Jeff Bezos is the billionaire (or is it trillionaire already?) and owner of Amazon that will be working with NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to accomplish the following:

1. Short run is to reduce cost of access to space by building a sub-orbital station
2. In the long run is to make way for millions of people travelling/working on lunar bases

The plan is to first strike a private-public partnership between his Blue Origins company, he said at the International Space Development Conference on Friday.

Eventually once the cost is reduced, with the orbital-class new Glenn rocket in the 2020s, moon bases can be set-up within hollowed-out asteroids.

Jeff has said that even if his partnership with NASA does not work out, his company Blue Origins has plans to go ahead with it’s still on-the-drawing board plans for a 5 ton payload lunar lander.

Stiff competition and a head-start by Space X will see Blue Origin struggle to get even into sub-orbital space, as witnessed by last months rocket launch.

That being said, the plan to build a moon base is ambitious and will most likely take years, if not decades, even if technology does start catching up with the ambitions of wealthy billionaires.  Nonetheless our society does need people who dream big, and if they have the money to back-it up, I believe technology and people will step-up to the plate.

Check out this video of bricks being built using simulated moon rock via 3d Printing.