Ken Chang

So when Jared Eisenman sort of revamped the moon program, he added this mission, which was not going to go to the moon.

It's going to stay in Earth orbit.

Space will have its Starship rocket, and Blue Origin will have its Blue Moon lander.

Blue Moon will launch first, then the NASA astronauts in the Orion capsule.

And they're going to rendezvous in Earth orbit, practice docking, and they're going to actually go into the lander and basically show that they can do these things all correctly the first time when they're at the moon.

And then...

After they're done with Blue Origin, then Starship is going to launch, and they're going to do docking with Starship as well.

So this is complex because you have three different spacecraft and three different mission controls.

There will be NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin, which hasn't happened before, really.

Well, it almost is a bake-off, right?

NASA was trying to decide which lander would be ready for Artemis IV, the first moon landing.

And at this point, it looks more likely it will be SpaceX, given all the troubles that Brennan has described that Blue Origin is now facing in recovering from that explosion.

No, and this has sort of been overlooked.

I mean, SpaceX is actually grounded right now with Starship.

They had a mostly successful launch, but the booster crashed when it was trying to come back.

And the FAA is requiring SpaceX to investigate and come up with a report so that they understand well enough to make sure that that doesn't come down on people.

Well, they're almost facing an artificial deadline, which is the end of 2028.

And they want to get this off the ground while President Trump is still President Trump.

And then you start working backwards.

And if you have any hope of doing a moon landing in 2028, you have to do Artemis III in 2027.