00:00We are watching this Blue Origins launch this morning.
00:02Live pictures moments away from the rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida, taking off.
00:07You can see it there on the left side of the screen for our viewers.
00:09For our audio listeners, it is a rocket on a platform.
00:11Yes, launch pad 36. Am I right?
00:14Ed Ludlow is here with us to guide us through all of this.
00:17Are we doing this?
00:18We're doing it now.
00:18You tell us.
00:19You and I and we.
00:21You've been watching all this.
00:21There was this hold about three and a half minutes in.
00:23What was happening here?
00:23It looked like things were proceeding at pace and then there was a stop.
00:25Yeah, I mean, what I would say for the radio audience listening
00:28that what we showed is a 98 meters tall, 321 foot launch system.
00:31It's quite sizable.
00:32This is a big vehicle.
00:33Of Blue Origin.
00:34Blue Origin is the space company founded by Jeff Bezos,
00:37the founder of Amazon and one of the world's richest people.
00:39And it's a powerful launch system.
00:42And, you know, we're about 90 seconds away from launch.
00:45You tell me if we're going to take this launch or not.
00:47But right now, things are counting down.
00:49We're going to take it.
00:50It's so normal for them to take pause.
00:52These are highly autonomous systems.
00:54And there are all kinds of imponderables.
00:56The weather, human error, data glitches, engineering glitches.
01:00So what they often do is just say, okay, everyone stop, reset,
01:03and let all the different teams that are tracking the launch system
01:07catch up with one another.
01:08That's kind of what happened today.
01:09And there will be a post-mortem on that.
01:11But we're 60 seconds away from launch.
01:13And the significance of this, guys,
01:15is that New Glenn is the flagship more powerful system.
01:19It's the first time they'll refly a booster that's flown before.
01:23That was in November.
01:24Which we've seen from SpaceX, but they haven't done this before?
01:27They have not done this before with New Glenn.
01:30Got it.
01:30They have two separate systems.
01:32We can talk later on about the sort of weaker system
01:34that focused on space tourism.
01:35But this is kind of what Blue Hopes will take on SpaceX's Falcon 9
01:40heavy and Starship.
01:41And within this, above the rocket, rather, there's a satellite.
01:45There's a for cellular service.
01:47What do we have on board?
01:47Yeah, so AST Space Mobile is the customer in this case.
01:50And they think about it as a ginormous cell tower in space.
01:53That's what that payload, that satellite will do.
01:56I don't know.
01:57Should we listen in?
01:58You got us through this.
01:59Let's listen in.
02:00About 10 seconds left.
02:01Yeah.
02:02When turned on, it will provide acoustic suppression
02:04to protect the vehicle from shock waves.
02:07There it is.
02:07And also to cool the launch pad.
02:08There we go.
02:10Big water.
02:11We're at T minus T.
02:13I know provide first motion time.
02:33First motion time, 11.25.
02:36And New Glenn has cleared the tower.
02:38As you follow New Glenn's journey along,
02:40look to the bottom of your screen.
02:42You can see telemetry there, as well as our time clock.
02:53Vehicles now completing the pitch over maneuver.
02:56Strakes now level.
02:5745.
02:57Autism complete.
03:01And walk us through what's happening here.
03:02Two stages in this launch?
03:04Yeah, two stages.
03:04So, at the bottom of the launch system are seven BE-4 engines.
03:11And those generate about 550,000 pounds of force per engine.
03:17And so, when you get to the kind of 60-second mark into the mission,
03:21you're approaching what's known as max Q.
03:23It's the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure or stress.
03:27Because, like, that beautiful view of Florida.
03:31For those watching, I love this, because, like, in modern-day, you know, space launch,
03:36there's all of these cameras giving real-time signal.
03:38I was just going to say, when it took off, there was a really cool shot of, like, the bottom
03:41of the boosters.
03:42You could see all the colors.
03:43It was never seen anything like that.
03:44I don't know which brand they use, but, like, for the radio audience,
03:47just imagine a GoPro strapped to the bottom of the rocket just facing downward
03:50and showing a beautiful sort of increasingly curving view of the Earth focused on Florida.
03:56And so, the second stage, so that's good old-fashioned rocket science,
03:59and those use rocket fuel.
04:01The second stage actually uses a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in what's called a BE-7 engine.
04:07And the reason that you do that is, like, you're trying to get to an orbit,
04:10an orbital height with high energy,
04:12and hydrogen and oxygen is a really good way of doing that.
04:15So, I don't know if we're going to go through the full sequencing of it,
04:19but, you know, those two stages separate.
04:22In the booster, the main primary stage falls back down to Earth.
04:26You're seeing the bottom of it now.
04:28And the whole point of this, the economics of what we're talking about,
04:31is for it to land itself back on a platform in the ocean so that it can be reused.
04:37How many times are we talking about here?
04:39Well, so this is, again, the significance of New Glenn 3.
04:41The New Glenn program, let's say it's over budget and behind schedule a little bit
04:46against its original state and goals, which is very common in the space industry.
04:50But this will be only the – wow, what a beautiful way of looking at it.
04:54This would be only the second – the first time they've reused a booster that's flown before,
04:58and that booster only flew in November.
05:02But, you know, in speaking with the company, which we may get to,
05:05you know, I think that they're now in a place where they're going to really ramp up
05:08the cadence of launching this system.
05:09Let's do that. So you had this interview, and you were telling me it's not just about this launch.
05:14It's more about their long-term plan and their ultimate goal.
05:17Because this New Glenn system, this is the system that Blue wants to get their company
05:21and their company's participation in getting America back to the moon.
05:26All right, let's listen. It's Ed Ludlow in conversation with CEO Dave Lim.
05:29I think it'd be a really good year if we could do, you know,
05:32eight to 12 flights this year up from two last year.
05:35That would be – you know, that'd be a good cadence for us.
05:37I can see a path that – we have plenty of hardware to do that.
05:40It really is what we learn from the flights.
05:42I would tell you that there's never been a time where launch is in such demand.
05:49And by the way, I think the demand's going up with all these direct-to-device announcements.
05:53Amazon made one, obviously.
05:56Other AST is doing direct-to-device.
05:58And these mega constellations, we have our own constellation we announced with TerraWave,
06:03that if I could fly a rocket every week right now, I would be sold out for the indefinite future.
06:11And so our job is to get out there, get as fast a cadence as we can as quickly as
06:17possible.
06:18And the foundation of that, again, is just to build a world-class manufacturing business.
06:22And, you know, that's something I've done for a long time, and the team's done for a long time.
06:27And I think we're on the right path.
06:28We still have a ways to go, but I'm excited about the progress.
06:31The world became familiar with Blue Origin through New Shepard, the smaller form factor launch system.
06:39And the first focus of that was kind of space tourism, you know,
06:43going to a pretty low altitude, relatively speaking, for a few minutes of weightlessness.
06:49And, you know, of course, I was in Van Horn, Texas, when Jeff Bezos himself went up.
06:53But you took the decision to halt that program, in large part to focus on Blue's participation in getting America
07:05back to the moon.
07:06And so, you know, in the first instance, Dave, what has the result of that decision been?
07:12Have you been able to accelerate that other program, the lunar program?
07:15How have you moved and reassigned resource and people to fulfill that ambition?
07:23Yeah.
07:23You know, we were able to fly 98 people above the Carmen line.
07:27I've never seen so many smiles on every astronaut that we were able to do that for.
07:32And I think if you had to make the decision to put New Shepard on pause,
07:36we put on pause for at least two years.
07:38With your heart, it would have been a very hard decision.
07:41Because you see that you saw it when you saw Jeff fly, every customer is the happiest customer you've ever
07:47seen.
07:47But when you make it when you make that decision with your head,
07:52it was probably one of the simpler business decisions that I and Jeff had to have ever made.
07:57Because, you know, I am so passionate about getting the U.S. back to the moon, as is Jeff.
08:04It's, you know, I don't think the country wants another Sputnik moment.
08:09We have been saying at Blue for 20 plus years that the moon is this incredible gift given to us.
08:15You know, it's three days away.
08:18It's got all the resources that we'll ever need right there, at least for the foreseeable millennium ahead of us.
08:25And we know how to get there.
08:28The moon is back.
08:30It's the focus of this country, right?
08:32And, you know, NASA is the agency, leads it.
08:34But in commercial space, SpaceX is now deepening its involvement in the plan.
08:40And Blue Origin also is in with a really good shot of being a really big participant in the Artemis
08:46program.
08:47But separate from that, again, bringing it back to the launch that we're covering here today, New Glenn 3,
08:53this is the launch system, the rocket, that will get their, I guess, more cargo-type lunar land as the
09:01moon's surface.
09:01And what I think that Dave went on to say in that interview is that there's a really good shot
09:05that if New Glenn goes well,
09:08we'll track it, hopefully the booster lands.
09:09But that program will put a cargo-focused lunar lander on the moon by the end of this year, later
09:15this year.
09:15Wow, that's soon.
09:16Yeah, and so this is kind of consistent with NASA and with Jared Eisenman, the administrator.
09:24This is a simple plan.
09:26Flood the moon's surface with stuff.
09:28Literally, like, cargo-focused landers, materials, to build a base on the moon.
09:35And, like, if we had launched Bloomberg this weekend, even three or four years ago, and I had said that,
09:40you guys would have laughed me off set.
09:42But now there's a lot of buy-in across the industry, and politically as well, to do this.
09:48This is the thing Ed says, because we talked about data centers in space, and I laughed.
09:51You did.
09:52You brought that up.
09:53Yes.
09:53Now look where we are.
09:54He spoke about demand.
09:55Let's wrap up by talking about that.
09:57Yeah.
09:57How much demand this company and others see for continuing to launch satellites like this into space?
10:01Yeah.
10:02So, like, you know, again, the mission on the screen, AST is a customer, and they paid money for this.
10:06So it's important that they can actually ramp up cadence so they can book revenues.
10:10Space is an expensive business, and you measure the economics of that on a dollar-per-kilo basis.
10:16Blue Origin's dollar-per-kilo now is in the thousands of dollars, and they would hope with time to take
10:20zeros off that, right?
10:21That's kind of what they're building towards.
10:23They need customers to do that.
10:25It's so interesting.
10:26Like, we don't have time for the full history lesson, but people forget in 2015, Blue Origin landed a booster
10:31back on Earth before SpaceX did.
10:32It's just that SpaceX, they're massively pulled away, and so, you know, they have all kinds of cellular or constellation
10:42-based internet opportunity with Amazon,
10:44which is trying to take on Starlink, with AST, things like that.
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