Jeff Bezos’s ambition to colonise space is straight from the 1970s

IT WAS MORE interesting than another quarterly business update. On May 9th Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, had his coming-out party as a space cadet. Mr Bezos, who is the world’s richest man, has long been interested in using his fortune to advance the cause of space flight. His private rocketry firm, Blue Origin, was founded in 2000. But he has been less of a publicity seeker than Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and the world’s best-known enthusiast for outer space.

No longer. During an hour-long presentation, Mr Bezos introduced Blue Origin’s prototype lunar lander, a machine that could be ready, he said, to meet America’s ambitions to return to the Moon by 2024. More striking were his plans for the farther future. Mr Musk wants humans to colonise Mars as an insurance policy should anything happen to Earth. Mr Bezos has no interest in Mars, or indeed any other planet in the solar system, all of which (except Earth) are pretty inhospitable places. Instead, he thinks humans should build their new space-going homes from scratch.