Full Transcript for Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp Talks Glenn Rocket

you know, what do they need to know about this system and what its big picture goals are. 00:02:50 Speaker 1: Yeah, as I said, the mission of the company is to build infrastructure to get things to space at much lower cost. And when you want to have lower cost, I mentioned the first thing you need reusability. If you're throwing away a rocket every time, you're just never going to get the cost. And when I talk about lowering the cost, we think of it as how much how many dollars does it take to get a kilogram of payload to orbit the rocket? You know, it can be reused, but it's not benefiting a customer. It's not getting anything to orbit it in itself. It's the payload that's on the top of the rocket. And so reusability helps a lot. And for that you have to build. You have to get the cost down on the rockets themselves. The second stages, but you also have to build engines that can be used over and over again, and again the airline analogy is probably the right one there. And then I think the second thing that's super important about this is you want to throw a lot of mass to orbit, and to do that, rockets want to be much much larger than they have been in the past. So a new Glen which you've seen being built behind me, the current version, which has seven engines in the booster and two engines in the upper stage, it can take forty five metric tons to lower Earth orbit in a seven meter fairing. So that's just it's about double what the rockets that are out there today are doing in terms of throwaway to LEO. And then if you look forward, we have a next generation vehicle that we're currently building now that'll be ready late next year probably is it has nine engines on the main stage, it has four engines on the second stage, and it has an eight point seven meter fairing the part where the payload goes, and that will be able to throw seventy metric tons to lower Earth orbit. So you can see as the scale of this goes up, the rocket doesn't linearly scale in cost and it has reusability, and then you're starting to get to the overall mission, which is to dramatically take an order of magnitude off the cost of payload to orbit. 00:04:53 Speaker 2: What is that current dollar per kilogram? 00:04:55 Speaker 3: Dave? 00:04:56 Speaker 1: You know, it varies depends on the orbits that you're at, but it's measured in thou thousands of dollars. 00:05:00 Speaker 3: Of kilogram today, you know. 00:05:03 Speaker 1: You know, if you look at a Falcon nine, I think they're pretty public and they're pricing it's thousands of dollars, and I think you want to in What we want to do is take an order of magnitude off of that. 00:05:12 Speaker 3: Someday maybe two orders of magnitude. That's That's a way is in the future. 00:05:15 Speaker 1: But I think in my span in this career, in this career, if I was able to take a zero off that and the team were able to take a zero off, that I would I considered a huge victory for not only Blue but for the planet itself. 00:05:31 Speaker 2: Success for New Glen three is putting a customer payload into orbit, right, and it is having that first or primary stage land back on Earth and so thus can become reusable. But I think what people really are trying to understand is jumping from November from New Glen two to today, how a successful mission changes the cadence of launch for Blue Origin. 00:05:55 Speaker 1: Yeah, and again you describe the mission goals exactly right. We want to we want to customer in this case ast to get their payload right on the spot that we're telling them to get it, which is in a LEO. 00:06:09 Speaker 3: Orbit, a circular orbit. 00:06:11 Speaker 1: And then we want to land the booster and so we can bring it back and recycle again. But the real thing to get to caves and is to build the machine that makes the machine. So I think I talked to you about this back when I was living my first thirty years of my life in consumer electronics. It's very easy to build a prototype of consumer electronics. 00:06:33 Speaker 3: To build a machine that makes ten million. 00:06:35 Speaker 1: Of them a month or twenty million of a month, that is a very hard problem. That you have to build the factory and build the software that builds the factory. And same thing is true if we want to get to a point where we fly once a week or twice a week, and that is our aspiration is we have to build the factories that can that can turn out the second stages. That's what you see being built over my shoulder here, And so you think about what rate you have to do. 00:07:03 Speaker 3: So if we want to fly once a week, we have to build fifty two of. 00:07:06 Speaker 1: Those things down there. And these are not small objects. These are large objects. So you have to think about robotics, automation, You have to think about supply chain and simplifying your designs such that that is manufacturable. And aerospace rockets weren't dramatically different forty years ago. They just were being made at very very slow cadence. You know, you might make one a year or one every two years, whereas we want to make you know, one of these every week and even more than that over time. And that's the challenge is we think about scaling the cadence. 00:07:42 Speaker 2: Dave, how many times are you modeling for New Glenn to fly in twenty twenty six. 00:07:47 Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it'd be a really good year. 00:07:49 Speaker 1: If we could do you know, eight to twelve flights this year, up from two last year, that would be you know, that'd be a good cadence for us. 00:07:55 Speaker 3: I can see a path that we have plenty of hardware to do that. It really is what we learn. 00:07:59 Speaker 1: From I would tell you that there's never been a time where launch is in such demand. And by the way, I think the demand's going up with all these directed device announcements. Amazon made one obviously, other ast is doing directive device and these mega constellations. We have our own constellation. We announced with

Tero Wave that I, if I could fly a rocket every week right now, I would be sold out for the indefinite future. And so our job is to get out there, get as fast a cadence as we can, as quickly as possible. And the foundation of that, again is just to build a world class manufacturing business. 00:08:40 Speaker 3: And you know, that's something I've done. 00:08:42 Speaker 1: For a long time, and the team's done for a long time, and I think we're on the right path. We still have ways to go, but I'm excited about the progress. 00:08:49 Speaker 2: The world became familiar with Blue Origin through New Shepherd, the smaller form factor launch system, and the first focus of that was kind of spaced tourism, you know, going to a pretty low altitude relatively speaking, for a few minutes of weightlessness. And you know, of course I was in Van Horn, Texas when Jeff Bezos himself went up but you took the decision to halt that program in large part to focus on Blues participation in getting America back to the Moon. And so you know, in the first instance, Dave, what has the result of that decision been. Have you been able to accelerate that other program, the lunar program? How have you moved and reassigned resource and people to fulfill that ambition? 00:09:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, we were able to fly ninety eight people above the Carmen line. I've never seen so many smiles on every astronaut that we were able to. 00:09:48 Speaker 3: Do that for. 00:09:50 Speaker 1: And I think if you had to make the decision to put New Shepherd on pause, we put on pause for at least two years. With your heart, it would have been a very hard decision because you see the you saw it when you. 00:10:00 Speaker 3: Saw Jeff fly. 00:10:02 Speaker 1: Every customer is the happiest customer you've ever seen. But when you make it, when you make that decision with your head, it was probably one of the simpler business decisions that I and Jeff have ever made, because you know, I'm so passionate about getting the US back to the Moon, as is Jeff. It's you know, I don't think the country wants another Sputnik moment. We have been saying it blue for twenty plus years that the Moon is this incredible gift. 00:10:32 Speaker 3: Given to us. 00:10:33 Speaker 1: You know, it's three days away, It's got all the resources that we'll ever need right there, at least for the foreseeable millennium ahead of us, and. 00:10:44 Speaker 3: We know how to get there. 00:10:45 Speaker 1: And so what we've done is, as you said, we've repurposed those those very talented people that have worked on New Shepherd. They're unbelievable engineers, and we've moved them into our lunar efforts. They're already up and running. I already see it curial changes and the cadence. We just brought our Mark one lander back from being cryo tested, and it's now back here at the Cape. We'll finish up testing and I think we have a very good chance of landing the largest thing that's ever landed on the Moon in the second half

of this year, and then you know, we'll see what NASA says. I'm very excited about Jared's new plans and if he wants to help, we are ready to go. So we have a huge lunar plant just across the street here, and we want to build as many landers as the US wants. 00:11:32 Speaker 2: You know that the imagination of the nation was captured by Artemis too, but I still think it's always worth going back to basics. So Blue is working on a lunar lander. Could you just explain the technology and I guess the engineering and physics and how you think it will get to the Moon's surface, so that everyday people, all the most sophisticated investors who are desperate to back the commercial space industry understand how. 00:12:01 Speaker 3: Yeah we have. 00:12:02 Speaker 1: I think of it as we have two product lines of lunar landers. I know that sounds amazing, but the first one is our Mark one lander, and it's, like I said, it's going to be the largest thing that's ever landed on the Moon. 00:12:14 Speaker 3: It's almost two x the. 00:12:15 Speaker 1: Size of the Apollo limb and it can take three metric tons, and over time, I think we might get got more cargo of cargo to the lunar surface. So one of the things that we need to do over the next three to four years, and I think NASA just laid that out in their plan, is we need to kind of swarm the Moon with lots of experiments and cargo and to try to build the basis for a moon base, and so Mark one is really efficient on that. It takes one reusable launch of new glan to throw that to the Moon, so you don't there's no refueling. It's got a single B seven engine which runs on hydrogen and oxygen, and it's very efficient path to the Moon, and so we can just lob those off to the Moon over simplifying obviously there's a lot of orbital dynamics to that and get a lot of cargo to the Moon. And then we have under our HLS contract with NASA, we are building a human capable lander. It's again twice as big as the Mark one, and that's our Mark I lander, and that has the ability to bring astronauts down to the lunar surface and not only put them there, but have them loiter there for thirty plus days. And so it's an important nuance about the line of business that we call our lunar line of business. We actually call it lunar permanence. We don't want to just go to the Moon and come back again. That will be the path to get there over time, but what we want to do is establish a permanence on the Moon, and we've had that group named that for four years because we think, again, it's such a good gateway to the rest of the Solar System. 00:13:54 Speaker 2: This was a part of the original thesis of Blue right that Jeff had the idea that there is opportunity and commodity in space that the human race can take advantage of. 00:14:07 Speaker 3: David, the Moon's been being you know, pummeled by asteroids for four and a half billion years, and unlike the Earth, it doesn't have running water to erode all that away. 00:14:16 Speaker 1: And so

with you know, every known element is likely on the Moon at at our fingertips to be able to build heavy industry in orbit and out on the Moon, and then we can reduce the amount of heavy industry here on Earth. 00:14:31 Speaker 2: I should ask you, Dave, you know, myself and my colleague Lorin crush a broker's story that you know, in future stages of the Artemis program. There are basically two proposals on NASA's desk. One is from SpaceX and the other is from Blue And what they're trying to work out is the best method to get the Orion spacecraft developed principally by Lockheed Martin from low Earth orbit to a lunar orbit. And part of what we reported is SpaceX's Starship is one example, would basically go nose to nose whether Ryan and push it to the moon. That's a stage that's somewhere in between what you and I have discussed thus far. But could you say anything about blues proposal and how you feel you can fit into the current artomis architecture for Automis three four and five, and what the current status of the program is. 00:15:26 Speaker 1: Yeah, good reporting on your own behalf, first of all, But I would say that I won't give too much away because I think it's That's not because I'm being cag I just think it's for NASA to decide and when they want to announce if they choose to work with Blue. Here, you know, we're obviously very hopeful and we want to help. I can tell you that none, I love our architecture. I think it closes very well. I think it's extremely affordable in lunar terms, so I think I think it will benefit us tax bearers. But I also I can all to tell you that none, none of our architecture requires of us pushing a Ryan to the moon. 00:16:08 Speaker 2: So understood and Dave. When you and I first started talking, you were the Devices and Services chief at Amazon, a job, I suppose, in the first instance, very much focused on what's happening here on Earth. But what's the experience been like going into commercial space? Was there some very clear similarities between those lines of works, you know, I guess are on the electronic side super interesting? Or if you sort of gone about this with a clean slate, I think it'd be really useful to reflect on the time so far and what you've learned along the way. 00:16:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm about two years into this, and the first thing I would tell you is that I probably didn't realize it before I took it, But it's it's it is a dream job. 00:16:54 Speaker 3: You know. I get to wake up. It's a hard job, but I get to wake. 00:16:57 Speaker 1: Up every morning, and I have this unbelievable team of people, and we get to make rockets for a living and lunar landers and satellites, you know. So it's I often used to say, you know, I had the world's biggest Lego set. 00:17:11 Speaker 3: Now I really do have the world's biggest Lego. 00:17:13 Speaker 1: Set, and and it's so much fun, fun to play with it, and and kind of invent new things. So that's that's been just such a pleasant surprise. Also, the missionary nature of the team here at Blue has been such a pleasant surprise. 00:17:28 Speaker 3: People are here because. 00:17:29 Speaker 1: They love space, they want to make the Earth a better place to live, and they want to move pluting industry into space. And that's just to a tea to all our employees, all ten thousand plus of them. 00:17:39 Speaker 3: It's just amazing to see. 00:17:41 Speaker 1: I would say the biggest similarity to what I you know, I spent thirty years in consumer electronics, starting at Apple and as you said, ending at Amazon, is that, even though these things are a thousand times larger than what I'm used to, manufacturing the basics of building a manufacturing plant and building it to work very efficiently, and how you build a product to make it manufacturable, those have transferred better than I would have guessed. Actually, So I think that's the you know, I'm still coming up to speed on becoming at least a toddler in terms of aerospace. Jeff has forgotten more than I will ever know, probably, but I do think I can bring a good amount of transferable expertise on how to make these lines run, how to make the supply chain work better and we're already starting to see huge benefits of that. And I think it's just the velocity of our learning curve is just getting better. 00:18:40 Speaker 2: Dave, I want to ask you very quickly, I guess as a case study, space based internet, you know, call it connectivity. But you know, AST is clearly an important customer. SpaceX has its Starlin coffering, Amazon has its own offering. You know that seems to be pushing a lot of momentum towards or I guess motivation to increase launch cadence. How is that playing out on your desk? 00:19:08 Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think that people would have. 00:19:13 Speaker 1: Ten years ago, people would have really said, our reusable rocket's going to happen at these frequencies. 00:19:20 Speaker 3: They were to poop poo that, and people would have pooh pooed that. You know, in the. 00:19:23 Speaker 1: Seattle area, between Amazon, Leo and Starlink, both their manufacturing plants are there, and we're based there as well. I'm in Florida right now, but we have a manufacturing plant there as well. That more satellites are being made per day in the satellite era in the Seattle area than we're built per year. 00:19:41 Speaker 3: A decade ago. So's the you know, that's the. 00:19:43 Speaker 1: Amazing thing that's happening in the space industry as we start thinking about building things at much higher rates. And what when you get the cost down and the cost of a Starling satellite or a LEO satellite, they're incredibly low cost. Then the economics of the these mega constellations because they don't look much different than terrestrial cell towers. And so if it's directed device, or it's broadband services or with terror away of what we're working on is enterprise back haul and very high speed data, it can it can compete against terrestrial things. And I think that's why you know you're hearing a lot more and Jeff started talking about it a year ago around data centers in space, that that crossover point is going to happen as well. And all that does is it just takes what is already a pretty limited launch market and just there's just a craving for more. So I feel that and we feel it blue that it's our responsibility to make sure that there's lots of alternatives with lots of capabilities to go up. And that just means building more infrastructure down here at the Cape. Because This is the best place to launch a rocket from, and we just need more infrastructure.