C (3:02)

So when you have this visit from the Secretary Hegseth and you're talking about going to the Moon, what is the Department of Defense, Department of War, what is the US Administration asking of you?

B (3:16)

I think the Department of War is a little separate from NASA is really the leading the spear for going to the Moon, and we're very supportive of that. But in general, when you talk to Secretary Hegseth, Feinberg, et al, what you find, especially in aerospace is that we've, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, we mortgaged our future a bit as a country in that if you looked at the industrial base of the United States coming out of World War II for the next 10 to 20 years, our aerospace industry was incredibly vertically integrated all the way down to the supply chain components, to the raw steel, to the raw aluminum, to the titanium. And we somewhere a couple decades ago, lost the formula and we outsource that supply chain. And so what I think we're seeing is a renewed interest and I can certainly say that for Blue, that we're trying to bring that manufacturing back to the United States and our allies. And the fact of the matter is that it's often lost on people. Building a prototype or one or ten of something is easy. Building the machine that makes hundreds of those things, thousands of those things in my last job at Amazon, tens of millions of those things. That is hard. And so, and part of that, part of that being hard is understanding your supply chain and being able to very vertically integrate. And when somebody says build a new version of this rocket, can you do it in a period of time that's tractable? And right now, for the most part, we have lost our way and we're really about trying to pivot and get that supply chain, get that manufacturing capability and make Blue Origin, hopefully others will follow our, follow, follow our lead, the world's best manufacturing partner.

C (5:13)

So when it comes to going to the moon, what is the status of the launch launder? I know apparently it is in the works right now, being Tested in Houston, I've been told. What's the timeline?

B (5:24)

Yeah, we have, we have a couple different fire irons in the fire right now. So we have what we call Mk1 Mark1 of our lander, which is a very large cargo lander. It can bring 3 metric tons to the lunar surface. That vehicle is in just in cryovac testing right now. It'll come back and our hope is to launch that in the next three to six months. And to put that in perspective, that's completely funded by Blue Origin and it will be by far the largest thing that has ever landed on the moon. Now it's cargo only, but it is a Pathfinder mission. It's going to test our avionics, our LiDAR system, our landing systems, our engine, our BE7 engine and to allow us to test all those de risk those things for when we try to get boots on the moon as we move forward. I think, you know, it'll take an all out effort, but I think there's a path where we could get, we could get people back to the moon in 2028 if NASA wants us to. And we think we have an architecture that would allow us to do that. We'll see what the new administration has to say, but we're ready and willing to give it a shot.

C (6:37)

So the cargo lander is the first step before human lander.

B (6:40)

Yeah. And they share a huge amount of the same architectural features, as I said, all those subsystems. What you have to add to it is and obviously launch, you saw the vehicle launch. That wasn't AI by the way, that's a real rocket. And, and you never know these days. You don't know these days. But, but the, the fact of the matter is what we have to add on top of that is life support systems and systems that can support docking with Orion. As Orion comes together to bring the astronauts from Earth to the Lunar lander before we land on the moon you.

C (7:13)

Mentioned others will follow. And recently Jeff Bezos, who never tweets this was his first tweet of 2026, posted a photo of this like Black Tortoise, which goes along with Blue Origin's I think motif of slow and ferocious, methodical. But a lot of people have viewed it as a warning shot to Elon Musk which really was focused on Space X going to Mars. And now he's saying we're going to focus on the moon. What do you make of that tweet and what is the competition right now? Do you think you're going to be the First.

B (7:49)

Well, it gives me an opportunity to put on a T shirt for you. So there you go. That's nothing else. Let me do that.

C (7:57)

I get to keep this.

B (7:58)

Yeah, that's all you're, that's the first one off the presses too, by the way. I think everybody's going to want one of those, but Gradatum Ferociter is, is the sort of our, our internal statement about, and it sort of stands for Step by Step, ferociously, which is that you, you, you want, when you're building space vehicles, when you're going to space, you want to do it in a way that you're testing as much as you can on the ground. Obviously at some point you have to launch a rocket and see if it works. But we, we want to just move to it and steadfastly holding within reason to our mission. And for the last 15 years we've been saying that, as I said, this moon that's out there is, is, is amazing place as a stepping stone for us. What we, what we're trying to do as a company is we, again, we visited all the planets in the solar system with probes or in some cases, you know, satellites and flybys, and we now know this planet is the good one. You know, it's got an atmosphere, it's got water. It's a pretty good place to live, especially down here in South Florida. And what we want to do is preserve this planet and move heavy industry off of this planet so that we can support, double, triple, quadruple the population on this planet. And that's doable, by the way. That's a very tractable problem. And the moon is an incredibly important part of that. And so it, for us, it's not about did SpaceX change their mind or did Elon change their mind? If they did, thank you. I'm glad that you're going in this direction because I think that's what's right for this planet. I would say, though, that it makes for good headlines that SpaceX doesn't have to lose for Blue to succeed. What the US needs is it needs two SpaceX's, it needs two launch companies that are competing vigorously against each other to try to give us the most capabilities as a country, commercially, civilly, from a defense perspective, because our adversaries aren't standing still. And so we need to be moving very quickly.

C (10:08)

Healthy competition. But I think a lot of people read into that as the tortoise being Blue Origin and the hare being elon Musk in SpaceX, because it also comes after Secretary Duffy had said that SpaceX is behind, so they were opening up for everyone. In terms of Artemis and Jared Isaac, man, who's now the administrator, also said, essentially, yeah, whoever can get there first is going to get the contracts. So do you think you're going to get there first?

B (10:33)

I think if asked, we will make it, we will give it a run for our money. I like our architecture, I like our odds of getting there very quickly. I don't, I don't have a crystal ball into what SpaceX is doing. I think again, Gwen and Elon are competent and they show it every day by launching rockets. But I love the fact that the US would compete us against each other. They are for sustainability on lunar. We're talking about who could get there in 2028. If asked, we will step up and we will move heaven and earth to get to the moon first.

C (11:06)

When it comes to sustainability and actually being on the moon, you talk about the minerals that are on the moon, what we can do, what is your thinking of the possibilities? I know people talk about data centers in space. I think Jeff Bezos wrote about that in high school. So he was really foresight for sure on his side. What would be the next phase of this?

B (11:27)

Well, in the near term, there are some incredibly strategic places on the moon. We now know at the poles there is water and there are these points on the moon called eternal peaks of light, where you get Sunlight for basically 24 by 7 lunar days, Earth days, however you want to look at it. But there are a few of those places, many but not thousands, where they're also very close to these valleys and these caves where we know that there's water. And if you're going to build Moon Base 1 Alpha, where you want to do it is next to these eternal peaks of light. So you can get power from solar panels and that you can harvest the water for both obviously human survival systems, ECLSS systems, but. But also for fuel for rockets. Our rocket, our lander that lands on the moon, that engine uses hydrogen and oxygen from basic chemistry. You should remember that's just water cracked. And so we can be able to pull that aside and make more fuel to return from the moon. Go to different places on the moon. So that's kind of phase one. Find these unbelievably strategic locations, get permanence nearby of these locations and build habitats. Once you're there, then you can start thinking about that as a lifting off point for all sorts of other things. You can build data centers there. You can Build whole colonies there. You can mine the moon. As I said, we don't know everything that's on the moon, but it's been bombarded by asteroids for 4.5 billion years. Pretty much everything's likely to be there, is my prediction. And so how do we utilize that and then build manufacturing, build data, inference in space? Those are all great places to start from. When you, when you look at the moon.

C (13:17)

I was telling Mark Bezos earlier that I was one of those skeptic journalists when everyone was going to space. So, you know, I've seen abject poverty around the world, traveling with my job, and I would think, why are they going to space? We have so much to fix on Earth. But what you're describing is actually making Earth better by going to space and using all those resources. You mentioned, adversaries. How can you ensure the US Is going to get there first?

B (13:42)

Well, I think that might be a better question for Jared and for the President. But, you know, we're prepared to do everything we can, including our own investment, to try to make that happen. But I, you know, I'm not going to candy coat it. Our adversaries are investing incredibly into space way more than the United States is. Even with all the private investment that has come in from SpaceX and Jeff with Blue and others, it's. And so I, you know, the, if you look at it from a defense perspective, forget about the civil applications, which is more the moon, but just the defense perspective. You know, Sun Tzu said it best. High ground matters. And, you know, in World War II and post World War II, the skies were high ground. And having control of the sky was really important. Space is the new high ground. And if we do not think about space as a domain that we have mobility in, that we have awareness in, then our adversaries could take that high ground. And I'm a firm believer in freedom and democracy and this republic that we live in. And I do believe that making sure you have good deterrence against your adversary matters. And I think our job as a manufacturer and a space provider is to give our war fighters, to give our civil astronauts the best technology possible.

D (15:12)

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