00:00With us now is Bloomberg Tech's own Ed Ludlow.
00:03Ed, just give us the latest when it comes to the mission status and what happens before tonight's big move.
00:11Yeah, so the crew inside the Orion spacecraft are essentially in safe orbit.
00:15They conducted a burn this morning that took them from low Earth orbit to higher Earth orbit
00:20and in a sort of elliptical fashion are going around the Earth until about 7 or 8 p.m. Eastern
00:26time.
00:26That's when the mission directors and flight directors have to decide if they are a go for the translunar injection,
00:33the burn that you described, which propels Orion the 250,000 miles or so to the far side or dark
00:41side of the moon.
00:42And that's why we're all here. That's the big part.
00:45And so there is risk, but there are testing systems.
00:48At some point, the crew has to sleep, but that's what we're tracking toward.
00:51The dark side of the moon, the far side of the moon, what's back there?
00:59Yeah, I mean, the point of the mission in part is observation of what's on the surface of the far
01:05side of the moon, right?
01:06This is a resources story, water, minerals, oxygen.
01:11The value of the moon is in part strategic from that resources standpoint.
01:14There's also an important moment where the Orion capsule and spacecraft is going to lose contact with Houston and control.
01:23And you're all thinking watching Bloomberg Tech, what?
01:26The crew, they're going to lose contact on the far side.
01:29Yeah, obviously, the moon's in the way.
01:31But that is also important.
01:33And they planned for that and prepared for that.
01:35And, you know, it's going to be a really significant moment when through what's got a free return trajectory, the
01:42moon's gravitational field and Earth's gravitational pull swings the Orion spacecraft back around in a figure eight and send it
01:48back to Earth.
01:49So there's risk here, but it is record breaking in terms of what they're trying to achieve.
01:54Well, we're talking about space, Ed.
01:55We've got to ask you a different question about orbit, and that has to do with shares of Global Star.
02:00They're rallying today up about 9 percent, this is after we learned that Amazon is in talks for a buyout.
02:06Now, Apple owns about 20 percent of this company.
02:10What would this do for Amazon?
02:12And it's, you know, quote-unquote competition for providing satellite service, web-based satellite service, or satellite web-based service
02:20for, you know, and really competing with SpaceX.
02:25It's interesting because the financial terms and what they're kind of agreeing to buy isn't disclosed.
02:29But what Global Star has is very valuable license spectrum.
02:34You know, that having Constellation in orbit is not really about the hardware that's up there, but the spectrum that
02:40it occupies.
02:41That's part one.
02:42The other part is that it's a kind of go-to-market story, right, where Global Star is authorized and
02:49regulated in markets around the world.
02:51It has ground infrastructure corresponding to the Constellation-based infrastructure.
02:55That would help Amazon, with its own space-based Internet ambitions, get into those markets, even if the satellites that
03:02are up there are about cell connectivity in places where a terrestrial cell signal doesn't reach.
03:08That's all a big part of it.
03:09And you're right, the history of Global Star is that right now, that's how you get emergency messages on your
03:15iPhone or make emergency calls.
03:16But the bigger picture is just access to the space that's up there.
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