Company chief Jeff Bezos wants to colonise the moon, and he wants to be the one to deliver everything needed to build the new city.

“I think we should build a permanent human settlement on one of the poles of the moon,” Bezos told kids at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, the New Yorker reports. “It’s time to go back to the moon, but this time to stay.”

Bezos has his own spaceship company, Blue Origin, which he hopes an Amazon-like service for all the parts needed for humans to settle in space. He’s already pitched the idea to NASA.

“We would like to set up a cargo service for that. We have architecture and technologies that would allow us to soft-land large amounts of mass on the moon, which would be necessary if you’re going to build a permanent human settlement there,” he said.

But don’t expect guys in polos and caps carrying boxes to deliver the goods — he plans on sending robots to build the new colony.

“And that’s the kind of thing that could also be done by advanced robotics with machine-learning systems on board,” he said.

Bezos told the kids — who were at the museum for the opening of a new Apollo exhibit — that he’s been dreaming of going to the moon since he saw Neil Armstrong doing his thing when he was their age.

But some of the entrepreneur’s hi-tech talk seemed to be lost on the squirts.

“What space are you talking about — the space on a computer or the space like the solar system?” one little girl asked Bezos 30 minutes into his presentation.

Bezos funds Blue Origin by selling $1.3 billion ($US1 billion) in Amazon stock a year, he revealed last month.

This article first appeared at the New Yorker and is reproduced here with permission.