00:00Ed, why is this such a critical moment or a critical test for NASA's SLS?
00:06Yeah, it's a dress rehearsal for the systems, right? The SLLS rocket system developed by Boeing,
00:12the Orion spacecraft developed by Lockheed Martin. It's only launched once before in 2022
00:19and, you know, is never launched with humans on board. It is a project that is over budget
00:25and behind schedule. But if we go today within the two-hour window starting at 6.24 p.m. Eastern
00:31time, it is the first time not only that America and NASA and the world has tried to put humans
00:37back
00:37towards the moon, but it's very deep into space. You know, it's a 685,000-mile round trip, 250,000
00:45miles plus from Earth that will take the crew over that 10-day period just 4,000 miles off the
00:52moon's surface. And I bring that up because that's the ultimate goal as early as 2028,
00:57the next stages of the Artemis program to land back on the moon.
01:00You know, when the space race was happening in the 1960s, it was all about the USSR versus the
01:07United States. And that was the geopolitical context at the time. Now it's different. Now
01:13the superpower is China. What are China's ambitions?
01:20Yeah, very simply, China has stated its ambitions to get to the moon by 2030 and NASA has accelerated
01:27its plans in part under the new leadership of Administrator Jared Eisenman to do as early
01:32as 2028, establish a base on the moon, a $30 billion commitment over a decade from this current
01:39NASA administration. That is the current space race that we are in.
01:43Ed, you and I spoke just a few minutes ago, you and Bailey helped with this piece, exclusive
01:49Bloomberg. SpaceX said to file confidentially for an IPO before AI rivals. Why are we talking
01:55about the SLS when, you know, SpaceX in a few years could do this? Could that displace
02:00the SLS at some point?
02:05SLS has had a lot of issues, principally with hydrogen leaks. Hydrogen is the fuel with oxygen
02:10as the oxidizer. And if the system goes tonight, it will be the most powerful human rated system
02:17to launch. 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Now Starship, the system that SpaceX
02:24is working on, is almost double that in terms of power. But it has never completed a mission
02:29end to end and has not yet done human space flight. But as we've reported at Bloomberg, there
02:36is a proposal on the table from SpaceX for a variant of the existing Artemis plan where
02:42SLS would carry Orion into low Earth orbit. In low Earth orbit, Orion would dock with Starship
02:48and Starship under this proposal that NASA is greenlit but is not final would push Orion
02:54to lunar, low lunar orbit and go from there. There's also a lander proposal from SpaceX as well.
03:00So they're in the hunt for this. But the IPO and the confidential filing we reported earlier
03:05be under no, you know, the straight matter of it is SpaceX raising capital to fund data
03:13centers in space. Completely separate story.
03:16OK. And just 30 seconds left on this. And obviously I'm going to Mars. And that's the question
03:21that we want answered here. How does a successful flight tonight set up a future human potentially
03:29on Mars?
03:30Yeah, again, this is a dress rehearsal for the systems with the goal in the near term of getting
03:35humans back onto the moon surface 2028. Establish a base on the moon surface with the academic
03:40argument that deploying resources literally launch capability or refuel from the moon to
03:46get to Mars in the future is one interesting avenue. And those are the goals. Nearer term it's
03:52the moon. But longer term there is still a commitment from this NASA administration and this country
03:57to getting humans to Mars. And again, SpaceX retains that ambition of making humans a multi-planetary
04:03species with the end goal being Mars.
Comments