch a Year-Long Mission to The Moon

Upcoming missions to Mars have grabbed plenty of headlines in recent years, but before we set off for the Red Planet, a lot more research is needed – and that’s why NASA has a new plan for sending astronauts into orbit around the Moon.

It’s been a while – we last set foot on the Moon in 1972. But NASA thinks the cislunar orbit (between the Moon and the Earth) is going to be an essential testing site and launching pad for reaching Mars in the 2030s.

As NASA’s Greg Williams explained this week at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington DC, the Moon mission is on the slate for 2027 and could see a crew spending a year sailing above the lunar surface.