Amazon Has a Plan for Delivering Packages to the Moon

When human beings eventually colonize the moon, they’ll have to live with the bare essentials first: food, water, shelter, air, and Amazon Prime.

According to a seven-page white paper obtained by the Washington Post, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’s private spaceflight company Blue Origin has a plan to start up a space delivery service to keep astronauts on the moon stocked with gear and supplies. Funnily enough, it’s not even the craziest delivery plan the company has proposed, and if America’s new president is on board, it could actually happen.

According to the Post, (which Bezos owns), Blue Origin has shown top NASA officials and members of the Trump administration a plan to land a lunar spacecraft near the moon’s south pole. It also wants the government to support a shipment service, like Amazon in space, that would deliver gear, cargo, and habitats as well by mid-2020, supporting a wave of permanent lunar colonists in the future.

“It is time for America to return to the Moon — this time to stay,” Bezos told the Post. “A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.”

The moon is a hot topic right now. On Monday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced a plan to fly two private citizens around the moon and back in its Dragon 2 spacecraft. While colonizing Mars is still a major focus for both SpaceX and NASA, Bezos appears to be riding the wave of moon-enthusiasm in 2017, perhaps sparked by President Donald Trump’s apparent favor of lunar missions.

Trump has been widely assumed to be a proponent of the private spaceflight industry, and publicly called for “American footprints on distant worlds” during a speech to Congress this week. NASA’s also still committed to its new Space Launch System, and, following SpaceX and the prevailing winds from the Oval Office, has plans to put two astronauts in its Orion capsule for a similar moon-circumnavigating mission in 2019.

While neither the agency or the Trump administration have announced a solid commitment to a moon colonization program, if Bezos’s white paper goes over well, Amazon’s plan for space shipping might just become a reality.