Jeff Bezos hopes to make space travel cheaper
The Amazon CEO and Blue Origin founder spoke Saturday at the Explorers Club Annual Dinner, where he discussed space and tasted a roasted iguana, according to Bloomberg.
Amazon CEO and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos speaking at the 32nd Space Symposium last April.
Jeff Bezos wants to help a lot more people make it into outer space.
"The price of admission to space is very high," Amazon's CEO said Saturday in New York, according to Bloomberg. "I'm in the process of converting my Amazon lottery winnings into a much lower price of admission so we can go explore the solar system."
Bezos was speaking at the Explorers Club Annual Dinner, where he accepted the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award and was photographed tasting a roasted iguana appetizer.
He's referenced this idea of lowering the "price of admission" to space before, saying in 2016 he wants to help develop the "heavy-lifting infrastructure" to allow space startups to proliferate in the future.
Bezos, currently the world's richest person, is working toward this goal by putting $1 billion every year into his rocket company Blue Origin by selling his Amazon stock.
Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX, spoke about space travel, too, on Sunday at the South by Southwest conference. But while Musk focused on bringing people to the moon and Mars as a hedge against future world wars, Bezos' perspective was a bit sunnier.
Bezos said the idea creating a backup in case Earth is destroyed is "unmotivating," Bloomberg reported.
"I want a world for my grandchildren's grandchildren to live in," he said.