This is John Batchelor. Conversation with my colleague Bob Zimmerman behind the black about the landings on the moon that we're hearing about, private, commercial enterprise landings. Intuitive machines, firefly, ice space. Why? Bob answers a question here. There's money in it. The moon is being monetized right now.

The first commercial landing successful just happened.

There'll be more.

And people want to put packages on the surface of the moon.

In other words, we're taking the robots and starting our colony.

Here's Bob Zimmerman to explain that money.

More of this tonight.

Oh, yes, yes.

These companies, NASA puts payloads on them.

Sometimes it buys the whole payload like it did with Blue Ghost.

Oh, sorry, yeah, with Blue Ghost.

But other times it buys some, put some instruments on, buy some space, but the company

is free to sell their raining space to others, and they are definitely getting business.

There's no question about.

Like Ice Space, the Japanese company, it has not yet launched any NASA payloads.

It's been doing engineering test flights, but it has payloads on board customers and they have

gotten contracts with NASA and so do these other companies they get NASA contracts

but they are open to get other contracts and there is a demand a low cost

demand to get payloads to the lunar surface that's going from other places

besides NASA