Jeff Bezos's huge ambitions for space include floating colonies with weather like 'Maui on its best day, all year long'

• Jeff Bezos on Thursday unveiled the Blue Moon lunar lander, a giant vehicle that can deliver payloads to the moon's surface, created by his space company Blue Origin.
• In his presentation he also discussed ambitions to put up to a trillion people in space with O'Neill colonies, spinning cylinders meant to replicate gravity, orbit the Earth, and sustain human life.
• "This is Maui on its best day, all year long," he said, according to The Guardian. "No rain. No earthquakes. People are going to want to live here."
• Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill came up with the idea in 1976, when he said that other planets might not be the best place for humans to live away from Earth.
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Jeff Bezos restated his ambition to build floating space colonies where people could in orbit, saying that the colonies would have excellent climates, with weather like "Maui on its best day, all year long."

The Amazon founder made the comments at a Thursday press conference in Washington, D.C., where he unveiled the Blue Moon lander - a giant vehicle that can deliver payloads, and perhaps one day astronauts, to the surface of the moon.

The lander, created by Bezos's privately-held rocket company Blue Origin, aims to help establish "sustained human presence" on the moon, Business Insider's Dave Mosher reported on Thursday from the event.

Read more: Jeff Bezos has unveiled an enormous 'Blue Moon' lunar lander to ferry payloads - and maybe people - to the moon's surface. Here's what it looks like and how it'd work.

At the event, Bezos also branched out into his far-flung ambitions to put up to a trillion people in space with O'Neill colonies, a hypothetical space technology meant to sustain human life.

They take the form of spinning cylinders in space that can replicate gravity, orbit the Earth, and give people and plants a place to live.

The cylinders are named after Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill, who in 1976 suggested that other planets might not be the best place for humans to live away from Earth.

And, according to Bezos's plan, living in those space colonies would be as easy and temperate as living in Hawaii.

"This is Maui on its best day, all year long," he said, according to The Guardian. "No rain. No earthquakes. People are going to want to live here."

He noted that O'Neill colonies would have to be constructed by future generations, as the technology does not currently exist. But he pledged to start building the infrastructure now - starting with the Blue Moon lander.

Read more: Here's the long-lost 1975 TV episode that Jeff Bezos makes people watch to understand what his space company is all about

Bezos has floated the idea of putting millions of people in O'Neill cylinders as early as 2016, and was said to have discussed it while studying at Princeton himself in the 1980s, according to GeekWire.

He also discussed building O'Neill colonies at a talk with Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, last year.

Bezos said on Thursday, according to the Financial Times: "If we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes, we will have unlimited resources."

Read Business Insider's coverage of the Blue Moon lander here.