Updated June 20th, 2019 at 22:42 IST

Eco-friendly in Space: Jeff Bezos reveals that his lunar lander 'Blue Moon' will be one day refueled with ice from the moon

Elon Musk's Mars colonization is not the bar for impossible space dreams anymore. Fellow space billionaire and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, on Wednesday, has revealed that his company's moon lander will one day refuel from ice on the lunar surface.

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Elon Musk's Mars colonization is not the bar for impossible space dreams anymore. Fellow space billionaire and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, on Wednesday, has revealed that his company's moon lander will one day refuel from ice on the lunar surface.

Speaking at the JFK Space Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, he said that his renewable space fuel dream may be possible because of the deposits of ice at the bottom of craters on the moon, found by space organizations since the Apollo days, as reported by a leading US news channel.

"We know things about the moon now we didn’t know about during the Apollo days. We can harvest that ice and use to make hydrogen and oxygen, which are rocket propellant," said Bezos.

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As shared by Bezos, the “Blue Moon” lunar lander which was unveiled last month is powered by a BE-7 engine, which uses hydrogen and oxygen as its two fuel sources.

“The reason we chose those propellants is because ..we know one day we’ll be refueling that vehicle on the surface of the moon from propellants made on the surface of the moon from that water ice,” Bezos said.

Bezos has said previously that his company's  Blue Moon lunar lander is a part of  NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.

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On Thursday, Bezos shared a 35-second video of the first hot fire test of the BE-7 engine explaining that the data and hardware both look in perfect condition. He also thanked NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center for its help.

Bezos who owns the billion-dollar e-commerce company Amazon is also the owner of Blue Origin - the space technology startup which has been working on multiple space systems at the same time. The company is currently developing a rocket for space tourism called New Shepard, as well as a giant rocket called New Glenn that will launch satellites and other spacecraft.

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Published June 20th, 2019 at 22:31 IST