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Lars Hoffman (7:26)

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Maria Varmazes (8:07)

Today's guest is Lars Hoffman, Vice President of Government Sales at Blue Origin Foreign.

Lars Hoffman (8:15)

I'm Lars Hoffman. I'm the Vice President for National Security Sales at Blue Origin.

Maria Varmazes (8:20)

Thank you so much for joining me today, Lars. It is a great time to be speaking with you. You all are just coming off of a fantastic success with the launch of New Glenn. It was thrilling to see it. You all must be feeling really fantastic right now. Congratulations, first and foremost. Yeah, just I'm so curious, what was that like for you all being Apple Origin with that great success?

Lars Hoffman (8:43)

It was fantastic. I was there to watch it in person and you could watch it and you could feel it as the sound hits you a few minutes later. It was fantastic to see. Dark black sky, big bright blue flame as it was climbing out and a lot of excitement on the ground and hugely successful first launch.

Maria Varmazes (9:06)

That's and to many more. It's just really what an exciting time for you all. Lars, since you're here, can you tell me a bit about your department at Blue Origin?

Lars Hoffman (9:16)

Sure. So National Security Sales covers all of the products services that Blue Origin offers to the national security space community. And that's where we focus both on the defense side with DOD and primarily Space Command, Space Force, and on the intelligence community primarily with the National Reconnaissance Office. So that's the people that we interact with on a regular basis. And what their focus is right now, of course, is with our launch capability with New Glenn and with our in space capability with Blue Ring. So that's where a lot of our conversations are focused.

Maria Varmazes (9:51)

Fantastic. So how is New Glenn going to set up Blue Origin to work with all these federal agencies?

Lars Hoffman (9:57)

Well, Nuclear is a new heavy lift launch vehicle entering the market. We have quite a bit of capacity. We have a 7 meter diameter fairing which is twice the volume of current rockets that are launching national security payloads. So we're going to offer a lot more volume there. We also have very heavy lift capability. We can lift 45 tons to low earth orbit with nuclear, which is quite a bit more than say Falcon 9 or Vulcan. And so we feel like this is going to be a welcome addition to the national security launch portfolio. And on the in space mobility side, Blue Ring is something that's kind of a new entrant to the market. It's highly capable, high energy, maneuverable, maneuverable platform that has the capability to host a bunch of payloads and do a bunch of different missions on any given launch.

Maria Varmazes (10:48)

Yeah. Can you tell me a bit more? It is such an exciting time in space launch right now and New Glenn's entrance is very, very long anticipated and we're all very exc. And I'd love to hear a bit more about, you know, Blue's advantage over the competition because this is really what everybody's talking about right now.

Lars Hoffman (11:04)

Yeah, I, I'd say are a couple of things. Number one, I mentioned the, the volume is twice the volume of current fairings that are launching with, with Falcon 9. Falcon Heavy or Vulcan certainly larger than some of the smaller launched vehicles out on the market and the heavy lift capacity. So we can deliver a lot of payload orbit on any given launch. But the other thing that sets us apart, we built this rocket to be reusable from the very beginning. I know Falcon 9 is highly reusable now. It wasn't at the beginning, but it is now. And Falcon Heavy is reasonable with its boosters coming back as well. But New Glenn was designed from the very beginning to be reusable. So even on the very first launch we tried to recover the booster and we will continue to recover the booster on every launch and then reuse those and that gives us a lot of availability and additional capacity for the launch market.

Maria Varmazes (11:57)

So you all had a great start to the new year 2025 already started. Really fantastic. I'm sure there are, I'm sure there are a lot of really cool plans ahead for us. So what can we expect from Blue Origin this year?

Lars Hoffman (12:09)

Well, you can expect us to come back with a second launch here in the next couple of months. We are analyzing the first launch and the data looks really good. Thus far. So we're anxious to get right on to the second launch and then a third, fourth, fifth launch throughout the rest of the year. We want to start building up to that regular cadence in 2025 and then continue growing that launch volume. A number of launches in 2026 and going forward in 2027.

Maria Varmazes (12:39)

It's going to be exciting to see. And speaking of exciting, spacecom in Florida, it's going to be my first time going, so I'm very excited to be there and I know Blue's going to be there too. So what are your goals as Blue Origin at spacecom this year?

Lars Hoffman (12:52)

Yeah, it's an exciting conference because it's kind of a hybrid between Space Mobility and the Space Comm. We are really excited, of course, to talk all about our New Glenn first launch and plans going forward for New Glenn like we're doing on this interview, and also to talk about Blue Ring as it serves the Space Mobility community on the Space Comm side of the conference. We're going to be having a lot of engagement with our customers and suppliers, potential suppliers. There's a lot of people that approach us at these conferences that want to partner with Blue, so we're always open to that. Looking forward to it.

Maria Varmazes (13:30)

Fantastic. Any final thoughts, partying words for our audience today?

Lars Hoffman (13:36)

Well, we are excited about our first launch, but this is, as you pointed out earlier, the first of many to come and I say stay tuned. There's going to be lots of exciting announcements coming out and the near future. We do have a new shepherd launch coming up in the next week, so they'll be hearing a lot more about that and more new shepherd launches to come, both with astronauts and with payloads. And I mentioned Blue Ring earlier. We launched Blue Ring Pathfinder on the first launch. We're going to be launching Blue Ring on future launches as well and expanding its impact into the in space mobility, servicing logistics and then our lunar program. We have trained committed to launching our lunar lander, the Mark 1 lunar lander later this year all the way to the moon. So that will be the largest spacecraft to land on the moon ever and looking forward to launching that on the New Glenn as well. So a lot of exciting things in 2025 for for blue Origin and looking forward to sharing that with all the people at Space.

Maria Varmazes (14:53)

We'll be right back.

Dave (14:59)

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Maria Varmazes (16:21)

Welcome back. Some great news for everyone who enjoys gorgeous views of our Earth from the vantage of low Earth orbit. And that would be, I imagine, just about everyone. Our friends at Sven, who have been streaming live views from the International Space Station for many, many years, yesterday made available a 4K livestream of Earth views from the International Space Station via Intersatellite link, available for over 20 hours a day. Sen's vision is to ensure that everyone can experience amazing views of Earth and space like those experienced by astronauts, says the company. And they add that they Hope that its 4k livestream of Earth will be accessed over time by billions of people, empowering everyone with live views of our planet to inform, educate, inspire and benefit humanity. Until we can all get our ride to the International Space Station to experience what the astronauts do, this is just about the next best thing. Thank you Sen. And that's it for T minus for January 28, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@space.n2k.com we're privileged that N2K and podcasts like T minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth, our associate producer is Liz Stokes were mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester. Our Executive producer is Jennifer Ibin, our Executive editor is Brandon Karp, Simone Petrella is our president, Pierre Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

Lars Hoffman (18:17)

T Minus.

Lars Hoffman (18:31)

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