 Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Las Vegas back at events, ReMars, Amazon ReMars. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. Mars stands for Machine Learning Automation Robotics and Space, it's a great event, it brings together a lot of the industrial space, machine learning and all the new changes in scaling up from going on the moon to doing great machine learning. And we've got two great guests here who's going to call Lunar Outpost, Justin Sierra's CEO, or in Mayan, he's the co-founder and chief strategy officer. Lunar Outpost, they're right next to us, we've been watching their booth, love the name, gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, thanks for having us, John. All right, so Lunar Outpost, I get the clues here, tell us what you guys do, start with that. Absolutely, so Lunar Outpost, we're a company based out of Colorado that has two missions headed to the moon over the course of the next 24 months. We're currently operating on Mars, which, for us, will tell you a little bit more about here in a second, and we're really pushing out towards expanding the infrastructure on the lunar surface, and then we're going to utilize that to provide sustainable access to other planetary bodies. All right, Farz, tea it up for you, go. How cool is this? We want to use every minute. What's the lunar surface look like? What's the infrastructure? Roads, you're going to pave it down? What's going on? Where we're going, no one has ever been, so our first mission is going to Shackleton Connecting Ridge on the south pole of the moon, and that's ripe to add infrastructure, such as landing pads and other things, but our first rover will be primarily driving across the surface, exploring what the material looks like, prospecting for resources, and testing new technologies. And you have a lot of technology involved. You're getting data in, you're just doing surveillance. What's the tech involved there? Yeah, so the primary technology that we're demonstrating is a 4G network for Nokia. We're providing them mobility services, which is basically like the old Verizon commercial. Can you hear me now? Where the rover drives farther and farther away from the lander to test their signal strength. And then we're going to have some other payloads, ride-sharing along with us for the ride. Reminds me of the old days of Wi-Fi. We used to call it War Drive, and you'd go around and try to find someone's Wi-Fi hotspot inside the thing. But no, this is kind of cool. It brings up the whole thing. Now, on Lunar Outpost, how big is the company? What's to some of the stats? Give us some of the stats. Absolutely, so Lunar Outpost, 58 people. Growing quite quickly on track to double, so any of you watching, you want a job, please apply. But with Lunar Outpost, very similar to how launch companies provide people access to different parts of space, Lunar Outpost provides people access to different spots on planetary bodies, whether it's the moon, Mars, or beyond. So that's really where we're starting. So it's kind of like a managed service for all kinds of space utilities. If you kind of think about it, you're going to provide services. Absolutely, yeah, it's definitely starting there. And we're pushing towards building that infrastructure and that longterm vision of utilizing space resources. But I can talk about that a little bit more here in a sec. Let's get into that. Let's talk about Mars first. You guys said, what's going on with Mars? Absolutely. Yeah, so right now, Lunar Outpost is part of the science team for MOXIE, which is an instrument on the Perseverance rover. MOXIE is the first demonstration of space resource utilization on another planet. And what space resource utilization is basically taking resources on another planet, turning them into something useful. What MOXIE does is it takes the CO2 from the atmosphere of Mars. An atmosphere of Mars is mostly CO2 and it uses a process called solid oxide electrolysis to basically strip oxygen off of that CO2 to produce O2 and carbon monoxide. So it's what you need to self-sustain on the surface. Exactly, it's not just sustaining the astronauts, but also for producing oxygen for propellant. So it'll actually produce, it's a technology that'll produce a propellant for return rockets to come back from Mars. So this is the real wild card in all this exploration is, how fast can the discoveries invent the new science to provide the life and the habitat on the surface? And that seems to be the real focus in the conversations I heard on the keynotes as well. Get the infrastructure up so you can kind of land and we'll pull back and forth. Where are we on progress? You get to the peg from one, zero to 10, 10 being we're going, my grandmother's going, everyone's going, to zero, nothing's moving. We're making pretty rapid progress. Three, six, I'll put it at an eight, John. I'll put it at an eight, this is why. The mission force was just talking about that's launching within the next 12 months. This is no longer 10 years out, this is no longer 20 years away, 12 months, and then we have mission two shortly after. And that's just the beginning. We have over a dozen landers that are headed to the lunar surface this decade alone and heavy lift landers and launchers start going to the moon and coming back by 2025. So, and you guys are from Colorado, you mentioned before we came on camera, right at the swap offices. So you got some space in Colorado and the rovers to move around. You get weird looks when people drive by and see the space gear. Oh yeah, definitely. So we have, you know, we have our facility in Golden and our Vata Colorado and we'll take the vehicles out for strolls and you'll see construction workers building stuff and looking over and saying, what's that? Good place to work too. So you're hiring us, great, you're doubling. On the business model side, I can see the lot of demand. It's cheaper to launch stuff now in space. Is there becoming any rules of engagement relative to space? I don't want to say verified, but like, you know, you have to somehow get to the point where, I mean, I could launch a satellite. I could launch something for a couple hundred grand. That might interfere with something legitimate. Do you see that on the radar? Cause you guys are having ease of use from smaller, faster, cheaper to get out there. Now you got to refine the infrastructure, get the services going. Is there threats from just random launches? It's a really interesting question. I mean, current state of the art, people who have put rovers on other planetary bodies, you're talking like three billion dollars for the Mars Perseverance rover. So historically, there hasn't been that threat. But when you start talking about lowering the cost and access to some of these different locations, I do think we'll get to the point where there might be folks that interfere with large scale operations. And that's something that's not very well defined in international law and something you won't really probably get any of the major space barriers to agree to. So it's going to be up to commercial companies to operate responsibly so we can make that space sustainable. And if there is a bad actor, I think they'll weed themselves out every time. It's going to be self-govern, I think, in the short term, good point. What about the technology? Where are we in that technology? What are some of the big challenges that we're overcoming now? And what's that next 20-mile stair in terms of the next milestone, the tech perspective? Yeah, so the big technology, technological hurdle that has been identified by many is the ability to survive the lunar night. It gets exceptionally cold when the sun sets on the moon and that happens every 14 days for 14 days. So these long, cold lunar nights can destroy circuit boards and batteries in different components, so lunar outpost is invested in developing thermal technologies to overcome this, both in our offices in the United States, but we also have opened a new office in Luxembourg in Europe that's focusing specifically on thermal technologies to survive the lunar night, not just for rovers, but all sorts of space assets. Yeah, huge. That's a hardware. Five nines, kind of like, meantime between failure conversation, right? And it gets fun, right? Because you talk five nines and it's such like ingrained part of the aerospace community, but what we're pitching is that we can send a dozen rovers for the cost of one of these historical rovers. So even if 25% of them fail, you still have eight rovers for the cost of one of the older rovers and that's just the economies of scale. I saw James Hamilton here walking around. He's one of the legendary Amazonians who built out the data center. He might come by the Cube. That sounds like what they did with servers. Hey, if one breaks, throw it away. Why buy the big mainframe? Yeah, that's the new model. All right, so now about space. Space as in not space space, but like room to move around. When you start getting some of these habitats going, how does space affect into the size of the location? Because you got to live there, solve some of the thermal problems. How do I live on space? I got to have, you know, how many people are going to be there? What's your forecast you think from a mission standpoint where there'll be dozens of people or is it still going to be small teams? Yeah. What's that look like? I mean, you can guess it's okay. I mean, my vision is thousands of people living and working in space because it's going to be, especially the moon I think is a destination that's going to grow for tourism. There's an insane drive from people to go visit a new destination and the moon has one of the most unique experiences you could imagine. In the near term for Artemis, we're going to start by supporting the Artemis astronauts, which are going to be small crews of astronauts, you know, two to six in the near term. And to answer your question, you know, in a different way, the habitat that we're actually going to build, it's going to take dozens of these robotic systems to build and maintain over time. And when we're actually talking timelines, forest talks, thousands of people living and working in space, I think that's going to happen within the next 10 to 15 years. The first few folks are going to be on the moon by 2025 and we're pushing towards having dozens of people living and working in space and by 2030. Yeah, I think it's an awesome goal and I think it's doable. Question I'll have for you is, the role of software in all of this, I had a conversation with Space Nerd and we were talking and I said open source is everywhere now in the software. How do you repair in space is, you know, you don't want to have a firmware be down. So I send that back to the United States, the US, wait a minute, it's the planet. I got to go back to Earth to get a part. So how does break fix work in space? How do you guys see that problem? So this was actually quite fun. I mean, currently we don't have astronauts that can pick up a rover, change a tire. So you have to make robots that are really reliable, right? That can continuously operate for years at a time. But when you're talking about long-term repairs, there's some really cool ideas and concepts about standardization of some of these parts. You know, just like lug nuts on your car, right? If everyone has the same lug nuts on their wheel, great, now I can go change it out. I can switch off different parts that are available on the lunar surface. So I think we're moving towards that in the long term. You guys got a great company, I love the mission. Final question for you both of you is, I noticed that there's a huge community developing around Mars, living on Mars, living on the moon. I mean, there's not a chat group, the clubhouse app used to be around, it's kind of dying, but now it's moving to Twitter spaces, Reddit, you name it. There's a fanatical fan base that loves to talk about an engineer and kind of a collective intelligence. It may not be official engineering, but they just love to talk about it. So there's a huge fan base for space. How does someone get involved if they really want to dive in and then how do you nurture that audience? How does that, is it developing? What's your take on this whole movement? It's beyond just being interested. It's become, I won't say cult-like, but it's been very, a lot of people and young people interested in space. Yeah. Yeah, there's a whole lots of places to get involved. There's societies like the Mars Society, there's technical committees. There's even potentially learning about these, taking a space resources master program and getting into the field and joining the company. So we really thrive on that energy from the community and it really helps press us forward. And we hope to have a way to take everyone with us on the mission. And so stay tuned, follow our website, we'll be announcing some of that stuff soon. Awesome. And just one last quick pitch for you, John. I'll leave you with one thought. There are two things that space has an infinite amount of. The first is power and the second is resources. And if we can find a way to access either of those, we can fundamentally change the way humanity operates. So when you're talking about living on Mars long-term, we're going to need to access the resource from Mars. And then long-term, once we get the transportation infrastructure in place, we can start bringing those resources back here to Earth. So of course, there are going to be those people that sign up for that first mission out to Mars with SpaceX, but we'd love for folks to join on with us at Lunar Outpost and be a part of that kind of next leap, accessing those resources. I love the mission. As I always said once on theCUBE, everything in Star Trek will be invented someday. We're almost there except for the transporter room. We don't have that done yet. Almost, it's going to be there. All right, well, thanks for coming. I really appreciate Justin for sharing great story. Final minute, give a plug for the company. What are you guys looking for? You said hiring, any other things else you'd like to share? Put a plug in for Lunar Outpost. Absolutely, so we're hiring across the board. Aerospace engineering, robotics engineering, sales marketing doesn't really matter. We're doubling as a company, currently around 58 people as we said. And we're looking for the top people that want to make an impact in aerospace. This is truly a unique moment. First time we've ever had continuous reliable operations. First time NASA is pushing really hard on the public-private partnerships for commercial companies like ours to go out and create the sustainable presence on the moon. So, whether you want to work with us or partner with us, we'd be excited to talk to you. And yeah, please contact us at info.lunaroutpost.com. We'll certainly follow up. Thanks for coming. I love the mission. We're behind you. And everyone else is too. You can see the energy. It's going to happen. It's theCUBE coverage from RIMARS. New actions happening in space, on the ground, on the moon, you name it's happening right here in Vegas. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.