Jeff Bezos’ space station may have seemed overly ambitious, but now that it’s making progress, it’s starting to become more than just a pipe dream. The CEO of aerospace company Blue Origin has been dabbling in commercialized space travel for some time.
After completing 22 successful space missions, it has successfully taken 31 people into space and ordinary civilians can now reserve their seats on its website. 2021, Bezos has upped the ante by partnering with Sierra Space to build a commercial space station called Orbital Reef.
This ambitious project aims to create a “mixed-use space business park” to meet the needs of anything from media companies and entrepreneurs to investors and inventors. In doing so, it opens the orbital reef to many game-changing uses. However, the scale of the project has bigger implications than simply taking tourists into space, so Bezos is already planning to bring it to fruition many years in advance.
Jeff Bezos’ space station will no longer be in the concept stage, as NASA has just given it the green light. NASA already sees Blue Origin and Sierra Space as among the top candidates to replace the International Space Station, and now it’s putting more faith in Bezos’ bold space station plans. In a press statement, Sierra Space announced that Orbital Reef was successful in NASA’s system definition review and that it was deemed feasible and achievable enough to move into the design phase. This puts it at the doorstep of the most profound industrial revolution in human history, said Tom Wise, CEO of Sierra Space.
Orbital Reef is not just about space tourism, as its microgravity factories and services have the potential to revolutionize every industry. With Orbital Reef, the company claims anyone has the opportunity to have their own address in space. When Bezos’ space station was first announced, it had a large window of time that led us to believe it might not be ready until at least 2030. Sierra Space, on the other hand, expects Orbital Reef to be operational as soon as 2027. When it does, though, we can only hope that its final design won’t be as problematic as Blue Origin’s rocket.
