That on an ocean-going platform is all inspiring and the team is rightly very proud of themselves for it. And the ocean doesn't always cooperate. That thing moves.
No, ocean is highly uncooperative. So to be able to do that like that is so impressive.
So all right Dave, this is all incredibly ambitious, right? And so the question is 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, getting the right people in, the supply chain, all this coming together. What is it that's foremost on your mind with this? 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. And so to see success like this and see how space is becoming more normal is amazing. But 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. You really want to, that takes a lot of time and a lot of thought. And that's the factories that are pushing these out because you don't want it to meet the vision that Jeff talked about. You don't want to build just one rocket. We want to build, we want to fly a hundred times a year and that means a hundred second stages. That means hundreds of engines. And so building our engine factory in Huntsville and our rocket factory down in Orlando and getting those to rate which includes the supply chain that includes the raw materials and heavy vertical integration is how you build that machine. And we're making a huge amount of progress. But you can always get better. Yeah, we're now building a BE4 engine. This is our heavy, you know, ULA's engine, every four days coming off the line now a BE4 engine. So rate manufacturing is critical to this.
You know 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. And so 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 that was talked about the manufacturing. I do want to mention something about your pipeline. When you, I don't know if you knew this but when we were looking for someone to come speak we had a CEO lecture series and we did a poll within our student body and what if you can listen hear from the head of any company what would it be and it was Blue Origin came out number one so thanks for accommodating. So I think your pipeline of talent is excited to come join you 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, right? And so we spent the last three decades with not enough computer science majors, but I think the pendulum's going to swing the other way. And 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 bit more on the engines, Jeff, as the, I don't know if everyone knows, it was mentioned early just a minute ago about you do have separate facilities. Most of your rockets are built in Florida, right primarily, but you have an entirely separate facility in Alabama. Yeah. 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. So, you know, the internal combustion temperatures inside a main combustion chamber of a rocket are 5,000, 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It's beyond the melting points of any materials. And so, 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. This is a very challenging thing to do and then so designing the engine is hard and then manufacturing it is hard and manufacturing at rate is hard. And you know I think we have a little clip I could show you. We have our lunar lander has an engine in it called the BE7 which is a relatively small engine. It's 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 once tested 30 years ago. They tested it for 36 minutes. So that's a multi-decade record that the Blue Origin team just beat with the BE7 engine. But this is a very challenging thing. These engines are very complex. We have the BE4 engine, which is the one that uses liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen, uses an oxidizer-rich staged combustion cycle. And then our BE3U engine is our second stage engine. It's liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. This is the same basic architecture that was used by the Apollo program. So a hydrocarbon booster stage and liquid hydrogen upper stages. Liquid hydrogen is a complex fuel to use, but it's much higher performing than hydrocarbon fuels. The problem with liquid hydrogen is that it's very voluminous. The density of liquid hydrogen is very low. So that's why you really don't want to use it on a booster stage. The booster stage would get too volumetrically gigantic but on a second stage it gives you tremendous advantages. So this is what the Apollo Saturn 5 rocket did and it's what we do as well.
To do the lunar landing with liquid hydrogen has a further advantage which is that you look just a little ways into the future when we have permanent lunar settlements. And this time we are going to the moon to stay. I'm not going to visit. We're going to stay. And when you look at the materials available on the moon, you have water ice in the permanently shadowed craters near the poles of the moon and that can with electrolysis 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, right? So, you guys have had this in your game plan since the company was founded was the moon. And 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 like a global interest of going to the moon, exploring the moon for various reasons. Do you feel like everyone else, the world is catching up to where you guys have been for a while? How do you feel about that?
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 we'll do all the other things, but the moon is the first best step. And there are many reasons for that. But it's kind of a gift. It's so near Earth. We can get there in three and a half days. We can return in three and a half days. You can go anytime you want. You don't have to wait for the planetary alignment to be just right. And you can only go to Mars every two years or so. And so there are a lot of advantages to the moon. And then the moon's gravity well is so much lower than the earth's that when you get materials from the moon, you can lift them off the moon with 28 times less energy per kilogram than is needed to lift something off the earth. And so that's a really valuable thing. If you are producing liquid oxygen, for example, on the moon, lifting that into space is very easy compared to lifting liquid oxygen off of Earth. And so as we go about exploring the solar system, which we will do, and as we, you know, we will build colonies on Mars and so on, the moon is an important first step. And when you skip steps, it actually doesn't make you faster.
Yeah, we and it's going to be an incredible time over the next just the next year. If you look at our lunar road map, we call our team inside of Blue Lunar the Lunar Permanence Group for exactly what Jeff said. We want to go there and we want to stay on the moon. And just next year, early in the year, we'll fly our Mark 1 lander, which is on the screen here. This is three metric tons to the lunar surface vehicle. It'll be the largest thing that has ever landed on the moon. And that'll be our Pathfinder mission. And then mid year, it was just announced last week, Artemis 3 will happen. Luca from Italy will be on that flight which would be great.
And that's going to be a rendezvous mission with our Mark 2 lander which is our human rated lander and we'll meet up at around 450 kilometers in low Earth orbit and we'll do some of two days of entering into the vehicle. The vehicle will have full environmental control. So have an ECLSS system and we'll test that out for when we fly to the moon the following year. And then later in the year, we'll fly another Mark 1 lander. So these are coming off the assembly line now. So we have a factory that's building these and that'll land NASA's VIPER rover late in the year. And so it's going to the cycle time to the moon, the cadence to the moon is going to increase very rapidly. And it's really exciting. And by the way, that VIPER rover is going to go find lunar water ice in those permanently shadowed craters. So that's a very exciting mission. We've seen it with various methods from orbit and so on. But now we'll be able to go look at it up close.
So just kind of seems like the timing has worked out pretty well. You guys identified it 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, you know we 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. And the idea that we've been to the moon before which we have great accomplishment much different than what we're doing now the permanence of what I was saying there and I really love what you said about and when we went before we pulled it forward in time.
Yep. You did it before we were ready.
It was pulled forward in time and because of geopolitics and the race with the Soviets and so on. And now is the right time to really get into and go to stay.
Yeah. We did it before by spending, you know, the US spent almost 3% of GDP. Yeah. To do it. And that's just not, we don't have those types of resources.
Give me 3% of GDP. I'll give you fusion. Okay. Think. Yeah.
So, I guess the question here and we've already I think we know the moon or Mars, Jeff.
Moons, Mars and everywhere else, too. And we'll build large, you know, O'Neill, Jerry O'Neill style colonies in space as well. Yeah.
And we'll build big, you know, we'll use asteroids and near-earth objects and the moon and so on to build compute in space and solar cells in space and so on. And a lot of our compute will be done in space. It'll make more sense and ultimately we even manufacture the chips that the compute runs on and then the answers can just beamed back to us here on this planet.
Dave said it before, but our long-term vision, our dream is that all the polluting industry can be done off Earth. If space travel gets reliable enough and inexpensive enough and we can get materials from asteroids and near-earth objects and the moon, then this garden planet can be returned to its pre-industrial revolution state. This is the only way in which the world is worse today than it was 500 years ago. Everything is better today. The, you know, global illiteracy is better than it was 500 years ago. Infant mortality is better than it was. Global poverty is better than was. Everything is better and it keeps getting better. And the one exception is the natural world.
And we can actually have both. So we go to space not necessarily just for space but for earth.
Yes. You want to protect, there's a great quote which I'm sure you've heard from one of your fellow astronauts.
Yeah. When he went to the moon and he looked back on Earth. He looked back at the earth and he said, 'I realized you go to heaven when you're born, not when you die.'
And I really love the way you describe the moon as a gift. You know, I've always thought of it like our little brother or sister that's always with us. If we're there, it's and it's the right. It sounds like you're saying we get there, we can go other places more quickly.
Um, bombarded time. What's that? It's been bombarded for four and a half billion years by every meteorite. And so just under that surface is everything we need to build the things that Jeff talked about. Like every mineral's there, water's there. We know this now. And it's just going to be an incredible resource and it's untouched for billions of years. So it really is a, I like that it's a gift for us to explore and then use that as a launch pad to go other places.
All right. Let's talk about some more about the infrastructure stack that you're developing. This is all, you know, about rockets and the vision for the moon and all these things that you guys are into and you're going to need a lot of talent and resources. But, you know, you said that that is really the key is companies and we've talked about a little bit already, companies that can be these world-class manufacturers with incredible vertical integration. They're the ones that are going to be the leaders and Blue Origin is doing that to set up this space economy, building that infrastructure. So when you say that about building that in the infrastructure layer for the space economy, what does that mean and what are the pieces of that stack that you're developing?
Well, I think on the, as you said on the manufacturer, I was very surprised coming to a company like Blue that you do have to be incredibly vertically integrated in this area and as an example, we have our own, these engines that Jeff talked about, you know, they're running at just the boundary of physics and high heat. So, we have a material science group that literally invented two new alloys. We call them cascadium and reerium. These are to coat these engines so they can survive in these applications. And then we take those alloys and we put them into one of the biggest additive manufacturing factories in the world which Blue has and we print these metals and literally print an engine. And so it's part of the infrastructure is inventing new infrastructure to push the boundaries of what we'll be able to do again to get to where Jeff said which is lowering the cost. You know, you could probably do this in the old ways back in the Apollo era, but it does take a lot of money in this. And then I think the other place that we're trying to invent is what are the applications you want to put in space. And so we have, we've announced two different constellations, one called Project Sunrise, the other one called Terrowave that get more infrastructure into space and I think we can talk more about that as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about Terrowave. Yeah, data. Where are we going?
