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The John Batchelor Show

Preview: Bob Zimmerman reports Blue Origin secured the Viper moon lander contract. The company's pace is "incredibly slow," having only one New Glenn launch since January. They must prove they can succeed, as only Firefly has successfully deployed a lunar

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Books, Arts, News, Society & Culture

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2025

⏱️ 2 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Preview: Bob Zimmerman reports Blue Origin secured the Viper moon lander contract. The company's pace is "incredibly slow," having only one New Glenn launch since January. They must prove they can succeed, as only Fireflyhas successfully deployed a lunar lander.
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Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:02.0

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0:04.0

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0:18.0

Visit sumup.co.uk to learn more.

0:20.0

This is John Batchel. Convers conversation with my colleague Bob Zimmerman, behind the black,

0:25.6

about a contract going to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's founded rocket company,

0:31.6

for Viper, an abandoned moon lander and mover that NASA could no longer afford despite the fact that I think it's all built.

0:44.0

Blue Origin is now taken over the contract. That's good. The question is when? When Blue Origin? When launch? When moon? When lander, when rover, when, is Bob to comment?

0:58.9

More of this incoming months and more of Bob this week.

1:05.2

Yeah, I mean, we have multiple companies building unmanned lunar landers.

1:10.1

Firefly is the only one so far that's

1:11.8

been successful, both intuitive machines and astrobotics have failed.

1:17.4

So Blue Origin trying this, they have to prove they can do it, and you're right, their pace

1:22.0

of operations is incredibly slow.

1:24.1

They get these kind of contracts, but they've yet to actually do anything. They've gotten

1:28.1

one launch of their New Glenn rocket, orbital rocket, but just one, and that was in January,

1:33.1

and we're now in September, and they still haven't launched again. They're supposed to launch

1:36.5

very soon, we should hope.

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