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We're very constrained as a country in terms of the number of launch vehicles that we have right now, and our adversaries around the world are not standing still.
They're putting hundreds of billions.
Of dollars into launch and into space, and especially as it relates to the Moon, which we haven't been on the Moon for fifty years. We think it's really important for Blue, for the country, and it just made prudent sense from our standpoint to take the brilliant people that we're working on New Shepherd, pause that for a while we're planning for at least two years, and then repurpose them to even further accelerate our efforts in lunar and launch.
There was all this excitement I think about New Shepherd, especially because Katie Perry went to space and for civilians who maybe want to have that moment like Mark Bezos had. So do you think you'll go back to that at some point?
Point?
Is it really just a pause?
I think we will.
I think there's still you know, we had multiple years of backlog and that it was the easiest ticket to sell, was that, And so I think we'll likely come back into that into that business. But again at the moment in time right now, it just makes more sense to focus.
On on the Moon.
So it really is a space race right now.
I don't you know, I'm very much pro America and a capitalist, but I don't think we want another Spotnik moment. And we were the first to put boots on the Moon, and I really feel like we want to put you know, we want to put boots on the moon. And this time the name of our group inside of Blue is the Lunar Permanence. So we're not only racing to the Moon to get there back again for the first time, but we want.
To keep people on the moon, you know, the moon.
If I don't know where you stand on the Fermi paradox, but if you're in the this is all a simulation camp the moon. The Moon would have been a it's a cheat code in the game that we're living in. It's literally three days away, it has no atmosphere, it's got one sixth gravity, it's been around for four billion plus years. It has every mineral on that that we
could probably think of. It has water, and we would be crazy as a nation not to figure out how to use that as a stepping stone to the rest of the Solar System and beyond.
So when you have this visit from the Secretary Hegsath and you're talking about going to the moon, what is the Department of Defense, Department of War, What is the US administration asking of you?
I think the Department of War is a little separate from NASA, is really the leading the sphere for going
to the moon, and we're very supportive of that. But in general, when you talk to Secretary Hegseath Feinberg at all, what you find, especially in air gerospace, is that we've ten twenty thirty years ago, we mortgaged our future a bit as a country in that if you looked at the industrial base of the United States coming out of World War Two, for the next ten to twenty years, our aerospace industry was incredibly vertically integrated, all the way
down to the supply chain components, to the raw steel, to the raw aluminum, to the titanium. And we somewhere a couple decades ago, lost the formula and we outsourced that supply chain.
And so what I think we're seeing is a renewed interest.
And I can certainly say that for Blue that we're trying to bring that manufacturing back to the United States and our allies. And the fact of the matter is that it's often lost on people. Building a prototype or one or ten of something is easy. Building the machine that makes hundreds of those things, thousands of those things in my last job at Amazon, tens of millions of those things.
That is hard and so uh and part of that.
Part of that being hard is understanding your supply chain and being able to very vertically integrate and when somebody says, build a new version of this rocket, can you do it in a period.
Of time that's tractable.
And right now, for the most part, we we have lost our way and we're really about trying to pivot and get that supply chain, get that manufacturing capability, and make Blue Origin and hopefully others will follow our follow our lead the world's best manufacturing partner.
So when it comes to going to the Moon, what is the status of the launch, Launder I know apparently it is in the works right now being tested in Houston. I've been told what's the timeline.
Yeah, we have we have a couple of different fire irons in the fire right now, so we have what we call m K one mark one of our lander, which is a very large cargo lander. It can three metric tons to the lunar surface. That vehicle is in just in cryovac testing right now. It'll come back and our hope is to launch that in the next you know, three to six months, and you know, to put that in perspective, that's completely funded by Blue Origin, and it is it will be by far the largest thing that
has ever landed on the Moon. Now it's cargo only and so but it is a pathfinder mission. It's going to test our avionics, our light, our system, our landing systems, our engine, our B seven engine, and to allow us to test all those de risk those things for when
we try to get boots on the Moon. As we move forward, I think, you know, it's it'll take an all out effort, but I think there's a path where we could get we could get people back to the Moon and twenty twenty eight if if NASA wants us to and we think we have an architecture that would allow us to do that, we'll see what the new administration has to say, but we're ready and willing to give it a shot.
So the cargo lander is the first step before human lander.
Yeah, and they share a huge amount of the same architectural features. As I said, all those subsystems. What you have to add to it is and obviously launch. You saw the vehicle launch that wasn't Ai by the way.
That's a real rocket, and you never know these days. You don't know these days.
But the fact of the matter is what we have to add on top of that is life supports systems and systems that can support docking with Orion as Orion comes together to bring the astronauts from Earth to the lunar lander before we land on the moon.
You mentioned others will follow, and recently Jeff Bezos, who never tweets, this was his first tweet of twenty twenty six, posted a photo of this black tortoise, which goes along with blue origins. I think motif of slow and ferocious, methodical. But a lot of people have viewed it as a warning shot to Elon Musk, which really was focused on SpaceX going to Mars and now he's saying we're going to focus on the Moon. What do you make of
that tweet and what is the competition right now? Do you think you're going to be the first.
Well, it gives me an opportunity to put on a T shirt for you, So there you go. That's nothing else.
Let me do that. I get to keep this. Yeah, that's all yours.
And that's the first one off the presses too. By the way, I think everybody's going to want one of those. But gratitum ferosit is the sort of our internal statement about and it sort of stands for step by step ferociously, which is that you want when you're building space vehicles, when you're going to space, you want to do it in a way that you're testing as much as you can on the ground. Obviously some point you have to
launch a rocket and see if it works. But we want to just move to it and steadfasting, holding within reason to our mission. And for the last fifteen years we've been saying that. As I said, this moon that's out there is amazing place as a stepping stone for us.
What we're trying to do as a company is again.
We've visited all the planets in the Solar System with probes or in some cases you know, satellites and flybys, and we.
Now know this planet is the good one you.
Know, it's got an atmosphere, it's got water, it's a pretty good place to live, especially down here in South Florida. And what we want to do is preserve this planet and move heavy industry off of this planet so that we can support double, triple, quadruple the population on this planet.
And that's doable, by the way. That's a very tractable problem.
And the Moon is an incredibly important part of that. And so for us, it's not about did SpaceX change their mind or did a lawn change their mind?
If they did, thank you.
I'm glad that you're going in this direction because I think that's what's right for this planet. I would say though that, you know, it makes for good headlines that SpaceX.
Doesn't have to lose for Blue to succeed.
What the US needs is it needs two Spacexes.
It needs two launch companies that are.
Competing vigorously against each other to try to give us the most capabilities as a country, commercially, civilly from a defense perspective, because our adversaries aren't standing still and so we need to be moving very quickly.
Healthy competition.
But I think a lot of people run into that as the tortoise being blue origin and the hair being Elon Musk and SpaceX because it also comes after Secretary Duffy had said that SpaceX is behind, so they were opening up for everyone in terms of Artemis and Jared Isaacman, who's now the administrator, also said essentially, yeah, whoever can get there first is going to get the contracts.
So do you think you're going to get there first?
I think, if asked, we will make it. We'll give it a run for our money. I like our architecture. I like our odds of getting there very quickly. I don't have a crystal ball into what SpaceX is doing. I think again, Gwenn and Alan are competent, and they showed every day by launching rockets. But I love the fact that the US would compete us against each other. They are for sustainability on lunar, we're talking about who
could get there in twenty twenty eight. If asked, we will step up and we will move Heaven and Earth to get to the Moon first.
When it comes sustainability and actually being on the moon, you talk about the minerals that are on the moon, what we can do. What is your thinking of the possibilities and know people talk about.
Data centers in space.
I think Jeff Bezos wrote about that in high school, so he was really a foresight for sure on his side. What would be the next phase of this.
Well, in the near term, there are some incredibly strategic places on the Moon. We now know at the p there is water, and there are these points on the Moon called eternal peaks of light where you get sunlight for basically twenty four by seven lunar days or days however you want to look at it. But there are a few of those places, you know, many but not thousands, where they're also very close to these valleys and these caves where we know that there's water.
And if you're going to build.
Moon Base one Alpha, where you want to do it is next to these eternal peaks of light, so you can get power from solar panels and that you can harvest the water for both obviously human survival systems ecless systems, but also for fuel for rockets. You know, are our rocket that lands, are lander that lands on the Moon.
That engine uses hydrogen and oxygen from basic chemistry, you should remember that's just water cracked and so we can be able to be able to pull that, pull that aside and make more fuel to return from the moon, go to different places on the Moon.
So that's kind of phase one.
Find these unbelievably strategic locations, get permanence nearby of these locations, and build habitats. Once you're there, then you can start thinking about that as a lifting off point for all sorts of other things. You can build data centers there, you can build whole colonies there.
You can mine the moon.
As I said, we don't know everything that's on the Moon, but it's been bombarded by asteroids for four point five billion years.
Pretty much everything is likely to be there, as my.
Prediction, And so how do we utilize that and then build manufacturing, build data inference in space? Those are all great places to start from when you look at the Moon.
I was telling Mark Bezos earlier that I was one of those skeptic journalists when everyone was going to space. So you know, I've seen abject poverty around the world traveling with my job, and I would.
Think, why are they going to space? We have so much to.
Fix on Earth. But what you're describing is actually making Earth better by going to space using all those resources. You mentioned adversaries, How can you ensure that the US is going to get there first?
Well, I think that might be a better question for Jared and for the President, and but you know, we're prepared to do everything we can, including our own investment, to try to make that happen.
But I you know, I'm not going to candy coat it.
Our adversaries are investing incredibly into space, way more than the United States is, even with all the private investment that has come in from SpaceX and Jeff with Blue and others. It's and so I you know, the if you look at it from a defense perspective, forget about the civil applications, which is more the moon, but just
the defense perspective. You know Sons who said it best high ground matters, and you know in World War two and post World War two, the you know, the skies were high ground and having control of the sky was really important.
Space is the new high ground.
And if we do not think about space as a domain that we have mobility in, that we have awareness in, then our adversaries could take that high ground. And I you know, I'm a firm believer in freedom and democracy and this republic that we live in and I do believe that making sure you have good deterrence against your adversary matters. And I think our job as a manufacturer and a space provider is to give our war fighters, to give our civil astronauts the best technology possibles.