• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, March 3, 2017

A couple of days after Elon Musk announced plans to fly two private citizens around the moon in a SpaceX rocket ship by the end of next year, a white paper from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origins has surfaced that proposes setting up an Amazon-like delivery service at the south pole of the moon by the middle of 2020. Meanwhile, Richard Branson yesterday launched a third company in the space space.

“It is time for America to return to the Moon — this time to stay,” Bezos emails Christian Davenport after the Washington Post reporter got his hands on the “proprietary and confidential” memo circulating at NASA and within the Trump administration and emailed the boss. “A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.”

“Blue Origin’s proposal, dated Jan. 4, doesn’t involve flying humans but rather is focused on a series of cargo missions. Those could deliver the equipment necessary to help establish a human colony on the moon — unlike the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts left ‘flags and footprints’ and then came home,” Davenport writes, reporting that several other companies are interested in developing various lunar enterprises.

The United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is one of them and its CEO, Tory Bruno, tells Davenport: “This administration, near as we can tell, feels a sense of urgency to go out and make things happen, and to have high-profile demonstrations that are along the road map to accomplish these broad goals. … There is an opportunity to begin building that infrastructure right now — within the next four years.”

Indeed, “missions to the moon seem destined to have their day in the sun during the Trump administration, in part because some of the people involved in the transition want to see the White House back a dramatic space mission before the 2020 presidential election,” Alan Boyle observes for GeekWire.

Four days ago, Musk’s SpaceX announced that two unnamed people who “have already paid a significant deposit” will be the first to fly around the moon in a Dragon spacecraft. “This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them,” the announcement read.

“The weeklong trip will look a lot like NASA's historic Apollo 8 mission — the first and only purely circumlunar, crewed mission in history — but SpaceX's mission will fly with two crew members instead of three and will use a fresh new spacecraft and launch vehicle,” writes  Space.com’s Hanneke Weitering in the introduction to a slideshow preview of the trip.

Meanwhile, Richard Branson announced yesterday that Virgin now has three companies — “Yes, three companies!” — involved with making space hospitable to commerce. 

“Effective today, Virgin Galactic is the name of the company that will send humans (including yours truly) to space. We will travel on SpaceShipTwo (VSS Unity), which was built by The Spaceship Company, our company that is manufacturing vehicles of the future. The Spaceship Company is based in Mojave, California and Virgin Galactic will eventually be headquartered in Spaceport America, from where SpaceShipTwo's commercial service flights will take off,” the company’s founder and CEO blogs.

“Our small satellite launcher, LauncherOne, has now become a new company called Virgin Orbit. LauncherOne was created with the exact same philosophy as SpaceShipTwo: Let’s open space to many more missions by dramatically decreasing the price of each flight.”

Writing for Fortune, Kirsten Korosec says that Virgin Orbit could end up being Branson’s “most lucrative” enterprise yet.

“Virgin Orbit will focus on launching small satellites into space using its LauncherOne orbital launch vehicle,” she explains. “This vehicle is essentially a 747-400 airplane designed to hold a rocket under its wing. Once the aircraft reaches a certain altitude, the rocket would be fired off into space to deliver small satellites for companies that want to take images of Earth, providing Internet and other communications services.” 

All this action is happening “during a period of renewed enthusiasm for the Moon, which was largely overlooked during the Obama administration in favor of Mars,” Rachel Becker points out for The Verge. To wit, “to the moon” has clearly taken on a totally different, financially correct, meaning than it had for Ralph Kramden.