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Jeff Bezos wants to create a park in space

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Jeff Bezos got a taste for it. After taking Captain Kirk into space (the real one) and officially kicking off the era of space tourism, the founder of Blue Origin – and of course Amazon as well – announced on Monday his plans to build a space park in orbit, nicknamed Orbital Reef. But be careful: this is not an amusement park. Or rather, not only: the correct definition is “mixed-use commercial park”, which will allow in its 3 thousand square meters to conduct cutting-edge scientific research and to shoot film scenes in microgravity, but will also contain a mini- hotel for those wishing to spend a romantic weekend around the Earth.

Jeff Bezos will build a space station in orbit around the earth with laboratories and a hotel


The station, which can accommodate up to ten people and will be built in collaboration with Boeing and Sierra Space, is expected to see the light by the end of the decade. Little is known about the costs, which were not detailed during the presentation. As is well known, however, Bezos has no intention of spared any expense for his space ambitions and has pledged to finance Blue Origin every year with a billion dollars.

At first glance, Bezos’ project might seem like a duplicate. In January 2020, NASA had in fact announced the collaboration with Axiom Space to build a habitable module that will become the first “commercial launch destination” of the US agency. In simpler words, Axiom has also been commissioned to design a real hotel among the stars, which should be docked to the International Space Station (ISS) by 2024. The main attraction of this module will be the observatory with a view of the Earth. , but there will also be a research laboratory and more.

The International Space Station, however, will not remain in orbit for long: launched in 1998, it should have been operational for only 15 years. Although the funding was then secured at least until 2030, the station begins to show a lot of ailments and, for this very reason, it could be abandoned by Russian cosmonauts as early as 2025. And so the Orbital Reef could play a role in the future. replacement of the ISS, for which NASA will allocate $ 400 million in funding for the companies that will help it in this enterprise.

Competition for funding will be tough: aerospace and war engineering giant Lockheed Martin, together with Voyager Space and Nanoracks, has in turn announced the launch of a space station by 2027. Overall, NASA is considering a dozen proposals, which according to rumors would also have been submitted by Airbus and obviously by SpaceX.

After winning a $ 2.9 billion contract by stealing it from rival Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s company is once again competing with Jeff Bezos’s. In the Star Wars, yet another front opens up among Silicon Valley billionaires.

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