It's great to be on the stage with you. The next frontier, let's start right there. Space is the place. Administrator Isaacman, key critical moment right now. How do you see it?
Critical. I would say this is such an exciting moment. I mean, it's an exciting period of time and we're talking golden age right now. I have to say a lot of credit to President Trump, Vice President JD Vance. I mean, think about the policies of this administration. We are going back to the moon. We are going back to the moon to build a moon base, establish humanity's first enduring presence on another world. We're getting underway under nuclear power in space right now, launching more great missions of science and discovery. I mean, this is the greatest adventure in human history and probably the most exciting time to be pursuing it since the Apollo era.
Yeah. What does this mean for Blue Origin?
Well, I think Jared's being humble first of all. The NASA under Jared is a different NASA and it's one that's moving with urgency and with direction and has a point of view and that is welcomed. I can tell you from private industry. The other thing is it's not just Blue, it's everybody in the commercial space industry. This public private partnership is very different for how we do these things and it's refreshing as well.
What does that mean? Oh, there we go. Okay. What does that mean when we talk about public private partnerships and this growing moment of what I would call the intersection of technology, investment, policy coming together to enable this? How does that continue to come or I guess evolve from here and what does that mean at NASA?
Well, first I'd say when NASA undertakes and achieves the near impossible, we never go at it alone. We are always joined by really the best and brightest from across the nation including industry, including international partners, including academic institutions. July 20th, 1969, NASA went along with Boeing and McDonald Douglas, Grumman built the lunar lander and many of those companies are still contributing to our mission today. But then you have some new organizations, new companies that bring an exciting flare to it. I would say Blue Origin is squarely in that camp. SpaceX, you heard from Elon Musk in the previous panel. Absolutely a great example of that and they actually are very enabling to our mission. I mean, the fact that both, you know, SpaceX and now Blue Origin as well are not throwing away their rockets at every launch actually reduce costs materially for our missions like sending out, you know, scientific missions of discovery, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, pursuing the secrets of the universe, sending astronauts to and from space. SpaceX will launch our astronauts on Crew 13 in just a couple days to the International Space Station. Putting massive payload down on the surface of the moon. We're counting on Blue Origin extensively to put a number of landers. Actually, a lot of the early foundation of the moon base is going to be carried there on New Glenn and their Mark 1 lander. So, we leveraged industry in decades past. We're absolutely doing it again today. You know, it's just the missions have only gotten better. We're building a moon base.
So with everything the administrator just laid out, where's Blue Origin in terms of development and being able to realize this vision?
Well, we've been all in on the moon for a decade now, and I think the timing aligns so perfectly with the vision that the president and Jared have put forth. So we've stood up the manufacturing lines already for a lander. We built the lander on our dime, the first one, and then we'll fly that and then we can stamp them out. Part of what's great about commercial space and what we're doing at Blue Origin is we're building the factories to build the space economy at rate. So not thinking about flying 10 times a year or 12 times a year, but how do we fly a hundred times a year? How do we fly a thousand times a year? How do we land something on the moon every two weeks? And that's just totally exciting.
Speaking of return to flight, still on track for New Glenn before the end of this year?
Yeah. We have a schedule that gets us flying this year. We just stacked that module today. I put that out in social and I'm pretty excited about it. The team's, we have a thousand people down at the pad. 500 working day shift, 500 working night shift, 7 by 24. It's so important for our mission. Our statement here is it's worth it, but it's also important for the country. You know, we want to fly because it's important for national security. It's important for NASA and everybody at Blue, all 15,000 of us are just dead set on getting back to flight.
Yeah, we just heard from Elon on stage as well. And obviously a successful Starship mission, you know, reaching orbit yesterday. The conversation I find myself having over and over and over again is that there's so much demand to send so much stuff to space and not enough launch capacity to do it.
Yeah. I mean, we're in an interesting time right now where there are some new rockets coming online and those kinds of things, but I can tell you that again, the rockets want to be large. And so, we're building very large vehicles. Starship you saw fly. We're building New Glenn. And these are going to have capacity like nothing we've ever seen before. 70 to 100 metric tons to orbit. And we're building the factory to industrialize them here in the US to industrialize them at scale. And you know the factories that we're building right now are scaled to build 150 second stages a year and that's just the first factory and we're going to stamp these out and we're building the infrastructure to launch at that kind of rate too. So it's going to be very different over the next couple years as this capacity comes online.
Yeah, I would just say I mean for sure there's going to be some short-term volatility here but then you see, you know, stellar performances like SpaceX's Starship flight just a couple days ago. Blue Origin, by the way, and I mentioned this to Jeff earlier, is surpassing all expectations in terms of their pad recovery operation. They're going to prove an awful lot of people wrong and the capabilities their new vehicle brings in including the upgraded version of which I think today was just added to the national security space launch contract. You have a lot of other companies out there. Rocket Lab, Vulcan is doing it. I'm very impressed with what Stoke is doing in their launch vehicle. Like this is whatever the volatility is and cost for because there is extraordinary transportation demand to lower Earth orbit and beyond. Industry is already making great investments across the board to address it.
What are the technologies you're most excited about right now?
Oh, well, let's see. You know, it's kind of interesting because we're talking about all these great things industry is doing. So, I like to talk a little bit about the things that industry probably shouldn't be doing. In fact, I think that's NASA's at its worst when we have substantial overlap with industry. I think NASA is at its best when it's doing the near impossible. What has no obvious immediate business use cases associated with it when no other agency, company or frankly other country is capable of doing. That's where I come back to the nuclear NASA. Under President Trump's term in 2028 after decades of failed programs and billions of taxpayer dollars invested, America will finally get underway under nuclear power in space. And I think this is just so important. It's nuclear electric propulsion. It allows us to really differentiate from where industry is making their investments in chemical propulsion. It actually is very complimentary too. But this is the kind of capability that can allow us to extend our reach farther into space. Ensure American leadership in the ultimate high ground. Go and explore some of the moons in our outer solar system that have oceans. I mean you think about Enceladus or Europa. I mean these are saltwater oceans with complex chemistry. We know that what we might learn and then as we mature the technology this becomes the power for your fission surface power reactor on moon base. This is what may ultimately contribute alongside industry of taking astronauts to Mars and bring them back to tell us about it and maybe nuclear reactors on Mars someday. So that's one thing I'm really excited about at NASA because we're just getting started. We have our Nautilus here. It'll launch in 2028, but the future we could build thereafter.
