Boldly rocketing into an agentic future - how Blue Origin plans to set up lunar colonies built on AI and AWS

In the battle of the billionaires to conquer the Final Frontier, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin last month unveiled plans for a new version of of its New Glenn re-usable rocket, something the firm hopes will give it a competitive edge over Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

While it’s tempting to dismiss this as ‘big boys and their toys’ with almost offensively OTT budgets to play with, William Brennan, VP of Tech Transformation at Blue Origin, sees a nobler vision at play:

Everybody at Blue Origin, we're building the road to space for the benefit of Earth.

And helping this to become not sci-fi, but reality, is AI, he says, leaning in to Star Wars and Star Trek and - perhaps less appositely given the way that turned out - to 2001: A Space Odyssey to make his point:

Space explorers have always had AI partners. Just think of some of those ...