Space Trucks: One Startup’s Plan to Get the U.S. Back on the Moon

0:04Big American trucks. On the moon, digging stuff up, hauling it to rockets, and sending it back to Earth, all in the dream of making the average Earth person affluent in a way few can imagine today, thanks to an endless supply of critical minerals and also the key ingredient for limitless energy from fusion. This week, we're talking about something that doesn't exist yet, but that our guest insists will exist someday, the lunar economy. Justin Cyrus is the founder and CEO of Lunar Outpost, a company that makes space trucks. It's one of three companies that have been selected by NASA to build a lunar terrain vehicle, or LTV, for its Artemis missions.

0:49Ultimately, NASA expects that it will select one company for the demonstration. Cyrus says he wants his company to be the mobility provider for the lunar economy. In other words, he wants to build big American trucks for the moon. Let's roll the tape. Can you name the truck with four wheel drive? Smells like a steak and seats 35. Can you narrow? Can you narrow? Oops, wrong clip. The value that the moon can bring as the naturally largest orbiting satellite of earth to the Earth economy right now is pretty massive, even if you start discounting the resources and the future of the resources in space.

1:38So right now, America's going back to the moon. The next time someone asks why the USA went to the moon just long enough to plant a flag and leave some footprints, you tell them America is going back. This time for good. The moon is Earth's naturally largest orbiting satellite. If you think of it just as a giant satellite in the sky, think about the Earth observation equipment you can put on there. Think about the weaponry that hopefully never gets put on the lunar surface, but it is the ultimate high ground in near Earth space. There is no better strategic or military positioning. From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Tim Higgins.

2:18And I'm Christopher Mims. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold name companies featured in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Today we ask, why are the U.S. and our biggest rivals all in a race to build permanent bases on the moon, and how will we do it?

2:41Welcome, Justin. Looking forward to talking about your moon truck and your moon robots and your first mission to the moon earlier this year. But let's first zoom out or maybe zoom in to Earth to paraphrase JFK in 1962. Why the moon? Again, I say that because the U.S., of course, was the first to set foot on the moon in 1969 with the Apollo mission and hasn't set foot again since 1972. I think a lot of people, it's sort of been there, done that, really just a big gray rock, a harsh place with not a lot to offer. So what is there to gain going back? Yeah, thanks for having me, Tim. I'm really excited to be here.

3:23There's a lot. There's a lot going on on the lunar surface. There's a lot going on in space that's going to contribute to what we are doing here on Earth and how we operate as humanity. So, of course, the science, the exploration, that kind of innate quality of being a human being, we want to push the boundaries to go where we've never been before. And that's all part of it again. You know, that hasn't gone away. But in terms of what we can do economically, that is a very important question that I don't think the broader public is aware of quite yet. When you start looking at the lunar surface, you have many of those resources readily available and accessible that have been deposited by asteroids over the course of billions of years.

4:09You have your platinum group metals. You have many other resources that have been implanted on different locations in the moon because of that asteroid bombardment. In addition, you have solar wind implanted volatiles. So you have these really rare isotopes that we don't get here on Earth because we have a magnetosphere and we are protected by our atmosphere. So you have these, think solar winds like volatiles, hydrogen, your heliums. And let me stop you there. I'm obviously a huge fan of going to the moon for helium three. I mean, cause we can use that for clean fusion. And Mims is always talking about helium three here behind the scenes of bold names.

4:49So we'll get to that. Yeah, we can use it for cooling quantum computers. I'm serious. The The future is helium-3 from the moon. But I got to ask you, setting these resources aside, because it is going to take a long time to build up to the point where we can economically extract those from the moon, as opposed to the deep ocean where we can get rare earth elements or existing gas wells where we can extract helium-3. In the near term, it is government contracts, right? And NASA has this Artemis program. to go back to the moon. Could you talk about that? What are the near-term government efforts that are going to bridge the construction of building this lunar economy, getting us from where we are zero to the point where it's like, this is self-sustaining economically?

5:42Yeah, and fair enough, Mims. It is going to take a little bit of time to set up the infrastructure to access these resources at scale. One thing I like to point out is it's actually easier to go to the moon than it is to mine the deep ocean. If you start thinking about the bureaucratic and environmental challenges that basically drag mining the deep ocean is going to present and the damage that can be done with that type of resource extraction, it's a lot easier to go to a lifeless body such as the moon or asteroids and actually extract resources from there. But to your point, we don't have the infrastructure right now to actually go and extract the resources from the lunar surface.

6:22So it is a lot of government contracts and it is complementary customers that are either doing technological demonstrations, science and exploration missions, or using it as branding and marketing campaigns. So to talk a little bit about our first missions, and then I'll get into what we're doing with the Artemis campaign and what we're doing with NASA more broadly. Our first mission just went to the moon a couple months ago. So we actually landed at the Winter South Pole. Now, it wasn't a perfect landing from our landing provider. It was an off-nominal landing. That was the Intuitive Machines landing?

6:56The Intuitive Machines landing, exactly. And for those who don't know, it landed, it had all these great payloads on board, including yours, and it tipped over. And this was, I think, the second time it happened. They have a real tip-over problem, and there's nobody there to just, like, push it back. Exactly. Like, if something happens, you are on your own. You have to figure out how to operate in that extreme environment all by yourself. I am confident they'll nail the next one, learn from the first two missions. But with that being said, we were trapped under the lander, so we couldn't deploy our rover.

7:31But as a part of that mission to talk on the commercialization, because this was a fully commercial rover, we had payloads from MIT. We had a resource camera that was actually going to help us map the lunar south pole. We had a tiny little astrayant, so like a 20 gram robot that was going to R2D2 its way around our rover and basically give us feedback and analytics on how our rover was performing. We had brand partners back here on Earth. Were there any brand stickers on your rover? No brand stickers on our rover, but we did have a lot of payloads on board. So one of my favorites, Mims, is we have our own Lego set.

8:10So we are the first space company in history to have a Lego set. The inner five-year-old of me is extraordinarily ecstatic about this. But that Lego set, it's a Lego Technic set, has a miniature of a rover that actually flew to the lunar surface. So, of course, that is commercialization at a smaller scale. But in terms of the awareness and getting people familiar with what's going on as part of the Artemis programs, that is massively invaluable. Yes. But to get to the bigger picture, though, ultimately, we're building a base on the moon. Like we're going back to the moon, human habitation, permanent human habitation, not just, you know, what do they call it?

8:50Boots and flags or whatever. You show up and you go. Flags and footprints. Exactly. Flags and footprints. So we are going to have a base on the moon. This is NASA's stated goal. And if we don't do it, then the like upside down version of the Artemis coalition, which is like Russia, China, Venezuela, and a bunch of other fun loving countries. They're going to do it too because they've said they're on their way to doing it as well. And that's it, Mims. And the reason that's important is think about it this way, if nothing else, even if you don't believe anything with the resources on the moon, even if you don't think that's going to happen for two or three decades, the moon is Earth's naturally largest orbiting satellite.

9:30If you think of it just as a giant satellite in the sky, think about the Earth observation equipment you can put on there. Think about the weaponry that hopefully never gets put on the lunar surface, but it is the ultimate high ground in near Earth space. There is no better strategic or military positioning if you look at it in the worst case scenario. So that's what we don't want to happen. Now, if you look at it from the other side, the value that the moon can bring as the naturally largest orbiting satellite of Earth to the Earth economy right now is pretty massive, even if you start discounting the resources and the future of the resources in space.

10:09So right now, America is going back to the moon. There is nation state competition, and it is critical for our national defense for us to have a continuous presence in cislunar space and to keep pushing. It's important for us for that long term goal of resources to get our footprint there now. We reached out to Intuitive Machines and NASA. They did not respond to a request for comment. Coming up after the break, the mantra, failure is not an option, doesn't apply to the age of private space missions. That's because every mission is so much cheaper than a typical NASA one that companies can afford to fail.

10:50Though that doesn't mean it's not tough to accept. You know, if you guys see the live stream, it's just kind of like a shock moment when I think the Intuitive Machines folks saw the lander go on its side. You know, for us, it was a bit of a heart drop because you spend a couple of years on this first mission. And it was a bit heartbreaking. But at the same time, it was exciting because we made a rover that got all the way to the moon. Stay with us.

11:32Okay, so we know that the universal picture here. Let's talk about where your company fits into this economy. Who are you guys? And what sort of opportunities are you seeing right now? Yeah, our company, Lunar Outpost, we are the leader in mobility and robotics for extreme environments. So we focus in space. We have seven missions going to space, five of them lunar surface, two of them in cislunar space, a mix of customers from NASA, the Department of Defense, European Space Agency, Australian Space Agency, Luxembourg Space Agency, and many others. Now, where we're at at the moment, we're about 150 people.

12:13Our headquarters is in Golden, Colorado, right outside Denver. Close to Coors, I hope. Close to Coors, yep, exactly. You're fueled by Coors beer, I hope. You don't need rocket fuel. We do not work with them yet. So I won't say the tagline of fuel by Coorsair, but we'd love to work with them. I'm pretty sure NASA would say no drinking and driving on the moon, though. But how do you get to the moon? I mean, you're not working on rockets. I mean, who's getting up there? So I think a big shift in the space industry is you don't have to work on rockets anymore to be relevant. It's very similar to the Internet in the 90s.

12:49when you had the network and the infrastructure in place, thousands of companies sprung up around that baseline transportation, our baseline communication infrastructure. The fiber optic companies, the Cisco's of the world. Exactly. Exactly. And now we have those, right? And that's SpaceX and Blue Origin and the rest? 100%. And there's a dozen launch companies that are pretty good, right? SpaceX obviously is dominant. Blue Origin's coming up. They're figuring things out. You have Firefly that's launching and then you have Rocket Lab. So you have a lot of good companies out there that are working on that infrastructure layer.

13:26So now us as a company, we have to ask what's next? How do we make this a viable, long term growing, sustainable, sustainable economy? And that's where our company comes into play. For anything you want to do in space, you have to have robotic systems. For anything you want to do in space, you have to have advanced spacecraft. Realistically, putting humans up in space is a very expensive and arduous process right now. We're hoping to make that easier over time. But that means all of the power, all of the communications, the launch and landing pads, the habitats, all of that is going to be built and maintained by robotic systems.

14:05And that's what we do at Lunar Outpost. So that's what we're doing now. And when you look at our first seven missions that are going, including the one a couple months ago, these are scouting missions. These are exploration missions. And then they start transforming into infrastructure missions. So we are setting up on our first mission. We actually flew Nokia, the 4G LTE, their 3GPP technology. Yeah, they were going to make the first cell phone call on the moon. But once again, this rover tipped over and they couldn't do it. The lander tipped over. That's right. Not the rover. Your rover was fine.

14:40It was trapped inside, though. Maybe paint us a picture a little bit. so the lander gets there and it kind of falls over so what yeah so our rover is like in a garage um so it's a thermal garage keeps us nice and toasty along the way and it is kind of ready to be deployed so we did full check out since this lunar space uh and two of the machines did a great job of getting our uh packets back if you will we got to test our advanced compute our radiation hardening a lot of our important subsystems and so we knew everything's ready to go and so we're like stuck in that garage essentially right yeah so when we were cycling uh around lunar orbit uh we're getting excited you know everyone's everyone's getting ready to go um we see the thermal cycles as we get closer and closer to the moon uh and then you know if you guys see the live stream uh it's just kind of like a shock moment when i think the intuitive machines folks saw the lander go on its side you know for us it was it was a bit of a heart drop because you spend a couple years on this first mission and it's it was it was a bit heartbreaking but at the same time it was it was exciting because we made a rover that got all the way to the moon survived an off nominal landing and got to test all these critical components so we got stuck um in our garage the lander because it's landed on its side is actually on top of our garage so we were like a little kickstand more or less for the lander that allowed them to communicate back to earth still.

16:10So we served our purpose. We helped them get packets back to Earth. But unfortunately, because the lander was on top of us, our garage couldn't deploy and we couldn't actually get out of the garage. Now, I got to ask about this failure in the context of NASA's new strategy, because your background, for those who don't know, you were at Lockheed Martin, right? You have family members working on this company with you. Your dad was a vice president at Lockheed Martin, you've talked about growing up close to a space center when you were a kid. And NASA has shifted in a way that makes your company possible, right?

16:49They're contracting private companies. Of course, the challenge then is that unlike when it's all under one big roof, everybody gets to move fast, but maybe those learnings don't get carried over mission to mission. It does feel like on this particular, out of the last, I think, four landings from the U.S. on the moon, three of them failed. One was a huge success. It does feel like, well, what do you expect? Like, this is a bunch of startups. No shade on you again. But, I mean, would this have been better if NASA had been responsible for this and a bunch of engineers who knew what they were doing, who'd been on five previous missions, could land this thing?

17:26You know, I'll push back a little bit and say you can land 10 Clips landers for the price of one NASA lander. So even if you get one of them down, which if you saw Fireflies landing a month or two ago, Austin, Texas company, beautiful, absolutely beautiful. We got great images. We got great video down. That one landing would have cost at least 10 times the amount if NASA had run this by themselves instead of partnering commercial industry. So just in terms of the investment, like the capital deployed versus scientific return, the CLPS program has already given a return on investment higher than historically run NASA mission.

18:05Now, if you look at the future and if you look at the groundwork that's being laid now by startups and commercial companies like ours, it's going to have a few failures and that's inevitable. But at the same time, if you are able to continue making progress, if you learn from your mistakes, if you iterate on it and keep the capital flowing, right, if you have real revenue as a space company moving forward and keep that growth profile, we have seen a lot of companies be extremely successful. So, of course, you have the new age of companies. I think Voyager just went public via SPAC a couple of weeks ago that are doing well on the open markets.

18:48But then hearkening back to the most successful yet, which is still in the private markets, SpaceX, those types of failures are OK as long as you learn from them. Now, you can't repeat the same mistake two, three, four times and expect NASA to keep funding you or the DoD to keep funding you. There's a lot of competition out there. There's a very high bar and expectations because of all the amazing things we've accomplished in space so far. So there is pressure on these commercial companies to succeed, not only from a market standpoint, if you're trading publicly, from an investor standpoint, if you're trading privately, but also from our largest customers.

19:29One of the big contracts you're working on is for NASA. It's a space truck. And I'd love to hear more about that. Because when I think of a lunar rover, I think of one from the 1970s, like a low profile golf cart with really big wheels. What does yours look like and what's it going to be doing on the moon? And how much was the Cybertruck an inspiration? I like the Cybertruck. I know it's very polarizing. Some people hate it. Some people like it. The profile reminds me of the F-117A from Lockheed back in the day when like the computers just couldn't make the well modeled cell technology. So they did these big flat angles.

20:10So that probably biased me a little bit. But the LTV, the lunar terrain vehicle, this is a pretty critical program from NASA. Our Eagle lunar terrain vehicle is going to serve as the backbone. The Eagle. The Eagle. Yeah, we had to. It's better than the pony or the Mustang, maybe, the Eagle. It's pretty American. And I got a golden Eagle here on my vest. I don't know. That call out from Apollo, the Eagle has landed, still is the golden age of American spaceflight so far. That's the inspiration. So for a deer head, just lay it on us. What are the specs on this thing? Zero to 60, how much can it tow?

20:52How many cup holders? How many cup holders? No cup holders, but this is a heavy duty truck. This can tow thousands of kilograms. This can carry two fully pressurized suited astronauts, over 800 kilograms of payload in the bed. It can tow thousands of kilograms. Now it has a fully autonomous and robotic arm on the back. So when astronauts aren't there, it can be used to build and maintain the infrastructure space. So as I was talking about a little bit earlier, the power communications, the habitats, all of that is going to be set up robotically and autonomously with this heavy duty space truck.

21:31So EGLE is not only meant as the new age of transportation for astronauts. It's not only meant to enhance the science and exploration we're getting from the Artemis campaign. This is the vehicle that makes a sustainable presence in space possible. so these the eagle ltv is going to set up the first outpost on the moon and the eagle ltv a variation of it is eventually going to help set up cities on mars how long is this thing going to last because because that's a big issue with equipment 10 years 10 years which is hard whenever i hear how harsh the environment on the moon is i think to myself this is hell no one should ever go there no one should ever try to build there you're better off trying to build at the bottom of the marianna's trench because you have you have a dust that sticks to everything that is ultra sharp that will shred anything that will destroy any gearbox and it's ubiquitous and you can't escape it or brush it off and oh by the way the temperature range is like what minus 200 c to plus 200 c day to night something like that you're partnered with gm right why don't you take a hummer up there Yeah.

22:39We're partnered with General Motors, Goodyear, Leidos and NBA space. General Motors and Goodyear actually helped with that original Apollo moon buggy. Not many people know that, but they have spaceflight heritage with that Apollo LRV. But as you were saying, this is a brutal environment. It's an absolutely brutal environment for humans or robotic systems. This contract wouldn't have been possible a decade ago, just in terms of the advancements we've made in robotics, artificial intelligence, material science. So there are very high standards from NASA on this. They call it like a class A mission.

23:13If astronauts are going to drive around this in this vehicle, it has to be absolutely bulletproof. So the validation and verification campaign, the testing that we're doing is extraordinarily extensive. Okay, you've also mentioned using GM battery technology. So this thing's going to be like on the same Ultium platform that's in the electric Hummer? We leverage a lot of the heritage from the Ultium platform. We do have different cells. And so I'll leave it to GM how they want to talk about the cell technology. But a lot of that learning and the research and development that has gone into that, a lot of the control electronics, all of that is being reutilized and then qualified for space.

23:54And going back the other way, the lessons learned that we're going in this like extreme testing campaign, as you said, negative 200 degrees Celsius to plus 200 degrees Celsius. That is being brought back to the General Motors vehicles we have here on Earth. So it's a pretty cool mutual benefit because it is such an extreme environment, because it necessitates technological advancement. Those learnings are being brought back to Earth. For now, companies like Lunar Outpost rely on government agencies to fund what they're doing, which seems precarious. But what larger things are at stake in the new space race?

24:36Nation-state competition is critical for space. It always has been, and for good reason. You know, when we start looking at the moon, when we start looking at the asteroid belt, there are those near-infinite amount of resources available in space, which if we can access that, that is a fundamental step change for humanity. Whoever controls those resources will control the future of where we go as a species. More on that when we come back.

25:18I listen to you say all that stuff, and it makes me think, gosh, this is going to be expensive, right? How much money? What's the sticker price on one of these eagles? Or maybe another way of asking is how much money do you need to make this happen? I mean, not just become profitable, but to fund what your ambitions are. If you're looking at the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services Program, it's an IDIQ contract with NASA. All three vendors are publicly posted pricing. So you have one vendor and at 1.69 total, like this is an absolute maximum the contract can hit. we're at 1.72 and other vendors at 1.9.

25:581.72 billion dollars. 1.72 billion dollars. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so it's just a spread in terms of who NASA is going to down select on. NASA is only going to pick one of these vendors to provide services long term. Now, just to be clear, that's not the price for one truck. So that's the price for us to provide services for a decade on the lunar surface. It could be multiple vehicles, and it could be many different mission profiles. Realistically, the pricing is going to be lower than that. But just because we are in a competitive phase, I'm not going to say exactly how much lower than that quite yet.

26:41Well, I ask because, you know, obviously a lot of nostalgia is seeped into the DNA of this new space race. The Artemis program, the sister of Apollo, So in mythology, Artemis hasn't gotten the greatest start, right? It's super behind schedule, right? And now there's concerns about NASA's budget being dramatically cut by the Trump administration. Where does that put things in this race to the moon? What's pretty cool about where we're at, and just to look at, I would say the opportunity. we as a space industry for the first time have reached a critical mass that we're moving forward regardless of where the government funding is.

27:30Now, that being said, the cislunar market and the cislunar economy absolutely needs government funding to help us get to that tipping point. But the broader space industry is making rapid progress. That being said, we are huge proponents of what NASA is doing, not only in the human spaceflight and exploration portion of this, but also the science and exploration piece. So we are looking forward to seeing how the budgets shake out. Obviously, that influences our strategy. But I will say there's a lot of great people in the NASA community, and there's a lot of strong support amongst the public for NASA.