There’s a good chance that Bezos will take advantage of the fact that Musk as space settler was neutralized by Zubrin and simply piggy-back on Musk’s superior engineering of space transportation and fill in the gaps of O’Neill’s approach, starting with LOX production using teleopresence. There are a variety of ways of getting mass to escape the moon’s shallow gravity well. The most obvious near-term one for a LOX business is to buy methane delivered at the lunar surface from SpaceX and use it to loft LOX to cis-lunar space. It seems Musk is seriously stuck on “the planetary surface being the right place for a technological civilization” so it may take him a while to wake up.
Of course, I am a bit biased since I was SSI’s local support team leader in Miami when Bezos gave his valedictorian speech. But I have been telling the Bezos-fans that Musk would beat Bezos on opening access to space since he started SpaceX.
