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 Lim, 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 with talking about a little bit of what we saw in the video: anomalies and end response resiliency. If you look across the history of spaceflight and this is nothing new, right? There's been setbacks going back to Mercury, Apollo, space shuttle. I'm certainly familiar with those setbacks that we had. 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 know, 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 on 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 which is 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, God knows how to appropriately price his goods and 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 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, so we brought in 400 pieces of heavy equipment. Brought in construction workers that were working 24/7, 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. I think you've said it best: we're going to fly this year. 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 of course are 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 a good time, in those times that are a little tougher. And you guys have a great team and a lot of support from NASA on this. It sounds great with the plan moving forward. Jeff, I want to pick up on something you said about 'it's worth it.' It's like you're doubling down on it's worth it when others might not have continued. 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. We want space to be this dynamic, entrepreneurial place where two kids in a dorm room can build an incredible space company. 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. 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 working on all these things. We're building a lunar lander. We're working on in-situ resource projects, learning how to build solar cells out of lunar regolith. There are many other initiatives we're undertaking, but all of them 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 they're unavoidable. They're going to happen. You don't want them to happen, but when they do, 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 beautiful city, 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. 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 science fiction. Is it real? 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. 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 the 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 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, even my students at Columbia have flown an experiment on one of the New Shepard rockets that would have been impossible seven years ago, just a few years ago, they did this. Can you imagine that when we were students?
And it's a circle too. If launch is 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.
Yeah. And you had this vision. There's nothing you can count on that happening. But you were confident, of course, that this would 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 times. And these constellations want to be gigantic. 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 in my home, I want to use all of it. And so these constellations want to be very, very large.
Okay guys, I think we're gonna cut to the tape now for real. All right, a little setback, but here we go. Let's have a shot.
For today's launch NG2, 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.
TS2 flight level.
Both engines continue to look good. 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.
Burning, burning, burn.
Great shot from our booster. Congratulations. Escapade, both blue and gold have successfully deployed. We have successfully landed the booster and we have successfully deployed satellites for Escapade.
So when you're doing hard things, you also get great moments like that.
Extraordinary. You said it was a launch, but it's also the landing which amazes me. That's out on the ocean right on Jack 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. 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 is so impressive. So all right, Dave, this is all incredibly ambitious. 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? What is 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 see success like this and see how space is becoming more normal is amazing. But building one off of anything, whether that 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 do that, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of thought. That's the factories that are pushing these out, because you don't want to meet the vision that 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. So building our engine factory in Huntsville and our rocket factory down in Orlando, and getting those to rate, which includes the supply chain, includes the 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.
We're now building a BE4 engine, our heavy LNG engine, every four days coming off the line now. 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. 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, that was talked about the manufacturing. 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? And 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 is going to swing the other way. I was so inspired seeing the kids at Columbia and people that know how to build real physical things and understand the complexities of how to manufacture them. They're going to be in very high demand.
To pick up a little more on the engines, Jeff, you mentioned you have separate facilities. Most of your rockets are built in Florida, but you have a separate facility in Alabama. I've ridden on rockets that take you to space, but I've never tried to build one. In your mind, what is so difficult about building rocket engines?
