Let's start with Rob talking about how brand naming is really risk mitigation strategy.

You know, I'll be honest, like the naming process, because people look at the book and you find out what I do for a living and they're like, seriously, like, just can't you just come up with something? And yeah, I mean, that's what I would have thought, too.

But the process is is a risk mitigation strategy.

It is it is not, you know.

It's not necessarily trying to like bottle lightning and ensure that you, this is going to sound bad, but like it's not about a process that gets you to the most brilliant kind of like earth shattering name every time.

It is partly about, you know, it's getting to a successful brand name and one that you can build a really strong brand around.

And that involves mitigating legal risk because, you know, there might be crazy ideas that are awesome that we just couldn't do from a legal standpoint.

you know,

That sounds great.

All right.

So I got into branding, uh, by accident, as many of us have.

Um, I started at Interbrand in San Francisco.

I, I frankly needed a job at the time and, um, had a, a friend who had worked, uh, at Interbrand and knew somebody there who just needed a guy that could write.

That was kinda the job posting.

It was for a junior business development person, someone who could help the head of business development by writing proposals, writing emails, cold emails, all that stuff.

You should definitely read these books.

But I guess from an economics perspective, you know, that technique, it has a higher yield on the moon? Like, like get us to the point where this is real.

Yeah, it absolutely will have a higher yield on the moon.

But, um, we plan with our go to market in the early 2030s to produce 10 kilograms of Helium-3, uh, on the moon.

Uh, here on Earth, uh, by deploying cold capture to grade A helium plants on Earth, we, uh, expect to produce about two and a half kilograms of Helium-3 annually.

Uh, and we have customers that are already signed up to buy Helium-3 from us, uh, uh, over f- uh, well, just under $500 million in, uh, purchase orders, uh, binding contracts that, uh, extend from 2028 out to 7 to 10 years in the future.

So we had to find a way to service those customers earlier, and by applying this technology that we've developed for the moon to this Earth application, we're able to do that.

Rob, just very quickly, have you a pathway or a plan in place to get your technology to the moon's surface? Who is the launch provider? Who's gonna help you do that operationally?

Well, well, we have a little bit of time to decide on that, Ed, Ed.

So is that-- I imagine that's something that you kinda constantly have to kind of like optimize and reoptimize.

Yeah.

Yeah, there, there is a tension there.

Um, and I think that, uh, sometimes it's, uh-- Like the example I gave, let's say you're sending fifty tons of equipment to the moon in twenty-thirty.

Well, that's not gonna be the last delivery to the moon.

The moon base is gonna have many, many deliveries.

So I might decide that in my fleet management I'm gonna send five cutting tools twice a year that'll be deployed and sitting in the warehouse or, you know, out in the lunar mare, you know, sitting, waiting to be used once a, once a harvester needs a new cutting tool.

Are there applications that you're particularly sort of e-enthused about that, that are separate, again, from what, what you're doing at I- at Interlun?

Yeah.

Uh, we're de- we're dependent on NASA.

So, um, we've done our best to project things, and then you, um, you make sure, like in any other business, are there adjacencies, uh, where you can make some money, um, along the path to your big vision? One of those is extracting helium-three from terrestrial helium.

So we're taking our cryogenic distillation technology, we're packaging it up, and we're plugging it into helium plants on Earth.

Uh, the Air Force is backing, backing that work, um, but we, we have investors that are really interested in that.

Another thing is, um, using our knowledge of excavation on the Moon to apply to construction of a moon base.

So NASA just announced a three-phase, thirty-billion-dollar moon base program, um, and we intend to be a part of it, and we wanna demonstrate grading a surface, compacting a surface, digging a trench, building a berm, uh, remotely on the surface of the Moon, which I think is going to...

When do you think there'll be a base on the Moon?

[laughs]

Um, we're gonna, uh, we're actually gonna use, uh, the lunar rover, which NASA's developing, as the platform that we're gonna build on.

So we've been sp- we've spent a couple of years working with, um, several companies, and I'll, I'll, um, I'll talk about those in a second.

But bui- we're building tools that are like excavators and trenchers that, um, can dig out the regolith and then we put those, those, uh, that regolith into a machine that then processes it, extracts the solar wind, and then we have to separate the helium-3 out from everything else.

We would do that all on the surface of the moon.

Uh, it takes power.

Um, because of the approach we're taking, um, mechanically crushing the regolith versus heating it, it takes less power than, than what people have considered in the past, and that's gonna, that's what's gonna allow us to, to do this for, you know, at lighter weight and lighter cost than what's been looked at in the past.

Rob, can you talk to us a little bit about the vertical landing of, uh, the Blue Origin Shepard? 'Cause that was just such a cool innovation.