Watch Jeff Bezos reveal Blue Origin's detailed plan for colonizing space

• Jeff Bezos unveiled how he and his company Blue Origin are going to lay the foundations for colonizing space.
• Part of the plan is a lunar lander called Blue Moon that can ferry payloads to the moon's surface.
• But the end goal, which Bezos says will take generations to reach, are giant, beautifully-manufactured worlds that can hold millions of people.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Narrator: Jeff Bezos dreams that one day a trillion people will live and work in space. But that day is a long way off. To get there, Bezos has unveiled a series of steps. Which will lay the foundations for future generations to come. And ultimately lead to giant space colonies. Bezos calls them O'Neill colonies. After American physicist Gerard Kitchen O'Neill who first developed the idea.

Jeff Bezos: These are very large structures. Miles on end and can hold a millions or more people each.

Narrator: The structure rotates to induce artificial gravity. And just how big is it? For scale, here's the International Space Station: And these enormous artificial worlds don't just have to be for humans. Some could be national parks. But whatever they're for, Bezos is sure of one thing:

Jeff Bezos: These are really pleasant places to live. Some of these O'Neill colonies might choose to replicate Earth cities. They might pick historical cities and mimic them in some way. There'd be whole new kinds of architecture. These are ideal climates, these are short sleeve environments. This is Maui on its best day all year long. No rain, no storms, no earthquakes.

Narrator: Admittedly, it sounds pretty great. But how practical is it to have entire companies dedicated to advancing human civilization in space? According to Bezos:

Jeff Bezos: Those companies, those entrepreneurial companies can not exist today. It's impossible. And the reason is, the price of admission to do interesting things in space right now is just too high. Because there's no infrastructure.

Narrator: That's where Bezos' space company Blue Origin comes in. First, it's working on launching and building reusable rockets, like New Shepard and New Glenn. Which are projected to drastically cut the cost of launching payloads into space. And second, Bezos wants to start pulling resources from the Moon.

Jeff Bezos: One of the most important things we know about the moon today is that there's water there. It's in the form of ice. It's in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon. And water is an incredibly valuable resource. You can use electrolysis to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen and you have propellants.

Narrator: So, how do you extract that lunar water? You go to the moon and mine it. Ideally with this: Blue Moon.

Jeff Bezos: We've been working on this lander for 3 years. It's a very large lander. It'll soft land in precise way. Three point 6 metric tons onto the lunar surface.

Narrator: Companies like Blue Origin, SpaceX, Boeing, and NASA are all pioneering the next generation of space exploration. Whether it's humans on the Moon by 2024, or its colonies on Mars by the 2030s, one thing is certain: The 21st century space race is here.