They are building a new road to space with Blue Origin. Please join me in welcoming to the Vivate stage, in conversation with former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino who helped save the Hubble Space Telescope, the CEO of Blue Origin David Limp, and the founder of Blue Origin Jeff Bezos. You will see a short film and immediately after that short film they will be joining on stage.
We have a gift, this nearby body called the moon. It will be the largest lander to ever land on the moon. That opens up huge possibilities. It'll soft land in a precise way onto the lunar surface. None of this is easy. All of it is hard. There's still a lot of work to do and a lot of hard work to come. Mark 1 is a Blue Origin funded mission. High risk, high reward. Mark 2 is a complete Blue Origin solution. Very ambitious. Reliable, repeatable, low-cost access to the moon. We will now have lunar permanence. It's time to go back to the moon. This time to stay.
Okay. Well, thank you very much for that warm welcome. Thanks Dave and Jeff for having me join you up here on the stage. It's a real honor for me to be here with you guys. We're going to start off talking about a little bit of what we saw in the video. Anomalies and response resiliency. If you look across the history of spaceflight, this is nothing new, right? There's been setbacks going back to Mercury, Apollo, space shuttle. I'm certainly familiar with those setbacks. And from the outside, people might look at that and think of that as a failure. But for those of us on the inside, in the industry, it's kind of part of the engineering development process. You want to learn from it and move on if you can. As we saw in the video, a few weeks ago you guys had a setback and now you're in the beginning phases of rebuilding your launchpad. What have you learned since and how does the path forward look?
Well, let me start by saying that was a rough moment. Nobody likes that. It was a gut punch for the whole team. But what we've learned since then is we got really lucky. Some of the long lead items in the launch infrastructure were preserved. For example, the propellant tank farm, all the liquid hydrogen, liquefied natural gas, liquid oxygen, all those tanks, those are very long lead items and they were fortunately undamaged. The booster, we had a booster in the integration facility right there at the launchpad and various pieces of shrapnel missed the booster. There was a lot of good luck in that incident. In the big picture, kind of what you're saying, God knows how to appropriately price his goods. Space travel is hard and it's worth it. By the end of that incident, within 24 hours, completely spontaneously, the Blue Origin team, and this is a team of just incredible people, they were making themselves t-shirts that say 'It's worth it.'
And I think the other thing is that we're busily rebuilding it. We got lucky in another way. There was a construction crew just down the road and so we brought in 400 pieces of heavy equipment. Brought in construction workers that were working 24 by 7 and so the pad has now been cleared of all the debris. It's amazing how quickly that's happened. And just yesterday we started the reconstruction and I think you've said it best. We're going to fly this year.
Yeah, we'll fly before the end of the year.
Awesome. Awesome. I think what you said about your team is very meaningful. I look back at my time at NASA and the highlights are of course successful space flights, but when you look at the setbacks, the way you respond to them, you find out what your team is made of, right? You don't find out necessarily in good times, in those times that are a little bit tougher. And you guys have got a great team and a lot of support from NASA on this and it sounds great with the plan moving forward. Jeff, I want to pick up on something you said about 'It's worth it.' Even though this happened, you're doubling down on 'It's worth it' when others might not have continued, right? You could also have decided not to move forward. Share with us your vision and why it is worth it to you.
Well, what we're trying to do is build all the infrastructure so there can be a completely dynamic space economy. Today the cost of admission to space is still very high. If you look back at what I witnessed in the internet space over the last two and a half decades, you saw an environment where because all this infrastructure existed, global networks and so on, very small companies could build very large enterprises. Two kids in a dorm room could build a giant company. And we want space to be like that. You want space to be this dynamic entrepreneurial place where two kids in a dorm room can build an incredible space company, and that is going to happen. The job of a company like Blue Origin is to help build the road to space, that heavy infrastructure, so that many other companies can do incredible things. And there are so many resources in space. You're seeing that now with LEO constellations and the potential for orbital compute. We have the moon as a gift. It's right there. We're building a lunar lander. We're working on in-situ resource projects, learning how to build solar cells out of lunar regolith. All of these initiatives are focused on building this infrastructure so there can be dynamism in the space economy.
Yeah. So this is all great news and I'm so grateful you guys are moving forward. These are not things you'd want to have happen when you have an anomaly, when you have a setback, but it's—
They're unavoidable. They're going to happen, right? You don't want them to happen, but when they do happen, it's how you react to it. It gives the whole team a chance to show everyone who we are and what we're made of. Right? Yeah. Looking back years from now, I think the team at Blue is the most missionary team I've ever worked for because we've explored every planet. We've been to the deepest parts of the solar system, and this is the good one, right? This is the planet you want to be on. It's beautiful. And as we build this infrastructure, you can move polluting industry into space and you can turn every place on Earth like the parks in this city into something even more beautiful, and we could support three times the population on this planet. That's the long-term goal. That's what we're trying to do. That's why it's worth it.
Okay. All right. So, I am very excited to see New Glenn fly again, but maybe not everyone in the room is familiar with what a launch looks like. So, we're going to roll a little tape so that everyone can see how epic one of these launches are. We'll roll the tape now.
It's not just a launch, it's a landing, too.
Ah, yes. There you go.
We didn't miss it, did we?
Okay. All right. Well, eventually we'll get that going. So, Jeff, you mentioned earlier about the space economy and I think to some of us that might be kind of like science fiction. Is it real? Sitting where you sit, what evidence do you see every day that convinces you that the demand for access to space is real and accelerating?
Well, this is a great question. The evidence right now is very obvious. If you look at demand for launch, demand for launch is insatiable right now. We have a tremendous backlog already on our books for launch. Every space launch company has tremendous backlog. We are supply constrained. We are not demand constrained. It's being driven by communications with LEO constellations, by national security missions, and in the future by things like orbital compute and lunar resources and NASA programs to return to the moon, this time to stay. There's just a tremendous amount of demand for launch.
Yeah. I think it was sort of underestimated at some point when years ago our government was looking for what they would need. Is it fair to say they underestimated what the real demand would be?
100%. I think people underestimated it tremendously.
Yeah. And I think there might be an element of if you build it, they will come. If you can't get to a place, you can't even imagine what you would do there. But now that you've increased the access, even my students at Columbia have flown an experiment on one of the New Shepard rockets that would have been impossible even seven years ago.
And it's a circle too. If launch is very, very expensive, then the satellites have to have really long lifetimes and they have to be very exquisite. But if the launch starts to get cheaper, then the satellites get cheaper. And if the satellites get cheaper, there's more demand for launch. If there's more demand for launch, then you get more practice with launch. Launch gets cheaper. So there's a virtuous circle there that once you get it spinning in the right direction, that's where we want to go.
So there's a virtuous circle there. Yeah. And you had this vision. There's nothing you can count on that happening, but you were confident, of course, that this would—
You know it's going to happen. You just don't know exact timing. So you get out there and you get ready. By getting reusable rockets, you lower the costs because these boosters want to be reused. They're expensive and when we land them, we can reuse them many, many, many times. And these constellations want to be gigantic. People are insatiable on how much bandwidth they want to use. When I had a 300-baud modem I wanted to use all of it. When I had a gigabit in my home I want to use all of it.
Okay guys, I think we're going to cut to the tape now for real. All right, we had a little setback, but here we go. Let's have a shot.
So when you're doing hard things, you also get great moments like that.
Extraordinary. That you said when I said it was a launch, it's also the landing which amazes me. That's out on the ocean on Jacklyn, the recovery ship. Amazing.
And this is a very large vehicle. This vehicle will take 45 metric tons to LEO. The variant we're working on right now, the 9x4 variant, will take over 70 metric tons to LEO. This is a super heavy class booster and to watch it land like that on an ocean-going platform is awe-inspiring and the team is rightly very proud of themselves for it.
And the ocean doesn't always cooperate. That thing moves. So to be able to do that is so impressive. All right, Dave, this is all incredibly ambitious, right? Because you're the CEO here, what keeps you up at night when you think about all this stuff coming together—the whole operation, the manufacturing, the talent pipeline, the supply chain, all of this? What is it that's foremost on your mind? Or is it everything combined?
There is a little bit of everything. I've only been doing aerospace for two and a half years. I'm traditionally trained in consumer electronics, but I think people underestimate how hard it is to build a rocket. These are incredibly complicated vehicles pushing the boundaries of what physics allows. To build one off of anything, whether that would be an engine or a rocket, that doesn't really keep me up at night much. What the hard part is is building the machine that builds the machines. That takes a lot of time and a lot of thought. That's the factories that are pushing these out, because to meet the vision Jeff talked about, you don't want to build just one rocket. We want to fly a hundred times a year, and that means a hundred second stages. That means hundreds of engines. Building our engine factory in Huntsville and our rocket factory down in Orlando and getting those to rate, including the supply chain, raw materials, and heavy vertical integration, is how you build that machine. We're making a huge amount of progress, but you can always get better.
Yeah. We're now building a BE-4 engine. This is our heavy, ULA's engine. Every four days coming off the line now, a BE-4 engine. So rate manufacturing is critical to this. Space travel is a solved problem for six decades. We're not trying to invent space travel. We're trying to make it cost-effective, and that's the key. That's why you need reusability, as Dave is saying, and why you need rate manufacturing. It really is about being world-class manufacturers, and Dave and the team are crushing that. They're doing an amazing job.
When Dave visited us at Columbia where I'm on the faculty, manufacturing was talked about. I do want to mention something about your pipeline. When we were looking for someone to come speak, we had a CEO lecture series and we did a poll within our student body. If you could hear from the head of any company, what would it be? Blue Origin came out number one. So thanks for accommodating. I think your pipeline of talent is excited to come join you and be a part of this.
Yeah, I think people are underestimating even in the academic world how much building physical things is going to be valued moving forward. We spent the last three decades with not enough computer science majors, but I think the pendulum's going to swing the other way. I was so inspired seeing these kids at Columbia and people that know how to build real physical things and understand the complexities of that and how to manufacture them. They're going to be in very high demand.
And just to pick up a little more on the engines, Jeff. You do have separate facilities. Most of your rockets are built in Florida, right, but you have an entirely separate facility in Alabama. And now I've ridden on rockets that take you to space, but I've never tried to build one. So in your mind, what is so difficult about building rocket engines?
Well, rocket engines operate right at the limit of physics. The internal combustion temperatures inside a main combustion chamber of a rocket are 5,000 to 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It's beyond the melting points of any materials. The complexities of pressurizing those propellants in high-performance turbo pumps that have to be very lightweight, of cooling those materials with regenerative channels so they don't melt—it's a very challenging thing to do. Designing the engine is hard, manufacturing it is hard, and manufacturing at rate is hard. We have our lunar lander engine called the BE-7, which is a relatively small engine, 10,000 pounds of thrust, and the reliability of this engine is paramount. We just did the longest engine test in history. This is a 41-minute engine test. This engine ran continuously for 41 minutes. That beats the record for the space shuttle main engine which they tested 30 years ago for 36 minutes. That's a multi-decade record that the Blue Origin team just beat with the BE-7 engine. We also have the BE-4 engine using liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen with an oxidizer-rich staged combustion cycle. And our BE-3U engine is our second stage engine, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. This is the same basic architecture used by the Apollo program—a hydrocarbon booster stage and liquid hydrogen upper stages. Liquid hydrogen is a complex fuel but much higher performing than hydrocarbon fuels. The density of liquid hydrogen is very low, which is why you don't want to use it on a booster stage—it would get too volumetrically gigantic. But on a second stage it gives tremendous advantages. To do the lunar landing with liquid hydrogen has a further advantage—when we have permanent lunar settlements, and this time we are going to the moon to stay, not just visit, you have water ice in the permanently shadowed craters near the poles that with electrolysis can be converted into liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. So by using liquid hydrogen as our lunar landing fuel, one day in the not too distant future, you'll be able to use in-situ materials on the surface of the moon to refuel your lander.
Let's talk more about the moon. You guys have had this in your game plan since the company was founded. Lately we've been hearing a lot about the moon. Artemis 2 was such a huge success and really captured everyone's attention. It's now a global interest of going to the moon, exploring the moon for various reasons. Do you feel like the world is catching up to where you guys have been for a while?
Yeah, we've been fixated on not skipping any steps. I'm very excited to see NASA and I think most of the world recognize that we should go to the moon first. We'll go to Mars and do all the other things, but the moon is the first best step. It's kind of a gift. It's so near Earth. We can get there in three and a half days, return in three and a half days, go anytime we want without waiting for planetary alignment. You can only go to Mars every two years or so. The moon's gravity well is so much lower that you can lift materials off the moon with 28 times less energy per kilogram than off Earth. If you're producing liquid oxygen on the moon, lifting that into space is very easy compared to lifting it off Earth. As we explore the solar system, as we build colonies on Mars, the moon is an important first step. And when you skip steps, it actually doesn't make you faster.
Yeah, it's going to be an incredible time over just the next year. If you look at our lunar roadmap, we call our team inside Blue the Lunar Permanence Group for exactly what Jeff said—we want to go there and stay on the moon. Early next year we'll fly our Mark 1 lander, a three-metric-ton-to-the-lunar-surface vehicle. It'll be the largest thing that has ever landed on the moon. That'll be our Pathfinder mission. Then mid-year, Artemis 3 will happen. Luca from Italy will be on that flight. That's a rendezvous mission with our Mark 2 lander, our human-rated lander, meeting up at around 450 kilometers in low Earth orbit for a couple of days of testing the environmental control and ECLSS system. Later in the year we'll fly another Mark 1 lander to land NASA's VIPER rover. The cadence to the moon is going to increase very rapidly. It's really exciting.
And by the way, that VIPER rover is going to go find lunar water ice in those permanently shadowed craters. That's a very exciting mission. We've seen it from orbit, but now we'll be able to go look at it up close.
So it just kind of seems like the timing has worked out pretty well. You guys identified it and now the moon base announcement from a couple months ago.
You're right that the timing is good. I would also tell you this is so early. As a species, as far as space is concerned, we're just still warming up, right? We have not even begun. This is the earliest, earliest, earliest. The idea that we've been to the moon before, which we have, great accomplishment, is much different than what we're doing now—the permanence of it. And when we went before, we pulled it forward in time. We did it before we were ready. It was pulled forward in time because of geopolitics and the race with the Soviets and so on.
