Even if Blue Origin can't strike public-private partnerships, Bezos will do what needs to be done to make it so, he said here at the International Space Development Conference on Friday night.

Bezos laid out his vision for lunar settlement during a fireside chat with Alan Boyle, which took place just after he received the National Space Society's Gerard K. O'Neill Memorial Award.

In the short run, Blue Origin's objective is to reduce the cost of access to space — initially with its New Shepard suborbital spaceship, and then with its orbital-class New Glenn rocket in the 2020s.

In the long run, Bezos' vision is to smooth the way for millions of people working in space. Those people just might live and work in hollowed-out asteroids — a concept that was proposed decades ago by O'Neill, a Princeton physicist whose ideas on space settlement fueled Bezos' passion for the final frontier.