00:00These are live pictures of West Texas Van Horn and Blue Origins Launchpad, New Shepard 38.
00:06Let's listen in. We're braced for liftoff.
00:09Six, five, four. Command is start. Two, one, zero.
00:305,000 feet.
00:51Crew capsule passing 11,000 feet.
00:53All right, New Shepard has cleared the tower. Take a look on your screen. On the left-hand side of the screen, you'll be able to follow along with our telemetry, giving you altitude and speed.
01:06And then on the bottom right-hand side of the screen, you'll be able to see how far we are into NS38's flight.
01:12Okay, you are watching live images of Blue Origins NS38 New Shepard mission carrying the six latest astronauts, commercial passengers, to just above the Carmen line out of Van Horn, West Texas.
01:36We've just hit max Q, the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure or stress on that vehicle.
01:43The Blue Origin New Shepard design relies on its own BE3 PM engine, where the propellant is a mix of hydrogen and oxygen, the byproduct of which is water for those chemistry nerds of you that are out there.
01:58And Caro, you know, we cover this because it is the evidence of the development of commercial space.
02:05You have six people on board. Some of them have paid for the privilege. We don't know how much because they don't disclose it.
02:11Just for 60 seconds of weightlessness in space, in what Blue Origin says are the biggest windows to ever go into space.
02:18And by now, this is almost becoming regular, and 90 humans above the Carmen line have been flown by Blue Origin thus far, right?
02:27So we're starting to see the cadence build up. And where does that push Blue Origin in terms of its next steps in commercialization?
02:35Again, Blue Origin is a multifaceted business. What you're watching on your screen now is the combined vehicle makes its way up to that Carmen line.
02:45You have the first stage booster and then the capsule on top. This is space tourism, essentially, right?
02:49They will also argue that it provides a zero-gravity environment, even for 60 seconds, to do scientific experimentation.
02:56But the news last night, Blue Origin is also working on a Starlink competitor, right?
03:01Satellite-based and constellation-based connectivity.
03:05Then they have a more powerful rocket, New Glenn, which is used for a wide range of commercial applications,
03:10but putting satellite deployment into low-Earth orbit.
03:13We're about three minutes into this mission. We expect that the separation to happen imminently.
03:20And then what you have is that three-minute, 30 seconds, Mark Caro, those six passengers go to the Carmen line,
03:27which is the kind of recognized boundary of space, where they'll get out, undo their seatbelts,
03:32and float around looking out of the window.
03:35And again, some of them paid hundreds of thousands.
03:37We don't have a specific number for the privilege of doing that.
03:40Yeah, and some of the names might be known to many. Tim Drexler, for example.
03:44But a lot of entrepreneurial names, some obstetricians are in there.
03:48But we've got Tim Drexler, Linda Edwards, Alain Ferdinand, for example,
03:52among the six that are currently in that capsule.
03:55And there was a slight delay to it.
03:56We understand that there was sort of unknown, unauthorized personnel in the line of the rocket
04:00as to why it was pushed back that little bit on the day.
04:04But talk us through the risks, if any, of what has become standardized practice.
04:08Every launch that involves human payload, humans on board, is a risk.
04:14The hold on this case, the delay, if you like, was because of unauthorized personnel on range.
04:20But that is a very wide radius.
04:23You have to control both the airspace and on the ground,
04:25subject to ITAR restrictions because it's a rocket at the end of the day.
04:30The view that you're looking at is just switch, right?
04:32So you can see those two white dots if you squint and you look very closely.
04:36One is the capsule and one is the booster that's kind of rapidly coming back down to Earth.
04:42And what will happen very, very soon, because we're at the 4 minutes, 30 second mark,
04:46is those inside the capsule, the six of them, will get a one-minute warning
04:52where they've been through this training process where they'll buckle themselves back in.
04:58And then it's good old-fashioned rocket science where the flat bottom of the capsule
05:02and Earth's gravitational pull brings it back down into Earth's atmosphere.
05:06And we can kind of go from that.
05:08And we can continue.
05:09This is like a 10-minute process.
05:10And we're already, as you say, at the halfway point, Ed.
05:13We go to Lauren Grush, who helps cover all things space across our network and platforms for us.
05:18And, Lauren, this seems to be going all according to plan, as we think.
05:21But space very much in line of sight of investors at the moment,
05:24but also of the market more broadly.
05:27We're thinking about Elon Musk, who's just come off stage over at Davos,
05:29talking about how his reusable giant rocket might be there by the end of this year in terms of reusability.
05:36Yes, that is the ultimate goal of Starship, which they've been pursuing for some time.
05:42Full reusability.
05:43You know, actually, the new Shepard is a fully reusable system, but it obviously does not go to orbit.
05:49And so Starship is really trying to accomplish a feat that no one has been able to before.
05:55And Elon just said that they hope to get to full reusability sometime this year.
05:59That would be a major accomplishment if they can make it happen.
06:02And we'll obviously be keeping an eye out on those Starship test flights, which are always so fun.
06:07But, yeah, that will be a big moment if they can make it happen.
06:11We've got Bloomberg's Lauren Grush.
06:12She leads our coverage on space.
06:14And on the left-hand side of your screen, we've got the downward camera on the new Shepard booster
06:19as it returns down to Earth.
06:21We're about six minutes in, Lauren.
06:23Booster descending.
06:24And then the capsule, any second, will start descending.
06:27By the way, peaking at like 4 to 5G on the way around.
06:30Cara and I were talking about how we carry this right because it's an expensive endeavor for space tourism.
06:36But Blue Origin's business, as we see that booster coming down, is multifaceted.
06:41What's the big priority for Blue right now?
06:42Well, it actually comes at a really interesting time.
06:46They just announced the third upcoming flight for their New Glenn rocket.
06:50That's their much larger orbital rocket that they've launched twice now
06:54and successfully landed on a barge on that second flight.
06:57Now, New Glenn is not fully reusable.
07:00The second stage, the upper portion of the rocket, does not come back.
07:04But they were able to achieve that partial reusability with the second flight.
07:08So they're really getting into full swing with their launch business.
07:12And so hopefully, just as these new Shepard flights are becoming routine,
07:16New Glenn flights will become routine as well.
07:18And we have at this moment the booster landing.
07:21We'll see if they note it successfully.
07:23It's 7 minute, 10 second mark.
07:26It's going to make for a beautiful picture.
07:28Ed, just talk us through the complex nature of a booster landing.
07:32Well, booster falls, 3-4 through the air using air resistance physics.
07:37Then it ignites that BE3 and smoothly touches down.
07:42A little needle in the haystack landing a pin in the middle of the West Texas desert kind of moment, Cara.
07:48Isn't it just so?
07:49There we are.
07:50Booster touchdown is hit at the moment with T plus 739.40, let's call it.
07:56Capsule reacquired comes at eight minutes, Lauren.
07:59And all of this is being, remind us, financed how?
08:02People are obviously paying their way to a certain extent.
08:05And we don't know exactly who, but this is still VC-backed, very much the endeavor of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
08:12Right.
08:12I mean, as you mentioned before, passengers pay some undisclosed sum to fly on these flights.
08:19But yes, I mean, Blue Origin is by far a very big passion of Jeff Bezos.
08:24And he has been primarily the funder of the endeavor for some time now.
08:29Obviously, the goal is to move away from that system to have more and more customers and to eventually become a profitable business.
08:37You know, either that's through satellite contracts, launch contracts, things like that.
08:42And then also Blue Origin just announced a new mega constellation to be a competitor to Starlink.
08:48So they have a lot of different revenue streams coming in, hopefully soon.
08:53Lauren, we just saw the drogue shoots and then the main shoots deploy on the new Shepard capsule on its way down.
09:01Now it's chill.
09:02You're just floating.
09:03And by the time you boost a landing speed, like six miles per hour.
09:07So we will wait for that over the course of the next two minutes to ensure that the capsule lands safely.
09:13You just talked about the business of constellation-based satellite.
09:17We talked earlier in the conversation about Blue Origin's efforts, that news last night.
09:22We also are trying to keep on top of Elon Musk's appearance at Davos, which you and I were both tuned in for, right?
09:28He did talk about Starship and some of the broader kind of academic questions around space-based data center.
09:35As best you can, just give us a summary of that while we await the Blue Origin capsule touching down.
09:40Sure.
09:41So as Elon indicated, he's a very big fan of solar power.
09:45One of the justifications for moving data centers into space is depending on where you put them, you can have this constant access to solar power,
09:54which as people who know much about AI and the data center industry here on Earth, power constraints can actually be a huge limiting factor.
10:03So moving to space, the likes of Elon and other billionaires, even Jeff Bezos, have talked about perhaps tapping into that solar power to get near constant access to sunlight
10:14that can then power these data centers that do all this complex computing.
10:19Yeah, we heard Musk saying, really, in the next two to three years, space is going to be the cheapest place to put AI.
10:25And there, look, we have the landing. Touchdown. Chill, Ed, as you called it.
10:31It looks like quite a lot of dust being blown up on a chill entry.
10:35If you're going up at three Gs and you're coming down at four to five Gs, but the moment you touch the ground, it's just like a little boop, then that's what I meant by chill.
10:44But again, we talked about this being routine, and sorry to interrupt, Caro.
10:47We'll wait for confirmation from Blue, but as it stands, another successful mission.
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