“Listen, I get it, space is cool and Jeff Bezos is rich,” said Jimmy Kimmel on his late-night talk show as he expressed his discontent towards Bezos’ new project. Bezos recently talked about his intention to build a “business park” in space, and Kimmel thinks that his continuing habit of spending exorbitantly on things that no one needs has to stop.
Also Read: Elon Musk Wants Jeff Bezos To Remember His Place
“But, you know, when they talk about spending tens of billions of dollars, you have to wonder which part of ‘the Earth is on fire’ Jeff Bezos isn’t understanding. Is the plan to sit up there and watch it burn? Why don’t you spend $ zero on the space station and all the dollars on Earth instead of spending tens of billions of dollars on the space station?” he said.
Talking more about this new project at Blur Origins, the commercial space station will be called “Orbital Reef” with Boeing, intending to launch the spacecraft in the second half of this decade. The project will be assembled in partnership with Sierra Space, the spaceflight wing of defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp. It will also be backed by Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions and Arizona State University. Blue Origin claims that the new station will be a “mixed-use business park” in space and will host up to 10 people.
“Seasoned space agencies, high-tech consortia, sovereign nations without space programs, media and travel companies, funded entrepreneurs and sponsored inventors, and future-minded investors all have a place on Orbital Reef,” Blue Origin and Sierra Space announced in a statement.
The announcement for the new space business park comes at a very crucial time. Last week, a team of a Russian actor, a film director returned to Earth after shooting for thier film for 12 days on the International Space Station. The team of this film titled The Challenge had blasted off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan earlier this month, travelling to the ISS in the company of veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov. If the project is finsihed in time, they will beat Tom Cruise’s Hollywood project that he announced last year together with Nasa and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Also Read: Jeff Bezos’ Flight To Space Enters Guinness World Records