Off-Nominal - 231 - Single Bing (with Justin Cyrus)

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Justin Cyrus, CEO and Founder of Lunar Outpost, to talk about their rovers—Eagle and MAPP—and everything else they’re working on. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Home | Lunar Outpost NASA seeks a “warm backup” option as key decision on lunar rover nears - Ars Technica NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on X: “Yesterday, I had the privilege of speaking at the @a16z American Dynamism Summit with the builders, operators, and investors helping shape the next era of exploration. NASA has a clear mandate under President Trump’s national space policy: Return American astronauts to the Moon” FLEX Rover – Astrolab LTV | Intuitive Machines Lunar Outpost® Moon Rover Space Vehicle 42211 | Technic™ | Buy online at the Official LEGO® Shop US Lunar Outpost celebrates release of Lego Moon Rover Space Vehicle | collectSPACE Follow Justin Justin Cyrus Justin Cyrus (@StarlordCyrus) / X Follow Off-Nominal Subscribe to the show! - Off-Nominal Support the show, join the Discord Off-Nominal (@offnom) / Twitter Off-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Jake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Main Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘 Off-Nominal Merchandise Off-Nominal Logo Tee WeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Oh, Jake, is it a good time to talk about the Artemis program? I guess so, yeah. Sounds like there's some news, so it's top of everyone's minds. Everybody's talking about it. So we figured, you know, talk about at least a piece of it. And what has got to be in the rankings, one of the coolest backgrounds we've had on the show here, on the guest side of things? On any side of the thing, honestly.

Yeah, we're going to spend a significant amount of this energy talking about what's behind you, right? thinking. I appreciate that, guys. We got Justin Cyrus, CEO and founder, right, of Lunar Outpost? That is correct. CEO and founder of Lunar Outposts. Builder of Legos, that is my favorite title. If you look on my personal website, it's literally like number three after landed a rubber on the moon. It's like Lego designer. I mean, you got product placement. I'm going to take them in the wide shot here, Jake. Look at that. And just to give the shout out to it. Oh, wrong shoulder.

There we go. It's at Target. It's at Walmart. Definitely at the Lego store. And it is a really fun build. One of the coolest things that we did with that product. We actually went down to Houston. And I grew up right outside of Johnson Space Center.

And we gave away, I think, 100 of these Lego sets to kids in the Houston area. And just to see that excitement and that engagement. Happy to talk about it more. but that's one of my favorite points of being a space founder up till now. It's pretty rad. To not talk about Legos in this show, Justin. Come on. Yeah.

I would probably do the exact same thing if I were you. I would have that very high up on my resume of like life accomplishments. Unreasonably high. No, even in our pitch deck that goes out to investors, I promise you guys, it's right there at number three. And it's like, you know, it's fun. And who doesn't love Lego? And I think a lot of us in the space industry built Lego when we were kids

and were inspired by what you could build in the Lego space sets. Yeah. I'm getting so distracted looking at your background because I'm like looking at all these individual pieces back there. Do you want me to give you the rundown? Jake and Anthony, you want me to give you that quick rundown what you're looking at? Yeah.

So you're in the Lunar Outpost Mission Control Center. So this is where we ran Lunar Voyage 1 from. It's quite a bit smaller than the historical now. of mission control centers. We only staff about six people per mission. And we run about three sets of people per day. So this is built not only to look cool, but to be functional. So the lights that you see above me actually change depending on what's going on in the mission. So if something's off nominal, then it will change to a, you know, orange or reddish color, depending on what is going on. If the rover's operating autonomously, it'll change to this purple you'll see behind me.

Or if it's in teleop mode, it will go to blue. But it's just a really nice, subtle light queue for all of our operators to be on the same page. Like, what's the status of the rover? Did they like alert mode? Because that feels stressful right out the gate. Red lights while you're trying to debug something. Like, you're amping up the level of anxiety, I feel like. No one likes alert mode, but it's good.

I mean, don't get me wrong. You don't want the lights changing rapidly, right? Like the last thing you want is like flashing red like you see in the sci-fi movie. It's like no one would enjoy that. That will not help you problem solve. Absolutely not. But if it's like a subtle cue that changes over time, it seems to be a good way to keep the team on the same page.

That's an interesting feature. Does anyone else do that? That feels unique. I haven't seen anyone else do that. There's a lot of, yeah. Yeah, Starship Enterprise. That's true. I can't argue with that one.

One other fun feature on the mission control center is these screens you see behind me. So a lot of mission control centers, you basically see like the normal office screens. It'll look like what you have at your house or what you have at the office. They're really quite boring. But these are quite a bit different. So these are 240 hertz OLED monitors. And the reason you actually need that in a rover mission control center that's moving at a high pace, it's very hard to distinguish details on the lunar surface.

So you need to get as fast a refresh rate as you possibly can. And to have that kind of really deep black contrast. So you can identify rocks or you can identify craters as an operator earlier. and then obviously the rover does that autonomously as well. But that's just, it helps the humans see things a bit better out in a space. So we have not yet had a gaming session in here,

but we have, I think our quarter two company event is going to be a Halo tournament, a Halo 2 tournament on these screens, which we're pretty excited about. That's awesome. I never would think of that as as like a good feature for the mission control, but it does make a lot of sense. That's yeah.

And honestly, though, it does kind of sound like bullshit. Like that's actually going to make a difference. But I do believe that it's a cool feature. You're just pat- Yeah, it's come out. Come out. You can actually drive one of the, a couple of the LTV prototypes from this room as well.

So it doesn't matter, Anthony, at all, when you're going like one centimeter per second. Like, and historically, rovers average about three centimeters per second. if you're looking at the Mars rovers, they average a little bit slower than that, if you're looking all the way back to like the Russian Lunakod Rovers. But when you're traveling like 15 kilometers per hour on the lunar surface, that's when those details start to matter. And we've never had a vehicle that can travel that fast on another planetary body

and basically live stream back to Earth. So that's why you haven't seen these in mission control centers in the past. They're not out there pulling a John Young, just laying the throttle open on the lunar surface. No, we definitely have to like speed cap the rovers for LTV. NASA probably doesn't want us going faster than 20 kilometers per hour. Just more government regulation, hey, geez. I mean, at that point, you're catching air, man.

You got speed limits out there? I mean, geez. Yeah, I thought the moon was supposed to be free, right? In the moray, it's like Arizona, though. The speed limit goes up quite a bit on the nice flat open lava fields, you know? Definitely, definitely you can go a lot faster in those nice wide open lava fields. Towards the Lunar South Pole with all the craters and rocks and boulders. And I think NASA is probably right on this one.

You probably don't want to hit a crater and catch vacuum on the moon. You know, it's probably one of the first. probably want to keep all four wheels on the ground. That makes me realize that like, you know, a hundred years from now, there's going to be people that live at the South Pole that are like bitching about, you know, these drivers, they come in from Mari Tranquiladas and they just are terrible. They can, they don't know how to drive down here.

They catch an air. They bounce it into everybody's habitats. There's going to be some interregional driving strife that everybody always has. Yeah. Honestly, yeah, just like here in Koppel. Colorado, we always complain about the Californians. Like, you Californians don't know how to drive, and especially in the winter and you come out here.

And don't get me wrong, it's a lot of my teams from California. We always give them grief. But I think you're right, that interregional tension, interregional dynamic. That might exist. I'm hoping it exists more on like the sports side of things. What I'd love to see is like, you know, the long jump on, you guys watch the Winter Olympics? Oh, boy, do we. Yeah, it's been a topic on this show.

Yeah. Awesome. You know, an American and a Canadian that have been having some tough times lately through the Olympics. USA. Yeah, we did it. We did it, folks. We did it. What an overtime goal.

But the point I was trying to get to is the ski jumpers. Can you imagine ski jumping on the moon? Like if someone had one-six gravity ski jumping in an Olympics, like lunar Olympics instead of summer or winter Olympics a hundred years from now. It'd just be a blast. It'd be so much fun. That's a wild. That's a wild one.

It'd be like a two kilometer of ski jump. It would be like one. Yeah, you're in orbit. Yeah. Low lunar orbit ski jump. That's such a better vision. You know, all these people are always like, we're going to do orbital sports and we're going to, you know,

commission this habitat on the ISS and do some sporting thing. And you've now blown my mind and made me. me expand it a lot further and say like what about the entire Olympics on the moon that's uh that's going to be solid stuff dude lunar sports would be an absolute blast to watch i i mean orbital would be it'd be cool don't get me wrong some like orbital sports but i think it's almost more fun if you have gravity it's just like different um different gravity regimes i i think that makes it more dynamic so lunar olympics 100 years from now i think it's said first on this podcast. So I think it's going to happen.

We're doing the torch lighting, obviously, because we'll still be alive. So we're going to be doing the torch handoff for sure. Anyway, we skipped over a big part of the show, Jake. Did you make a drink over there? I did, yeah. Do you make a me? No, my wife found something for me at a craft fair. So this is pretty wild stuff. I opened it this week. This is, I don't know if you can read it. So crema de mescal, la asienne is the brand. So it's pinia colada with mescal mixed in. It's like a cream liqueer. You bought it at a craft fair? A crap fair?

Yeah. All right. So I pour a little bit just over ice. It's like, it's very, it's very mild. It's like 5% alcohol, but it's like kind of sweet. You hate it, Anthony. It's like it tastes like bubble gum, but, you know. Yeah.

It's good. I made a gin and tonic, but I, uh, I'm getting a home renovation done right now, Justin, and I was walking from the finish part of my house through the construction zone. And I tripped on a piece of wood and I spilled all of my ice. And I was too close to the show to go back and get more. So I just have an iceless gin and tonic at the moment. Sorry, just quit. So which kind of screwed up my ratios.

So this is quite strong, but I feel like it's going to be all right. That's part of the fun. Are you allowed to have drinks in that room or are the monitors too expensive? Not in mission control. We're not allowed to have drinks and mission control. But I do have Bing. So just a quick shout out to Bing. One of our finance guys, his parents.

This is Bing Green Apple. It is delicious, absolutely delicious. One of our finance guys is parents actually own an energy drink company. And so going into Mission Control, and especially when you have to wake up at like 3 a.m., wake up in the middle of the night, we would just go straight for Bing. So I felt like it was appropriate given the background. It's kind of like the official drink of the Mission Control Center. Yeah.

See, now the lights though. It's like a rave when you guys are in ops, you know. Not quite. Not quite, but it's, you know, our team. I wonder you're driving so fast. Less energy drinks, you know? Less energy drinks. So it's down.

Back to water. Yeah. You know what, man? It's not as bad as those Celsius. I don't know if you guys have had those Celsius. It's like four coffees. I have one of those and like you get just jittery. I've never even, never tried it and apparently never will.

You've now dissuaded me from ever trying that. Yeah. I love Red Bull. Red Bull's fantastic. Bing. I just like green apple. Good, good flavor profile. So not having quite as much fun as you guys, but still having fun.

You know, you're the one with Legos behind you and really cool gaming displays, and also you make lunar rovers. So I feel like you're doing all right out there. Yeah. We do, we should stay up front to the Schrodinger's moment we're in here, right? Where everybody expected an announcement of the LTV contract last year, I guess. Last fall was the expectation. Yeah. So there's probably stuff you kind of can't say, and people out there can make it our fault that we didn't ask the question, but I know we have to be sensitive about it because it's technically still an open and ongoing contract round.

Do we have any sense for like, is now everything is up for debate in the Artemis roadmap, but does that also include the LTV? Are you guys still kind of tracking towards there's an announcement soon? I mean, as far as what we've been told, and this is what I can't share, there's an announcement soon. granted, that's been the message since November of last year. So honestly, Anthony, Jake, I don't know much more than what you guys know, which is, you know, obviously I'd love to love to learn more. I guess from the LTV perspective and like it's criticality to the Artemis program, anything you want to do on the winter surface requires mobility.

Anything you want to do on the lunar surface requires robotics. So unless we're just going to land astronauts on the moon and they're going to pop, their heads up like gophers and you know kind of go back in and that's going to be the entirety of the artemus campaign which like that would be fine for like the first landing or maybe even the second landing but eventually we want to actually build a habitat on the moon eventually we want to and jared has said this the NASA administrator has said this we want to build the infrastructure on the moon although i think what they were focused on over the course of the last couple months has been getting the launch piece of it correct and i think my favorite quote from

Jared. He had two talks in the last two weeks, which I was quite excited about. One of them was at A16 Z's annual summit. They're a big venture capitalist at Silicon Valley. And the other one was kind of the Artemis reconfiguration between three, four and five. And his three, four and five, quote was, we are going to need lots of rovers, lots and lots of rovers on the moon. That's not exact quote. So, you know, if it's one or two words off, please forgive me. paraphrase by the Lodipos. I get it. It was lots and lots of rovers, actually.

He said it three times. I think it was American rovers on American launch vehicles at American bases on the moon. It was his catchphrase. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then at A16C, he said something very similar. So he published that speech online. He said, we need LTV or LTV like rovers.

We're going to need many of them on the moon. And I couldn't agree more. So everything from the launch and landing pads we want to build to the power, to the communications, to the habitats and infrastructure, all of that needs LTV, and that's what we've built our Eagle lunar terrain vehicle for. So if you look at our competitors, LTVs, and we can get into that a little bit more later, there are each very different architectures and each very different designs meant for different reasons. Ours, the Eagle, it's a space truck. It's meant to build the Artemis Campaign. It's meant to build that long-term infrastructure

on the surface of the moon while providing safe and reliable mobility for Artemis astronauts. And I love this clip as well because that's actually at autonomously driving at night. And here, behind me on the Mission Control Center, this is actually where we ran those operations from. So we not only built the prototype in phase one, but we built the entire end-to-end stack in phase one before the preliminary design review. So we tested out the back end, we tested out the autonomy, we tested out a lot of the critical hardware along the way as well. You know, one thing I've been thinking about with this whole Artemis roadmap shuffling is that they've, they're doubling down on the lunar surface in a way that they weren't previously.

And last fall, there was a lot of talk, I think even, you know, some space news articles and whatnot about we don't know if they're going to have, you know, a single winner out of this award, or two winners like they were hoping originally. Because I think NASA had openly stated originally. They were hoping to get two, but they didn't know exactly how the budget would shake out. It was the same kind of situation we were in with the HLS Award in the original day. So charitably, my best reading of this would be they're delaying this announcement because they know what the changes were that were coming,

which is this doubling down on lunar surface and trying to make it so that there would be two awards coming out, which I feel like, you know, you can tell me if you disagree as someone who would like to win the award, but I feel like most people in the industry are like, two would be better, given what we've seen historically with other crude and uncrewed spaceflight programs out of NASA. But do you, like, how did you feel going in? Like, was the one award thing good or bad news? How did, what was the kind of lunar outpost's take on that? Yeah. It's a very good question, Anthony. And what it comes down to is like, I think it's going to end up being two awards, mainly just because in the Senate reauthorization, NASA reauthorization,

they're saying NASA should seek to obtain two LTVs. And the congressional CJAS write up, they said, seek to award two. Don't get me wrong. Like, I just want to get going. Like, for me, if there's one or two, like, of course, it would be fantastic. If we were the one awardee and all of NASA's money is going to us, my job as a CEO, I've done my job. But if there's there's two. I mean, that's fine as well. At the end of the day, I don't mind competition. I thrive in competition or company thrives in competition. And I think we've put an architecture together that's more well suited for commercialization on the surface of the moon than either of our competitors and more well suited to do that at scale. So if there are two awarded, that's fantastic. If there's one awarded,

that's fantastic. All I care about is getting to work now because in President Trump's executive order, he put out in December, he said we didn't outpost on the moon by 2030. And if we're going to put any outpost that, like, even if it's a first element, it should not be an outpost that just comes down on a lander. And obviously NASA is going to dictate this. Like, NASA makes the decisions. I don't make the decisions. I'm a contractor.

I do what they tell me to do. And I do it with a smile on my face and I'll support what they want. But at the end of the day, I don't think we should have a habitat that comes down on the lander. I think that would be very limiting in terms of scope of what we can actually accomplish on the lunar surface. So if we are going to make that 2030 timeline for the lunar outpost and if we are going to contribute to Artemis 4 and Artemis 5 that are going in 2028, we just need to get to work. And for us, like, it's been nine months since preliminary design review. And we had interim infrastructure task order contracts.

We've been keeping ourselves busy with her five other missions. our DOW contracts. So we're not hurting for work, but truly at some point, we just need to get the green light to go make this happen. Yeah, that must be difficult. Like, you know,

we've got a lot of different sort of scenarios like this where we have these kind of new programs from NASA that are trying to like, you know, foment an industry that didn't really exist before. It's not like there's always been a market to go out and just buy a lunar rover, right? Like, this is sort of a new thing, you know, a newish company.

And we saw this with clips a lot too, where it's just like these startups are trying to like make it, but they really, really depend on these kind of initial contracts to really grease the wheels and get things moving. So I hadn't really thought that through, but you're right. Like every month of delay on the award is like just burn rate that you're going through. And you've got to figure out kind of how to stand up the company in a more sustainable way, right? Yeah. And for us, I think that's one of our strengths. honestly at Lunar Outpost. We have five other missions going to the moon. We had our first rover

that operated on the moon last year. Unfortunately, we didn't get a drive, but it operated. We got data back. We got data back from that whole transit as well. And then we have our second mission that's going to the moon this October. So that's Lunar Voyage 2 is what we call it. That's going to Riner Gamma, a magnetic anomaly that's been puzzling scientists for hundreds of years. So we're teamed up with Johns Hopkins applied physics laboratory. And that is a is a NASA science mission, which we're extraordinarily excited about. Lunar Voids 3, commercial mission that also has an international space agency on it. Lunar Voyage 4 is our, rover is what it's actually called, not Lunar Voids 4.

Roover is the Australian National Flagship Mission going to the moon. So that's out of our Melbourne office. And then Lunar Voyage 5 is Artemis 4 deployed instruments. So another NASA science mission with our map rovers that it's the first R2D2. It's the first BB8 in space. It's the first robot that's ever going to be working with an Artemis astronaut or any astronaut on the surface of another planetary body. So that's keeping us quite busy. Our team is very excited about that.

And then our DOW contracts, we got to launch next month. I got another launch 12 months from now, mostly focused on satellite swarms and the software layer that connects those. And the reason we built that technology, the reason we invested in that technology, eventually we want that technology to not only power many satellites in Leo, we want that technology to power our swarms of rovers on the surface of the moon to build the lunar outpost to access the resources of space and access the energy that's available to enable heavy industry. So yes, there's burn rate. Yes, we have to, don't give it wrong, LTV is massive, right? I'm not going to pretend like LTV is not a big contract because it is a huge contract for us and would mean a lot for our business. But like worst case scenario, if LTV evaporates, we're still business.

We saw five rivers going to the moon. That's more than any other organization on Earth currently. CCP might have more that we don't know about. So just putting that in there with a grain of salt. Yeah, that's good. Lots of irons in the fire. That's diversification, the name of the game, right? Yeah.

Cool. Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about sort of the eagle design? I'm curious to kind of know just sort of an overview of high-level design principles. Like, why do you, why did you choose to build it this way? What are some of the really interesting features that it has? Yeah, so the Eagle Lunar Surround vehicle, and we saw a video of it a little bit earlier, it's very much built to be a space truck.

I mean, humanity has been optimizing vehicles for thousands of years here on Earth to do work at scale. And so when you start looking at the requirements for LTV, they're not that different. from the requirements of a work truck here on Earth, except now you have to do it in a very extreme lunar environment, right? Negative 200 degrees Celsius to plus 200 degrees Celsius. Now you have to have direct to Earth communications. Now you need to survive not only radiation, but you have to be able to survive potential micrometeoroids.

You have to be able to mitigate the lunar dust. So it's basically taking that form factor of a truck and making it well suited for the lunar surface. And the reason we ended up with this design is you need a design that enables commercialization. Like when Elon's out there tweeting about mass drivers on the moon and launching satellites and factories of satellites on the lunar surface, I love it. Like absolutely, let's get after it. I think that is 100% possible in our spacefaring future. To do that, we need vehicles like the Eagle, though.

If you look at our competitors, they both took very different approaches. We all took very different approaches, right? Not any one of these vehicles is the exact same. One is kind of a go-kart, you know, go-kart strategy, kind of the bare minimum, or this is my interpretation. They might describe it differently. Another one is- That's good.

That's good. Yeah. Like the sharp elbows of go-kart. That's good. Yeah. It's a, I love go-karting, by the way. We did that as a company. No offense, go-carts, but.

No, no, I love, I actually too love go-carting. We, hyper-competitive company events at Lunar Outpost is what I'll say, right? We take that very seriously. But then the second one, it's highly complex, right? Like you're looking at all these different moving parts, pieces, and mechanisms. And NASA told us, we need to provide them a 10-year service lifetime. So when you're looking at it, it's not really made for humans. It was originally a robotic platform.

They just kind of threw humans on the back. It kind of looked like a zamboni. And then they put humans on the front, and it's like a zamboni. but it's like it's highly complex which lends itself to be less reliable. That's my take. Again, they'll probably say the same thing about our architecture. But truly, we went for the space truck. We went for something that's highly reliable that can do real industrial work on the lunar

surface. So we have the ability to pick up and offload large cargo. We have the ability with the robotic arm that's on the back to manipulate not only science payloads, but move around bulk regolith on the surface of the moon. and then astronauts still get that, I would say, more truck-like feel that they're used to driving back here on Earth. So that's a little bit about our architecture without giving some of the competition sensitive pieces away. But it's not only the hardware, it's the software, as what I will say. And then the last thing I'll say on the software, you have to not only be able to operate in this environment with astronauts and drive on the lunar surface.

you have to be able to operate on this environment fully autonomously and fully robotically for about 70% of the time. So your rover needs to be quite capable in terms of its autonomous functionality and quite capable in terms of its ability to actually set up and maintain large scale infrastructure. So that's been a big part of our focus as well. That's probably got to be like an undersold or under discussed part of this whole idea of like, you know, ongoing operations on the moon because like here on Earth, an autonomous vehicle is like a nice to have and there it's like square one. Like that's like your starting point. And it also just

happens to be able to let a human take the wheel of the there. But that's not really, that's not, that's not going to be like the prime operating mode. Right. And so it's kind of, it's kind of interesting to have to think about that because yeah, that that's got to change. I'm very curious to see how like that fundamental base requirement changed, that bit flip between, you know, autonomous versus human, how that cascades down into the rest of the design, whereas it's like, well, now this doesn't make sense or this does make sense or whatever reason, right? That's very interesting to see how those kind of play out. It's like a good evolution of ground transportation, you know, just in the, in the grand scheme of human history, of moving down from feet to horses to cars and now

we've got these things are going to be all different as well, right? Yeah, and it's a pretty fun thought. to kind of run down. I mean, you look at the Waymos right now. They're kind of like the electric jaguars and they have these lighters on top. You look at the Tesla Robotaxi and it's kind of much more streamlined like holistic package from the ground up. I think we're going to see different approaches on other planetary bodies as well.

Ours is more not necessarily like the sensor suite that we use because you do need a different sensor suite for the lunar surface. but ours is more top up built to operate autonomously and carry humans. And that's what makes it unique, right? I mean, you could look at the Mars Perseverance River. You had a few companies testing out like path planning algorithms. You had JPL testing out autonomy. But that's definitely a lower level of autonomy than what we need.

So you not only need high-performance edge compute, you do need the ability to communicate back here with Earth and communicate with other assets on the lunar surface. So it's working with humans, working with robots, working with the key pieces of infrastructure, which makes it a whole heck of a lot of fun because it's as it sits, and again, Jared, Isaacman might know something I don't. But as it sits, LTV is central to the entirety of the Artemis campaign. So we got to be able to plug into the power, the Vsats that they're putting down. We need to be able to interact with the habitat. that. Ideally, if the habitat runs out of power, just like a Ford F-150 lightning here on Earth

or a cyber truck, our LTV should be able to provide backup power to that habitat. So those types of interfaces, those types of interactions are completely novel and new. And candidly haven't really been thought about here on Earth. We're just starting to see it here on Earth, but now we need to do this in an extreme environment, which I do think we're going to see a lot of technology we develop for the moon brought back here to Earth because of it. Because we're we're going to do. We're we have to solve these hard problems. Yeah. Well, yeah, I was just thinking the same thing.

So like we said, the autonomy is one kind of, you know, parallel facet where we're doing the same thing on Earth. But now you're talking about, you know, grid storage basically in the vehicle, which is a thing that's happening on Earth as well, but, you know, for different reasons. But, yeah, there's different problems to solve there. It's trying to hook up an EV to a house from the 1870s. That's a very extreme environment in my experience. So, yes. Oh, man. I have a battery car with a house that was filled before electricity existed in houses.

So that's fun to try to collage together. Now I'm wondering, Anthony, if you have it harder or if I do with the Mexican wiring standards here, where everything is just kind of electrical tape together and buried in the grounds. Yours will melt if left exposed to the sun down there. So at least have that. I was looking around. planning. Sorry, go ahead.

NASA is not working with an 1870s or Mexican infrastructure idea. Or Mexican electrical code, yeah. We have varying experiences. NASA has significantly, yeah, significantly better technology. I do think, though, in the light of this new workforce thing, that maybe Jared should bring me and Jake in as the ends of the electrical experience here on Earth that we could maybe apply to the lunar base. Seems fair.

So, yeah. I think they'll need some consultants, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, boy. Do I have opinions about what kind of monitors I would put in the mission control on the moon after this, if this conversation, you know? Perfect, man. I mean, what's better? Let me ask you this, Anthony, like a nice 240 hertz monitor, or do you just want a nice big window on your lunar outpost to, like, look out at your rovers?

Okay, so you don't ask that. Perfect segue. I'm not bringing that up. Perfect segue, because I was cruising around, cruising. around the sites of the varying competitors, right? And of everybody bidding, the Eagle is the most adaptable to a pressurized version just in terms of its shape and layout. So what's up? You building one? Where are we at on this? Where's the one with glass? Very astute observation. I think that is fair. Pot. What I will say.

say is like our name is lunar outpost right like ever since we were founded back in 2017 we have been I would say laser focused on building technology and capabilities that allow us to sustainably put humans on the moon and therefore use the infrastructure we're going to build up to access the energy and resources space has to offer like that's our vision our LTV is meant to be as modular as capable as possible without detracting from its baseline mission. So we are trying to commercialize this thing at scale. I have, I think, 70 letters of interest on LTV that we're ready to commercialize. We spent an insane amount of time on commercialization.

I got banks lined up. I got investors lined up. People are excited about the LTV and they're excited about where it can go. What we need is that anchor customer. And what NASA needs to do is show us that market pull of this. This is what we're looking for. And truly, like, if they say, hey, we don't want humans on there, great. You just take out the crew interfaces and crew systems and you lower the safety factor from, like, you know, kind of that human rated safety factor that you carry for pressurized student astronauts, down to something more akin to what we've seen on other robotic rovers.

And you save probably a thousand kilograms. And you can send that up as a robotic only version. If they say, hey, we now want a pressurized rover to compliment Jaxo, like we want a little mini pressurized rover, it can be enclosed. It's a lot of extra mass that would go into that. It's a lot of extra life support systems. I would rather see our lunar terrain vehicle be used for logistics to support outposts on the moon.

Like we built this vehicle to support logistics. We built this vehicle to support infrastructure. If they want us to make it bigger and make a pressurized version, heck yeah. I'm here for it. But what we need from NASA is that initial anchor customer clear market pole signal. And that's why we need the phase two of the LTV to be announced. Remind where you're based. Golden, Colorado.

Have you been? Yeah. Either of you guys ski. I've driven by Golden plenty of times. I love Colorado. Colorado's awesome. It's an ideal state in so many ways. No beach.

No beach is the dinger for me. but you know, yeah, we're coastal boys. Yeah. Yeah. Jake didn't grow up a coastal boy, but he's adopted the coastal boy nature. Jake, you're down to Mexico now? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can't.

So I don't do the no beach or the snow thing anymore. Fair enough. We have an office down in Houston, Texas. And I grew up in Houston and I still got family down there. So in the winter, because I'm still a Texas boy at heart, I go down to Houston and I skip the snow. But I do love Colorado. It's just a pretty place.

Well, we at least have somebody in the chat trying to get hired in Australia as well. I don't know who X-Wing 669 is, but if they end up getting a job, I want a finder's fee. That's all I'm saying. I think that's fair. I'll upload your resume to the chat. We'll run it by Justin in real time. There you go, Anthony. I mean, that's our beach, that's our beach office.

We're right in Melbourne, right next to the ocean. So we got a beach office too. Love it, love it. Can I ask about deployment? This is always something that comes up with the rovers. Like, do you have anything you can tell us or anything you can share about how this thing gets from cold Colorado to the moon? That seems like an important part of the whole operation. Pretty critical.

Yeah, and what was kind of fun? And I think what was commercially enabling on the LTVS side, they not only allowed us to procure the rover, but they allowed us to procure the landing, the communication satellites, the ground stations, everything else that went into it. So for us, you know, as a company that's tried to bring a lot of that in house and then form strong strategic partners elsewhere, it really was a good fit for that program. Now, our first rover for LTV is actually going down on a SpaceX starship. Now, that was announced, I believe, about a year ago. We love working with a SpaceX team. I don't know if either of you guys saw, like have seen SpaceX Starship in person. But watching that thing come down, it's like a 20-story building.

V3 is going to be even bigger. You know, it's like 30-40 stories. But watching that thing come down and get caught in the chopsticks for the first time is one of the top ten. coolest technological moments of my life. It was awesome. And you felt it too. You know, you're crosswater. You absolutely felt it.

So have you guys seen a starship launch yet? Not yet. I'm in the great dilemma right now in which I had active plans to bring. I have two small boys, five and 18 months. I was like, we're going to the next launch. Me and the boys. We're going to go hang out for a week, hang out on the beach. And then SpaceX has moved into a position where they're very likely launching

in early April out of what would effectively be me staying in South Padre Island, which if anybody understands spring break culture in South Padre Island, I'm not sure I should bring a five-year-old and an 18-month-old to this location and watch a space launch. So now I don't know what to do, Justin. Fair enough, Anthony. I think that's... Shout out anyone at SpaceX if you can get me and two small boys into your, like, cool spot to watch it that's not on the beach. That would be great. Awesome.

And, you know, that's, it's a fun experience. It really is. It's a good time. And then we've made the rover so it can launch and land on really any new, new platform coming up, whether it's launch or landers. So we can land on the origins, blue moon. We can land on any of the medium class, infrastructure class landers. We're starting to see come out of the eclipse program. And then we can obviously land on both HLSs. And that's part of that modularity I talked about with LTV. Like the more capabilities, you just, you know, if you want a longer range, you can throw on some more batteries. If you want lower mass, you can just take out a few batteries. Whatever mission profile are specific you're trying to fit, we don't want to change it too much. Like it should be 90 to 95% the same always so we can actually have a production line with

this rover. But when you're talking about like mission specific capabilities for science or exploration purposes. Those are the types of mission profiles we can fit. So basically from Colorado, we put it in a giant truck. We ship it down to Huntsville, Alabama, and Johnson Space Center, depending on the rover, depending on the timeline, whether it's robotic or human spaceflight rated. We go through full qualification. Then we ship it out to the lander integration facility. It actually gets put in place. And all of these landers have different deployment mechanisms. You know, obviously I probably can't talk about their specific deployment mechanisms, but you can use your kind of general imagination how a rover would be deployed off these landers.

It's not that different to how humans would be deployed off or how large cargo would be deployed off if you want to look up those graphics. Ramps, cranes and elevators. Ramps, cranes, and elevators, exactly. Well, one thing I'm curious about on that, though, is like, do you see, you know, if the abundance mentality takes hold and there's tons of. lots and lots, to paraphrase Jarvisement, lots and lots of lunar rovers. Is there like a standardization that we should seek in terms of wheelbase

and spacing so that there is a more standardized ramp? I think of this like driving through a car wash, right? Like, I'm not worried that my car is going to fit through the car wash that I'm about to enter. They have tracks that will fit all the cars that will enter this car wash. The landers thus far seem to be like, well, this one is built for Griffin

and then it seems like Astrolabe, you know, there fits well enough on that ramp. But do we have to go through some sort of standardization to make this stuff plug and play so that we can see a really cool future where everybody's able to fly on anything? I think so, Anthony. I think that's a very good point

and I think that's a point that needs to be hammered home. NASA has done a great job of this in the Leo economy with KupSats, with how we integrate onto these launch providers. Docking ports? And that worked. Docking boards. Yeah, that worked phenomenally for not only the International Space Station.

Yeah, Esper Rings, yep, and the launch providers and the Leo economy, NASA should absolutely 100% do the same thing for the moon. What I will say, and my pitch to NASA, if anyone from NASA is listening to this, don't make the wheelbase narrow. You do not want your rover tipping over, especially when your trial billing 15 to 20 kilometers per hour. You have to have a nice stanced wheelbase. You have to have your weight distribution proper. You have to have your center gravity, your driving dynamics. And one thing we were pretty fortunate on our first kind of like foray into LTV to have was General Motors on the driving dynamic side.

They have this entire facility that you can actually set your vehicle down in and you can feel and experience the live driving dynamics. And NASA has created the same capability at Johnson Space Center. So I do think that's going to be a big part of how astronauts, trained for this mission. But one thing that I think our vehicle has a pretty massive, not minor, but like pretty massive competitive advantage over the competition on is driving dynamics. When you're an astronaut on the moon and you're going, you know, you're 100,000 kilometers, you know, a couple hundred thousand kilometers away from Earth, you don't want to experience jolts.

You don't want to experience shocks. When you hit these small craters, when you're going up and down into these permanently shadow regions, if NASA allows astronauts to do that, or if you're hitting boulders or rocks along the way, you want the suspension to be able to absorb that. So that means you have to have your vehicle at least a certain distance off the ground. You have to have a pretty soft suspension, and you need to be able to kind of absorb a lot of those shocks along the way. So with that being said, that's probably more information than you are asking for. So I apologize, but hopefully that gives you a few ideas on how we're going to be.

we should standardize. Like, we should standardize driving dynamics and wheelbase and center of gravity. I'm now, like, remembering that, that meme that's been going around for a long time that traces the, the, the width of the space shuttle booster right back to, like, Roman roads because, like, they established some standard for, for, like, all horses this wide, and then you make the wheels to go in the ruts, and then the ruts became train tracks, and the train tracks had to transport the boosters, and there we go. So now we have, you know, the Romans decided how wide the shuttle boosters were.

We should just continue that on. Like, why don't we just put that standard rate up on the ramps and the wheelbase? Like, what's the, uh, seems like we should do that. Roman chariot. Roman chariot is probably a little bit narrow, but. A little bit, but I, I do ask that, like, kind of seriously, though, right? Like, what, is there anything about the environment that, that would say that, like, an earth-sized wheelbase that I would just have in a regular pickup truck is not good enough?

Like, is there anything, any physics differences that would drive a change there? or because that, like, that's, that is kind of standardized. We're used to that. Like, that's like still great where one astronaut can climb up on each side and they can sit in tandem and drive the thing away. You know, it's like a good, it's a good size, right? Yeah, there are a few things that drive it to be a bit wider than anything you'll have here on Earth.

So you can't take a GM electric cummer truck and just copy paste it on the moon. You can't take a Tesla cyber truck or a Ford F150 lightning. Astronauts have these giant spacesuits, right? like these giant spacesuits, and they're large for a reason. They're spacecraft in their own right. They have the plits on the back, the life support. And with that being said, now you are facing the constraint of two astronauts that you need to have in this vehicle. That's a requirement by NASA.

And then you're facing the constraints on the other side of the rocket farings you can actually fit in. So if you want to take the approach like we did at lunar outpost to fit in these rocket fairings, it does get you that maximum width where the. suits kind of set the minimum width. And with that, you also want the astronauts to be comfortable if they're driving for long periods of time. So the seats need to have like some level of comfort

and design to them, which is something I think ours are quite comfortable. You can sit in those things for eight, 10 hours at a time. I've done it myself. I've gone down to our test ranch, it's a thousand acres in Southern Colorado, whip this thing around for hours because we wanted to know how it felt. You could

try to stand up on these rovers. I think it's a terrible idea. you could do it if you're going like three kilometers per hour max but the moment you start going any faster than that you actually look at the requirements for the winner's ran vehicle program you're talking about like 15 kilometers per hour up to 20 kilometers per hour can you imagine being in one 6g driving at 15 to 20 kilometers per hour standing up and then it's like oh i hit a bump I got to come back down like it's not it's not a good idea when you're going those speeds so that is kind of the constraints that you're working with in the LTV program.

You have to fit in a rocket faring, but you need to be wide enough so you don't tip over. You have to be wide enough so you can fit the two astronauts. But then you also need to be safe. You have to be safe, reliable, consistent, and you have to have good, comfortable driving dynamics for astronauts on the moon. And feel free to argue with me if you guys don't. All I was going to say, you would stand up if you were driving on this thing. You'd stand up for a minute.

Don't lie to me. You know what we did, Anthony? We went to – so my family has a ranch in Southern Colorado. My parents were very kind. They let me dig up many acres in their front yard to dig a test track when we were thinking about this architecture. We took one of our electric ATVs and I put on a crash helmet. And AJ, my CTO, put on another crash helmet.

He was my driver. I stood up in the back of that electric ATV, and I was like, all right, we're going to do this two ways. One, you're going to drive three kilometers per hour, then we're going to go five kilometers per hour, then 10, then 15. Like, it was a scientific test while we were having some fun. And then I did it sitting. How many energy drinks in were you? How many bings?

How many bings? No bing? You know what? Maybe, maybe like, that was a high enough adrenaline day. It was a heck of a lot of fun, but maybe like one bing. One bing, Anthony. Single bing. Yeah, maybe one thing, Anthony.

A single bing. single thing. But what it comes down to is like we did that sitting up or standing up. We did that sitting down and standing up, I'll tell you even here on Earth in Earth gravity, which is six times stronger than lunar gravity, that is a tough prospect to sell. And he went 15 kilometers per hour and I was starting to gain a little bit of, you know, a little bit of jump on on this vehicle trying to stand up while we were driving through this. And that's in Earth gravity. Now imagine trying to do that on the moon, it's just a bad idea. Like if you cap it, if the stand-up mode is capped at like a couple kilometers per hour, that's totally fine. But truly for a vehicle that's

going to travel fast, high-rate mobility is what NASA calls it on the winter surface. You have to have at least a mode where they can sit down and be safe. It was fun. It was a blast. If you guys ever come out to the ranch, we'll put you on the ATB and we'll let you do the test. For sure. Yeah, I'm not going to lie and say that I'd never looked sideways on mission space when Disney told me not to look sideways. I did that. I saw what happens. It's a terrible idea.

I wouldn't do it again, but I would stand up on a lunar rover. That's all I'm saying. You can accommodate that, right? Like, you can still stand up and drive ours. It's just, I don't recommend it past a certain speed limit. That's what I'll say for safety purposes. What kind of like navigational affordances are we thinking about for these kind of rovers? I'm thinking like cockpit experience, right?

Am I, what do I got in front of me when I'm trying to nap? Is this all visual or is there some semblance of a nav, a GPS system? What kind of thing should I think about? That's a very good question. It's a little different than what you would see here on Earth. don't have GPS, but what we've tried to do is simplify the screens to be as, like, limited information as possible and only critical information. Because what you don't want to do, again, you're an astronaut, you're a couple hundred

thousand kilometers away from Earth, you're performing a mission. If you're driving this thing, you don't want to have the astronauts have to think about 20 or 30 different things at the time. So the control setup is actually quite simple. It's a stick that goes forward, back, left, right. You can switch it into zero point turns. You can do that. You can switch it in in crab mode.

You can do that. But the screen that you actually see is very similar to modern day cars here on Earth just with a lunar twist. So it's very clean. It shows. Listen to podcasts. One, you're on the moon. Can we get this promise right now that you can listen to Off Nominal on the moon? Oh, man.

I think I might have to charge you guys for that. Yeah. Let's get the RSS feed built right in, you know? Perfect. I love it. Off nominal live from Moon. That's perfect. It's, hey, Juventus is the first football club on the moon.

It was awesome to see their fan base engaged. Like one Instagram post they put out had like 20 million views, like one video about the mission. And that's a rover of this size, right? Like we had partnered with Juventus, we partnered with Lego, we partnered with MIT, we partnered with a dozen other companies that procured commercial mobility services for us on the and that was our first map rover. So imagine what you can do on LTV. You can have podcasts from the moon.

You can do live streaming from the moon. Hey man, if you want, you can do your first F1 race from the moon. It does not matter. The sky's limit. What matters is making sure NASA has the safe, reliable mobility for astronauts, and we can set up the moon base. Everything else is open. I mean, you know, within reason, but everything else is open.

Official radio of the moon, Jake. We need it. All right, I cut you off, though, an interesting part, which is what I want to know is astronaut gets in a rover. What do they have on the display? They got waypoints. They've got like where the lander was and points of interest. What are we looking at?

More or less, you have the points of interest where you landed. You have your moon base clearly identified so they can say, hey, take me home or anything like that or take me back to the lander, depending on which mission it is, which mission profile. You do have other points of interest like large craters clearly identified. On the screen, it actually shows all the hazards within the next couple hundred meters that the robotic system is tracking. So not only like, hey, here's something visual for the astronaut, but if autonomous like hazard avoidance has to kick in, it shows you kind of what it's what it's detecting. So I would say, like I said, imagine you get in your electric cars. I don't know what electric cars

you guys have, but it's that with a lunar twist. Just a one level deeper with those points of interest. And you do have some of those kind of critical, you do have some of those critical, I would say human factors, characteristics that you need. And we can tie into the suits if they allow us to. So that is something that if they want like suit data on the screen, we're more than happy to make that a reality, but that would have to come from NASA the super providers to provide us that API to get that data. So we'd love to do that. And we think that would also be like a safe and responsible thing to do.

So astronauts know what's going on with their life support systems and the space suits more broadly. Yeah, that seems reasonable. And then you can pump into the audio for the off nominal feed. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. I guess I got to hit up axiom also. I'm realizing now.

I think you need to blast it out in the, yeah, that's an axiom thing, not a you thing, huh? Yeah, hey man, if they give us an audio feed to their suits, we'll take it. One of us is joking, and it's not me. What else is joking? Hey, audio is pretty useful. Pretty useful overall. I'm going to send you the resume that I'm getting in the email from X-Wing 6-6-9, and then I'm going to send you some info on what we should.

hook up here because this sounds great. Awesome. And I didn't, I didn't answer X-Wing 669's comment, so I apologize. We are hiring in Australia. Yes. So we are hiring in Australia. We are hiring in our European office in Luxembourg. And then our global headquarters, obviously, is here in America and Golden, Colorado. And then we have our human spaceflight headquarters down in Houston, Texas. So we're hiring in all four locations. All right. Job are available, folks. You want to work on space trucks. We'd love to have you. Space trucks.

I'm pulling up your careers page, and I see the audio integration engineer is listed as a job post. That's false. That's definitely false. That is fake news. NASA is going to hear that, and they're going to be like, we didn't tell you could get an integrate audio? And it's like, I probably. Jared's been on some of our show. goes, we'll make this happen.

All right, good. I'm glad to hear it. But John Krause is a friend. We're going to make this happen. Awesome. Yeah. Cool. This sounds awesome.

I'm excited. The LTV thing is really interesting to me because when you look at, I pulled up the imagery of everybody's rover earlier and it is the most diverse of all of these contracts that NASA has run so far that like, like you said, truly, everybody had a different idea of what sort of configuration they should go in with and all the other ones kind of converged on similar design aesthetics or design emphasis in a way that LTV had a lot more variability. Like, spacesuit, you're going to, they all look like spacesuits. Shocker. They look like a human. You know, cargo vehicles to the ISS. Yeah, it's a docking port and a bunch of space to put stuff.

This one has the most interesting, you know, decisions about where the person sits and what kind of stuff it carries and how those are packaged and where they should, what are the affordance for people getting them on and off the rover. So it truly is, I think, the most interesting of the competitively sourced proposals from NASA. And then the last couple of weeks, I feel like have only made this more of a thing that needs to happen,

considering the fact that they are just, like, not only unlocking a lot of budget for the lunar surface, but doubling down on frequency of flights and trying to get the lunar surface more. So, I don't know. It's been a weird couple of months for the LTV contract, but I feel like it shook out in a really good direction overall. Yeah, honestly, I think it's heading there. I think it's heading in the right direction. And, you know, if I had a quick pitch to Jared, it would be, hey, LTV's ready to go.

You got three competitors. You got three vehicles. Let's get them funded and let's get him going to the moon. just in terms of mobility and capabilities that we can put down on the surface, like, we can move pretty quickly. Like at Lunar Outpost, we've made flight rovers within 12 months for one of our DoD contracts. Like our team, we looked at procuring a satellite bus, and it was like 18 months, 24-monthly time. And so all we did was take our map rover, take the wheels off, and like, oh, great, we have a satellite bus. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah, but it's like, it's all just compute, baby. It's all the same pieces. It's all the same parts. It's all the same components. I think the most important thing. And my pitch to Jared is NASA needs to be a good customer. And being a good customer means clearly communicating, being a good customer means clearly defined timelines.

And if they can do that, there is no doubt myself and many other entrepreneurs in the space field can go attract massive amounts of capital. to support Administrator Isaacman's vision and President Trump's vision for the lunar surface. Because I love what those guys are doing. Like the executive order in December, President Trump, fantastic. That was phenomenal. Like, let's get an outpost on the moon by 2030. That is music to my ears. And what Administrator Isaacman is saying about landings in 28, multiple landings on 2028, perfect.

Let's put an LTV on one of those. Let's get multiple LTVs the next year. Let's get after it. So that's my quick pitch, how NASA can do that. be a good partner to commercial industry. All right. He's probably listening. That's my guess.

Seems likely. He's not that busy right now. Yeah. Yeah. Not much going on. He's not doing every interview ever. So. Jake's rocking the Artemis turn today too, huh?

I am. Yeah. I thought I'd show a little love. You got over the whole America thing. Nice. After the gold medal. So I was quick. I had a sore day and then I've realized

there's bigger fish to fry. Yeah, we just, you know, We throw a Canadian on the first mission around the moon, and there you have it. It all is absolved. There you go. Rock and roll. Justin, this is awesome. I love talking to you guys.

It's such an interesting time, so we appreciate it hanging out. And hopefully, post-announcement, maybe we get you guys back on to talk however everything shakes out. Yeah, I'd love to come back, ideally in a celebratory mood. And maybe the next drink you'll see me have is not a Bing, but a drink. at that point I'd have to be outside of mission control center though strict no alcohol policy in there we'll get a bang from the ranch yeah yeah from the ranch we'll fly out and we'll stay up on the rovers and drink some bings no drinking bings yes no no drinking and driving on the no i'm pretty sure i have to

definitely we'll have a you can be the designated driver not a rule on the moon yet i don't think i don't think that's a law on the moon for the record so still probably a bad idea is that in the outer space tree i don't know there's certain things that just fall into the category of like maybe not a law of like bad idea. Yeah. Yeah. The one car on this planetary body, let's not screw this one car up. On the other hand, though, like, you're going to hit, you know.

That's true. That's a great point. Yeah, there's pretty deep craters out there. Yeah. But anyway, I really appreciate your guys' time. Fun conversation. Honestly, awesome to talk to you guys. Like I said, hopefully LTV, we hear back in the next.

couple weeks and next conversation is a little bit more of a celebration. Like yeah, man. Cool. Jake, do we know what's happening next week? I don't think we know what's happening next week. I don't think so, but I'm assuming it's going to end up being, I think it's going to be an Artemis conversation. We'll see you.

I feel like we put a moratorium on like, let's book more guests for a little bit until everything shakes out. Yeah, yeah. It's been a little. My guess is there are some of our writer friends that have stories coming out in the next week that we might want to talk to them about. That may happen. It feels, we feel right for a texting Eric Burger on a Wednesday.

Do you want to come talk to us tomorrow? This feels like we're in that territory. Expect the text, Eric. All right, y'all. We'll see you later. Bye. Awesome. See you.

Thank you. 4, 3, 2, 1, end of that.