Tech companies need to work with US military, says Amazon boss Jeff Bezos
Tech companies need to work with the US military, Jeff Bezos has said, as he defended deals made by Amazon and his aerospace firm Blue Origin.
The space company announced last week that it would provide rockets to the US air force to reduce its reliance on Russian technology.
Amazon, Mr Bezos' more famous company, has previously caused controversy with an agreement to provide facial recognition software to the US government, and it is also considered the favourite candidate for a contract to provide cloud computing services to the Pentagon.
Speaking at the Wired25 conference in San Francisco, Mr Bezos said he would continue to work with defence agencies even if it was unpopular among his own staff, because the US "needs to be defended".
"If big tech companies are going to turn their backs on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble.
"This country is a gem. It is amazing, it’s still the best place in the world, it's a place where people want to come," he said, adding: "I’d let them in if it was up to me. I like them, I want all of them in."
He also said that he hoped the space company would begin commercial flights next year, and that "astronauts" who took the short trip above the earth's atmosphere would only need a day's training.
In a video released on Monday the aerospace firm revealed ambitions to send millions of people into outer space.
The Amazon tycoon's company says it “believes in a future where millions of people are living and working in space”.
In a new video posted on its website the company says “Now is the time to open the promise of space to all, and lay the way for generations to come.
“When our descendants look to the stars, perhaps from a rocky moon or colonies floating in space, they’ll remember this time.
“When they reflect on where it started, they’ll remember this place.”
The Amazon chief executive founded Blue Origin in 2000, and a test flight successfully reached space in 2015.
He has previously expressed ambitions to establish colonies of up to a trillion people, but the new video enshrines that ambition in the company’s manifesto.
The ambition appears to be a long-held one for Mr Bezos. In his high school valedictorian speech, given in 1982, he told classmates he wanted to “build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth,” the Miami Herald reported at the time.
His company has pioneered reusable launch crafts which are designed to lower the cost of space travel, with the ultimate goal of moving heavy industry and large numbers of people away from earth in order to preserve it.
"What Blue Origin is doing is lowering the price of admission so that in the next generation we can have the Mark Zuckerberg of space," he told the conference.
"We need that dynamism that we’ve seen online in space."
One rocket, the New Shepard, will take commercial passengers into space “soon”, the company promises.
It features a capsule which detaches and “coasts” into space for a short period, before landing with a parachute, while the launcher lands vertically and is designed to be used again.
“With each flight, we’ll continuously improve the affordability of space exploration and research, opening space for all,” the company said.
Mr Bezos is the richest person in the world, with a wealth of $151bn (£114.7bn), dwarfing his aerospace competitor Elon Musk, who is worth around $20bn.
Mr Musk’s company SpaceX was founded in 2002, and was the first to achieve several milestones, including becoming the first to launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft, in 2010.
