NASA will learn through lunar landings before fixing a base design

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 28:18

   schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. Let's talk about the moon in a second, Jared, 2028, an aggressive timeline for landing on the moon. Thank you for that. It's super great to have aggressive timelines once again. Once we land on the moon, give me a step-by-step, if you would, for getting a lunar base there. Because getting a permanent lunar base where humanity for the first time is ever existing off the planet of Earth, beyond Earth's orbit, is huge.

2. 28:48

   Steps getting there, when do humanoid robots enter that equation? Can you give us a few details? Sure. I think it's imperative that we do a lot of littles at first, which I think is fully akin to the space race in the 1960s. We had Mercury before Gemini, Gemini before Apollo, lots of Apollo missions before we landed on the moon. And in this world that we've been in absent competition for some time where I told you that focus is a problem and we are distributing money everywhere to make everybody happy, we kind of are forgetting all of those interim steps to getting to the the exciting outcome.

3. 29:25

   And we just design a dream state, a dream state as a service sometimes. And it's usually very late and much more expensive than we want. And none of us want that. We all enjoyed the headlines of Artemis, too. You know, even though we had done very similar things, you know, a half a half century earlier, you know, it reminded us of what's possible and got us all excited. We don't want to wait several years in between the next the next episode.

4. 29:49

   right? So I think getting back to doing a lot of littles up front and learning what does and doesn't work to inform the next phase, it worked very well for NASA in the 1960s. We're bringing it back. So what I described, phase one. And this is before the astronauts ever get there in 28. We're going to be dropping landers and rovers on a near monthly basis. We're going to take advantage of the commercial market that exists today, the CLPS program that started years past.

5. 30:11

   We're going to start printing these things off. We'll learn from every one of them in that incredibly harsh environment on the lunar south pole. Because if we're going there and we're going to build a base, we better at least do it near the water ice, or what are we doing there? And we're going to learn how to survive in that environment, and we're going to do it before we lock in the dream state.

6. 30:29

   So I'm like, I don't want to hear how we're locking in lunar comms, surface or orbital yet, or what our power source is going to be, or what the interface is going to be between the rover and some future state nuclear reactor. Let's start landing stuff now and learning in this environment, and we'll use it to roll into a subsequent design. And phase one is going to leave a lot of debris everywhere like that. A lot of dead rovers and landers, but we're going to learn from it and then we'll roll into phase two and i think you know once once starships are launching with frequency and they've you know worked out uh orbital prop transfer and once blue origins got their on-orbit aggregation strategy uh down then when you're moving mass very efficiently as surface that's when you roll in the humanoid robots again you want the least

7. 31:12

   you want the fewest reasons possible to ever put an astronaut in a suit outside the base unless there was no other alternative and humanoid robots are going to give you that best guess under over when we see the first humanoid robot walking on the moon? In my mind, I would think that on the uncrewed lander demonstrations, which both Blue Origin and SpaceX need to do in advance of the lunar landing, that's already contractual. I'd kind of be shocked if somebody didn't smuggle one on board. But we're not waiting that long, right? I mean, you're talking the next four years, maybe six years as a window as these start showing up and building that infrastructure.

8. 31:48

   Boots on the moon, except they're optimists or figure boots on the moon, circa 2028, 2029. That's great.