Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has provided a few more details about Blue Origin's plans to put compute in space, first announced in October.
Speaking on the Lex Fridman podcast, Bezos explained the 'Blue Ring' project, which aims to provide multiple services to space customers.
"Blue Ring is a very interesting spacecraft that is designed to take up to 3,000kg of payload up to geosynchronous orbit or in lunar vicinity," he said, with the system acting as a space tug.
"It has two different kinds of propulsion, it has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion," he added.
While it moves payloads, "it provides thermal management, electric power, compute, and communications," Bezos explained. "And so, when you design a payload for Blue Ring, you don't have to figure out all of those things on your own."
Of particular interest is the compute side. Bezos said: "Radiation-tolerant compute is a complicated thing to do, and so we have an unusually large amount of radiation-tolerant compute onboard Blue Ring, and your payload can just use that when it needs to.
"All these services, it's a set of APIs. It's a little like Amazon Web Services, but for space payload that needs to move about in Earth vicinity or lunar vicinity."
Blue Origin is not the only company getting into the space tug game - competitors include Northrup Grumman, Rocket Lab, Momentus, Firefly Space, and Astroscale. But Blue Ring is believed to have a greater payload capacity than all of them.
It is also not alone in planning to shift compute into orbit. Earlier this week, Axiom Space detailed plans for a space data center, while NTT has partnered with SKY Perfect JSAT to launch its own space data centers in 2025.
The EU is also studying the concept of space data centers, and storage-focused Lonestar Data Holdings hopes to deploy data centers on the Moon.
Blue Origin's plans for both space tug and space compute services come after a tumultuous time for the company. Backed by Bezos' billions, the business has been accused of lacking focus and drive.
“Blue Origin needs to be much faster,” Bezos said on the same podcast. “It’s one of the reasons I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago. I wanted to come in — Blue Origin needs me right now.”
Over the past few months, several senior executives have departed, including CEO Bob Smith. He has been replaced by Dave Limp, who was Amazon's hardware boss, heading up Alexa and space satellite business Project Kuiper.
After several delays, this week also saw Blue Origin successfully launch and recover a New Shepard booster. Launches were grounded for more than a year due to a booster failure.
