I watched the Moon landing in 1969, when I was five years old, and it had a huge impact on me. I could tell how excited all the grown-ups around me were. And I think, by the way, that's one of the gigantic legacies of Apollo, is it inspired so many people to enter science, engineering, become pioneers, explorers.

It's, I think, hard be hard to overstate the degree to which that program did that for a whole generation of people, not just in the US, but around the world. We did something as a civilization that everybody had used as a literal symbol of impossibility. Oh, yeah, that'll happen when a man walks on the Moon. And they had to change that metaphor in 1969. And so we all got to witness that as a civilization, and it really made people realize the kinds of things that we can do.

I started at Amazon with a very small amount of capital. I didn't need much capital because all the heavy lifting had already been done. I didn't have to build a transportation system to distribute and deliver packages. It existed. It was called the post office. I didn't have to build a payment system. It existed. It was the credit card and so on and so on.

So when there is deep infrastructure, even if that infrastructure took many decades and many billions of dollars to build out, people can stand on top of that infrastructure and do amazing things. We don't have the infrastructure to do that in space today. If you're in your dorm room, you're not going to start a interesting space company. The starting price tags to do really interesting things in space or hundreds of millions of dollars, going quickly to billions.

But if we had reusable space vehicles, then we'd be able, that would start to change everything, and you'd find a generation later, that you could have the two kids in their dorm room create the next great space company. And then you'd see thousands of space companies, and you'd eventually get to really amazing things going on.

To the degree that big NASA programs become seen as jobs programs, in that they have to be distributed to the right states where the right senators live, and so on, that is going to change the objective. And now, your objective is not to whatever it is, to get a man to the Moon or a woman to the Moon, but instead, to get a woman to the Moon while preserving X number of jobs in my district.

That is a complexifier, and not a healthy one because by the way, as jobs programs go, all the people NASA employees, and the contractors and so on, they're highly-trained, highly sought after, brilliant engineers, they can get jobs anywhere. And so it also happens to be the wrong kind of jobs program for the wrong kind of people. But that is part of the reality. They didn't have that back in 1961 and 1962. They were moving fast they were.

From the time of that Rice speech, I don't know the exactly, but I'm thinking probably they were letting contracts, actually finished contracts within a year of that Rice speech. Unbelievable. There were nine competitors for the lunar lander, and Grumman won. The RFP was released, and then it was awarded to Grumman six months later. Today, there would be three protests, and the losers would sue the federal government because they didn't win.

What I really hope is that we stick with going back to the Moon this time to stay, because that is actually the fastest way to get to Mars. It's the illusion that you can skip a step. Skipping steps slows you down. It's seductive, but wrong.

The military has a great saying: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. And in this case, go to the Moon. Get yourself set up there. Mine propellants there. Build a fuel depot there. It takes 24 times less energy to lift a pound off the Moon than it does to lift a pound off the Earth, so if you're going to need a lot of supplies, and fuel, and bulk materials to go to Mars, you're much better lifting them off the Moon than you are lifting them off the Earth. It's a gigantic lever.

You have to understand the Internet is a nuance destruction machine as a platform. And it's so fast. Twitter cannot handle nuance, and so everything gets kind of de-nuanced on the internet. And we, everybody in this room, and if you're a leader of any kind you need to fight that. You're not going to fight it on the internet.

I was talking to your daughter earlier. She's writing a book. That can have nuance. And we need to continue to have this civilization where we don't just fight on Twitter.

My son said this other thing too. He said, if you really want your meme on the Internet to go far and travel fast, you have to eliminate all nuance in it and add conflict. And I was like, that's true and discouraging, thank you.

It's called Blue Origin because this is the blue planet, and this is the planet that we have to save. This is the good planet in our solar system. We've sent robotic probes to all the planets now. This is the only good one.

For all of human history, except very recently, we have been small. We humans as a species, we have been small, and the planet has been big. That's not true anymore. In the last 50 years that has changed, and we all recognize that. We have this long line. My life is better than my grandparents life was. Their life was better than their grandparents life was. And we all want our grandkids lives to be better than ours. And we want their grandkids lives to be better than theirs. That's called progress, and we have been enjoying it for centuries. We want to keep enjoying it, and to do that we're going to have to go out into the solar system where we have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources, unlimited energy, unlimited material resources.

This isn't going to happen in our lifetimes, but we will move all heavy industry off Earth. All polluting industry will move off Earth, and Earth will end up zoned residential. And people this will be we will keep this planet as this remarkable oasis in this harsh solar system that it is. And by the way, we'll move all of this industry to space primarily because it'll be better. You have 24/7 solar power out there. You don't have nighttime to interfere with your solar arrays. You have in the asteroids and on the Moon and other near-Earth objects, and so on, you have so many resources. Imagine, why make the microprocessors here? Make them microprocessors in space, and you can send them down, little finished components.

So we really do have to protect this planet. It's the only good one in the solar system. At our scale, if we're going to continue to make progress and make sure that our descendants have better lives than us, we need to go to space.