Jeff Bezos is serious about building a colony on the moon

It looks like the billionaires' race to colonize space will kick-off in two different directions. While SpaceX CEO Elon Musk dreams of sending people to Mars as soon as 2024, Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos believes it's more practical to start out on the moon.

Chatting with GeekWire's Alan Boyle at the Space Development Conference in Los Angeles on Friday, Bezos outlined his plan to send people to the moon and eventually build a permanent settlement there.

Bezos has a pragmatic view of why we'll need those lunar bases in the future. "The Earth is not a very good place to do heavy industry. It’s convenient for us right now, but in the not-too-distant future — I’m talking decades, maybe 100 years — it’ll start to be easier to do a lot of the things that we currently do on Earth in space, because we’ll have so much energy,” he said.

Bezos' vision of the future includes millions of people living and working in solar-powered space outposts in the Solar system, including inside hollow asteroids. No wonder Bezos' Amazon has recently jumped in to save The Expanse.

The logical place to start out is the moon, Bezos thinks, because it's close to us, and has plenty of sunlight as well as deposits of water ice near its poles.

To take humans there, Blue Origin plans to build its Blue Moon lunar lander in partnership with NASA, which would speed things up, Bezos claims.

But even if NASA gives up on the idea or if Blue Origin doesn't win the contract with the agency -- we're sure SpaceX will be interested as well, despite its focus on Mars -- there are other agencies that are interested in building a moon outpost. Bezos, for example, likes the European Space Agency's Moon Village vision of inter-lunar cooperation..

"The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that everybody basically just says, look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let’s do it close to each other," Bezos said. That way, different outposts could help each other in time of need.

Building a lunar outpost isn't just about building a rocket and a lander and sending some people there, but Bezos says Blue Origin is willing to do anything it needs to do to succeed in this plan. Unless he runs out of money, which doesn't seem very likely right now.