Good times and then those times are a little bit tougher, and you guys have gotten 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 that it's worth it. It's kind of like you're now, 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, you know, what we're trying to do is build all the infrastructure so that 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, you know, two and a half decades, you saw an environment where because all this infrastructure existed, the global networks and so on, very small companies could build very large enterprises. You know, two kids in a dorm room could build a giant company. And we want space to be like that. We 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. So 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's 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. And so we're working on all these things. We are building a lunar lander. We are working on in-situ resource projects, so we're learning how to build solar cells out of lunar regolith. And there are many other initiatives that we're undertaking, but all of them are focused on building this infrastructure so that 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 going to happen, right? They're going to happen. You don't want them to happen, but when they do happen, it's how you react to it.
It's how you get a chance to, 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...
Yeah, and the team at Blue is the most missionary team I've ever worked for because, you know, we've explored every planet. We've been to the deepest parts of the solar system, and this is the good one. All 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, this beautiful city here. And we could support three times the population on this planet. And 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. Yeah.
We didn't miss it, did we?
Okay. All right. Well, eventually maybe we'll get that going. Okay. So, we're good. We'll proceed. All right. So, Jeff, you mentioned earlier about the space economy. And I think to some of us that might be kind of like a science fair, or people might hear that as almost like science fiction. Is it real? You know, is that something that is for real? But 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. And it's being driven by communications with LEO constellations. It's being driven by national security missions. And it's being driven 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. Yeah, I think it was sort of underestimated at some point when, you know, years ago when our government was looking for what they would need. I think, 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 to it, I think in some ways like if you build it they will come. You know, 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, all types of, even my students at Columbia have flown an experiment on one of the New Shepard rockets. That would have been impossible. Even, you know, seven years ago, a few years ago they did this, but can you imagine it, even thinking that when we were students, or in the not too distant future, I mean I was...
If launch is very, very expensive, then the satellites have to have really long lifetimes and they have to be very exquisite.
And so, but if the launch starts to get cheaper, then the satellites can 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, and launch gets cheaper.
So there is a virtuous circle there.
That once you get it spinning in the right direction, that's where we want to go.
Yeah. And you had this vision, it's not 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 the exact timing. So you get out there and you get ready.
And you know, by getting reusable rockets you lower the cost because these boosters want to be reused, they're expensive, and when we land them then we can reuse them many, many, many times. And these, as you said, these constellations want to be gigantic.
You know, especially communications, 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 at my home I wanted to use all of it. And when I go all the way, these constellations want to be very, very large.
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 give it a shot.
For today's launch NG-2, we have two goals. The first is to safely deploy the payload, which is NASA's ESCAPADE, which is heading out on a mission to Mars. And the second is to land the booster for the first time.
NASA's new ESCAPADE mission will help us understand Mars's climate history using two spacecraft in orbit for the first time.
CS2 flight level. Autopilot enable.
Both feet for you now.
Continue to look good. Body rate is nominal. Getting good data coming down from both stages.
All right, at 9 minutes is when we're expecting the first stage to touch down on Jack Landing.
We've got our booster landing burn. And there's re-entry from our booster.
Congratulations ESCAPADE. Both blue and gold have successfully deployed. We have successfully landed the booster and we have successfully deployed the satellites for NS Campaign.
So, when you're doing hard things, you also get great moments like that.
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah.
Extraordinary. That is, then you said when it said it was a launch, it's also the landing, which amazes me. That's out on the ocean, right, on Jacqueline, 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 a moving 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.
No, the ocean is highly uncooperative.
So, to be able to do that like that is so impressive. 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, you know, 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 it would be 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 to meet the vision that Jeff talked about, you don't want to build just one rocket. We want to fly 100 times a year. And that means 100 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.
We're now building a BE-4 engine. This is our heavy LNG LOX engine. Every four days a BE-4 engine is coming off the line now. 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 was 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, we talked about the manufacturing. I do want to mention something about your pipeline. 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 if you could listen to hear from the head of any company, what would it be? And it was Blue Origin. Came out number one. So thanks for accommodating us. So I think your talent pipeline is excited to come join and be a part of this.
Yeah, I think people are underestimating, and even in the academic world, how much building physical things is going to be valued moving forward, right? 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, I don't know if everyone knows, it was mentioned earlier just a minute ago. You do have separate facilities. Most of your rockets are built in Florida, right, primarily, but you have an entirely separate facility in Alabama. And now I've ridden on rockets to space, but I've never tried to build one. So in your mindset, 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 the 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 that they don't melt, it's a very challenging thing to do. And then so designing the engine is hard, and then manufacturing it is hard, and manufacturing it right is hard. And, you know, I think we have a little clip I could show you. Our lunar lander has an engine in it called the BE-7, which is a relatively small engine. It's 10,000 pounds of thrust, and the reliability of this engine is paramount. And 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 BE-7 engine. But this is a very challenging thing. These engines are very complex. We have the BE-4 engine, which is the one that uses liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen. Uses an ox-rich stage combustion cycle. And then our BE-3U 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 the second stage it gives you tremendous advantages. So this is what the Apollo Saturn V 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 in 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. 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, and it's going to be an incredible time over the next, just the next year. If you look at our lunar roadmap, we call our team inside of Blue Origin 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 a 3-metric-ton-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 will be on that flight, which will 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 km in lower Earth orbit, and we'll do some two days of entering into the vehicle. The vehicle will have full environmental control, so it'll 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, 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, the 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 actually go look at it up close.
So, it just kind of seems like the timing has worked out pretty well. You guys identified it, now and the moon base announcement from a couple months ago.
You're right that the timing is good. I would also tell you that 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, a great accomplishment, much different than what we're doing now. It's the permanence of it, of staying there. And I really love what you said about what we went and did before, we pulled it forward in time. We did it before we were ready.
It was pulled forward in time because of, you know, geopolitics and the race with the Soviets and so on.
And now is the right time to really get in there and go to stay.
Yeah. We did it before by spending, you know, the US spent almost 3% of GDP to do it. And that's just not sustainable anymore.
Yeah. Give me 3% of GDP, I'll give you heavy fusion, okay?
So, I guess the question here, and we've already, I think we know, Moon or Mars? Jeff?
Well, Moon first. Moon first and then Mars.
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 be beamed back to us here. And 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. Global illiteracy is better than it was 500 years ago. Infant mortality is better than it was. Global poverty is better than it 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. And there's a great quote, which I'm sure you've heard from one of your fellow astronauts, Jim Lovell, 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 described the moon as a gift. Now, I've always thought of it like our little brother or sister that's always with us. If we're there, it sounds like you're saying we get there, we can go other places more quickly. Our next time, what's that?
It's been bombarded for four and a half billion years by every meteor, right? 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 going to be an incredible resource.
And it's untouched for billions of years. So it really is, I like that it's a gift for us to explore and then use that as a launchpad to go other places. All right. Let's talk about some more about the infrastructure stack that you're developing. This is all about, you know, the talk 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 said that is really the key, is companies, and we've talked about it 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 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 manufacturing side, 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, 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 Runerium, and 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, and I think we can talk more about that as well.
