Jeff Bezos: Blue Origin's Moon Mission & the Future of AI

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Bret Baier (0:37)

Joining us now, Amazon founder and executive chairman and importantly here on the factory floor for Blue Origin, the Blue Origin founder, Jeff Bezos. Thanks for having us.

Jeff Bezos (0:47)

It's great to be here. Thank you.

Bret Baier (0:49)

Listen, you've been talking about the moon for a long time. You've been a moon guy.

Jeff Bezos (0:53)

Yeah.

Bret Baier (0:53)

There've been a lot of people talking about going to Mars. Now, the country is putting pretty much all its ships on going to the moon in the near term.

Does that make you vindicated in some way?

Jeff Bezos (1:05)

Well, I'm really glad to see the country put their energy behind the moon. Look, it's not good to skip steps. In general, you don't want to skip steps. And we'll go to Mars, we'll do all the other things. But we need to go to the moon first. The moon is a gift. It's only three days away from Earth. You can get there in three days. And you don't need to wait for special launch windows. And it has all these resources that we can utilize. And it takes 28 times less energy to lift something off the moon because of its lower gravity than it does to lift something off the Earth. So the resources, you know, we're working on, for example, building sources. We here at Blue Origin, building solar cells out of lunar regolith, out of the dirt that's on the moon. It's 20% silicon. There's, it's very easy to do this. So we can make solar cells on the moon. We can make liquid oxygen on the moon, which is a rocket propellant.

We can find water on the moon. There's all sorts of things. And it's a natural body. So when we go explore it, there're gonna be positive surprises.

So yes, we should be going to the moon. I'm glad to see that happening. And you know, I'm glad everybody's coming.

Bret Baier (2:10)

For the conspiracies out there, just to be clear, we have been there before.

Jeff Bezos (2:13)

We absolutely have been to the moon. We went there in 1969 You know, people ask, why is it that it's so hard for us to do if we did it way back in 1969?

And what you have to know is, we spent 3% of GDP when we did it in 1969 Almost 3% of GDP. So it was very expensive. Today, we're gonna do it at a much lower cost. And we're gonna this time go to the moon to stay. It won't just be a mission and leave. It'll be a real sustainable lunar base. And that's how we'll really explore the moon and find interesting things.

Bret Baier (2:45)

Your heavy lift orbital rocket, New Glenn.

Jeff Bezos (2:48)

Which is being built all around you here.

Bret Baier (2:50)

Right here, factory floor. When does it fly again, specifically?

Jeff Bezos (2:53)

At the end of this year. So, December this year. So, sometime in December.

Bret Baier (2:58)

Before Christmas.

Jeff Bezos (2:59)

Probably December 31st.

But December of this year, we're gonna fly that vehicle again. And nobody believed we would be able to, after the anomaly that we had. But the team here has rallied. They've done an unbelievably great job of repairing the launch pad. I'm super proud of that team.

Bret Baier (3:15)

And we're gonna talk about that and what happened back in May. What flies on it first?

Jeff Bezos (3:20)

Well, the first thing we'll fly on it is a vehicle called Blue Ring. Blue Ring is a vehicle that Blue Origin manufactures. This for moving payloads, interesting payloads, multiple payloads into different orbits all around Earth and even to lunar vicinity. It can even take things to Mars.

So it's a very versatile transportation vehicle for in-space transportation. And that's the first thing we'll fly.

Bret Baier (3:47)

You're asking the FAA to go from 12 to 50 launches a year from one pad.

Jeff Bezos (3:53)

Yeah.

Bret Baier (3:53)

That's one a week.

Jeff Bezos (3:54)

Yeah, that's one a week. And we're building three more pads. So we're building, we'll have a total of four pads that were under construction right now.

And you know, our goal is to fly every day. And then once we're flying every day, we want to fly every hour. And then once we're flying every hour, we want to fly every minute. And by the way, that's where I lose the team. They think I'm crazy, they want to fly every minute. But I've seen crazy things before come true. So at Amazon one time, I told people we'd one day have a hundred million Amazon Prime members. And I thought the leadership team at Amazon thought it was nuts. But today we have several hundred Amazon Prime members. So these things can happen. And you'll see that space travel becomes much more routine than it has been to date.