Amazon’s Jenny Freshwater engages Jeff Bezos in a fireside chat at the re:MARS conference in Las Vegas. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
LAS VEGAS — For the first time in public, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained the rationale for his risky Project Kuiper satellite broadband venture, during a fireside chat that was interrupted when an animal rights activist jumped on stage.
Today’s half-hour discussion was one of the headliner events for Amazon’s inaugural re:MARS conference, held here in Las Vegas to throw a spotlight on the frontiers of Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space. It’s modeled after the invitation-only MARS meeting that Amazon has been organizing annually since 2016.
Bezos and his partner in the fireside chat — Jenny Freshwater, leader of forecasting and capacity planning at Amazon — broadened the focus of the conversation to touch on some of the Amazon CEO’s favorite topics, including his management philosophy and his advice for entrepreneurs.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos raises his arms (and the robotic arms they’re linked to) at the re:MARS conference in Las Vegas. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
LAS VEGAS — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ handshake is at least as firm as a robotic hand’s grip.
I found that out for myself today at Amazon’s inaugural re:MARS conference, when Bezos tried out the touch-sensitive, dexterous robotic arm set up in an exhibit hall at the Aria Resort and Casino here in Las Vegas.
Like the annual invitation-only MARS conference, re:MARS is designed to focus on the frontiers of Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space. And robots were the stars of the show when Bezos popped in.
Jeff Bezos shows off Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander in Washington, D.C. (Blue Origin Photo)
By Todd Bishop and Alan Boyle
It’s our choice: a finite world with limited resources, or an infinite universe with unlimited potential. Those were the options presented by Jeff Bezos this week he laid out his plan to colonize the moon as a first step toward a future with as many as a trillion people in space.
Blue Origin, the Amazon founder’s private space venture, unveiled its Blue Moon lunar lander at an event in Washington, D.C., this week, and said it was working to help the country achieve the Trump administration’s goal of putting U.S. astronauts back on the moon by 2024. Blue Origin is one of multiple companies expected to compete for the NASA contract to go back to the moon.
But a lunar colony would be just the first step in Bezos’ larger aspirations for humans in the solar system.
GeekWire’s aerospace and science editor, Alan Boyle, was there for the announcement, and he called in for this special edition of the GeekWire podcast.
Jeff Bezos shows off a mockup of the Blue Moon lunar lander. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos today laid out the architecture for missions to the moon aimed at supporting NASA’s goal of landing astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024.
The game plan for Bezos’ space venture, Blue Origin, calls for continuing work on the company’s Blue Moon lunar lander and a new breed of hydrogen-fueled rocket engine known as the BE-7. Blue Origin has been discussing the lander concept with NASA for years, and plans to propose Blue Moon in response to a solicitation that NASA is due to issue this month.
During today’s invitation-only event here at the Washington Convention Center, Bezos said that sending humans to the moon by 2024 and establishing a permanent lunar settlement would be in sync with his own vision for humanity’s future in space.
“I love this — it’s the right thing to do,” Bezos said. “We can help meet that timeline, but only because we started this three years ago. It’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.”
Bezos said Blue Origin already has been in touch with customers who’d be interested in sending payloads to the lunar surface on Blue Moon, including Airbus, Arizona State University, Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PARC, Southwest Research Institute, Britain’s Surrey Satellite Technology and Germany’s OHB.
“People are very excited about this capability,” Bezos said.
The showstopper came when Bezos pulled the wraps off a full-size mockup of the Blue Moon lander. “This is an incredible vehicle, and it’s going to the moon,” he said.
The rivalry between SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has surfaced on Twitter. Again. (Musk Photo: TED via YouTube; Bezos Photo: GeekWire / Kevin Lisota)
The fur is flying in the broadband internet satellite race.
It all started when we found out that Amazon was planning its own 3,236-satellite constellation to provide global internet access. The campaign, known as Project Kuiper, is likely to compete with SpaceX’s long-running Starlink project to put thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit and do pretty much the same thing. SpaceX’s operation in Redmond, Wash., was set up in 2015 to lead the Starlink development effort.
Cara Gee, who plays a tough-as-nails spaceship captain on “The Expanse,” takes a seat in a mockup of Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew capsule. “No one asked me to wear this helmet on our tour of the facility,” she tweeted. “But here I am in a real life space chair.” (Cara Gee via Twitter)
Science fiction met space fact this week in the Seattle area when the cast of “The Expanse,” the science-fiction jewel in Amazon’s streaming-video crown, got a look at Blue Origin’s spaceship.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the common denominator in the meetup: He personally engineered the sci-fi series’ shift from SyFy to Prime Video, and announced it onstage at a space conference last May while I was sitting beside him. Bezos is also the founder of Blue Origin, the space venture that is testing its New Shepard suborbital spaceship and gearing up to build its orbital-class New Glenn rocket.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos prepares to unleash the robo-dragonfly. (Jeff Bezos via Instagram)
Find someone who looks at you the way Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos looks at the robotic dragonfly that’s buzzing around his head at this week’s MARS conference.
MARS is Amazon’s annual invitation-only event focusing on Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space. This year’s attendees range from researchers and entrepreneurs in all those fields to celebrities like “Star Wars” legend Mark Hamill and veteran astronauts including Mike Massimino and Story Musgrave. (Astronauts attend for free.)
Arizona State University’s Lindy Elkins-Tanton and MIT’s Dava Newman face the camera during Amazon’s MARS conference. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is in the giant drone behind them. (Lindy Elkins-Tanton via Twitter)
Those are just a couple of today’s highlights from Amazon’s annual invitation-only festival in Palm Springs, Calif., celebrating Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space. As usual, we’re on the outside looking in, based on tweets with the #MARS2019 hashtag and reports from those on the scene at The Parker Resort.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship lifts off from its West Texas launch site. (Blue Origin via YouTube)
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent eight NASA-sponsored scientific payloads to the edge of space and back on its New Shepard suborbital spaceship, marking another step toward putting people on board.
The rocket lifted off into clear, chilly skies from Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas at 9:08 a.m. CT (7:08 a.m. PT). Minutes after launch, New Shepard’s gumdrop-shaped capsule separated from the hydrogen-fueled booster and headed to a maximum unofficial altitude of 350,775 feet (66 miles or 107 kilometers). That’s well above the 100-kilometer Karman Line that currently serves as the internationally accepted boundary of space.
The reusable booster maneuvered itself back to a landing on a pad not far from where it was launched, while the capsule deployed its parachutes and drifted back down to the desert terrain.
“Welcome home, New Shepard. Wow!” launch commentator Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s head of astronaut strategy and sales, said during today’s webcast.
In a follow-up tweet, Blue Origin said the 10-minute, 15-second mission “looks to have been a wholly successful flight.”
John Travolta and Jeff Bezos share the stage at the Living Legends of Aviation ceremony. (LLOA Photo)
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person and the founder of Amazon as well as the Blue Origin space venture, defended his billion-dollar-a-year expense on space travel here in front of a receptive, star-studded crowd.
The occasion was the 16th annual Living Legends of Aviation awards ceremony, held on Jan. 18 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel with John Travolta as host and Harrison Ford as one of the celebrity presenters. The event, produced as a fundraiser for the Kiddie Hawk Air Academy, honors those who have made significant contributions to aviation.
Bezos got a triple dose of recognition, thanks to his induction into the Living Legends lineup plus his acceptance of the Kenn Ricci Lifetime Aviation Entrepreneur Award and a newly created honor called the Jeff Bezos Freedom’s Wings Award.
After receiving the Freedom’s Wings trophy from Airbus CEO Tom Enders, Bezos sat down for one of his traditional fireside chats. At one point, Bezos was asked why he should spend money on space exploration rather than on earthly issues that need fixing.
