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Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park for a wide-ranging conversation about the mission to make humanity a multi-planetary species and what it actually takes to build the infrastructure for that future. Limp traces the arc from his childhood fascination with the Apollo program and backyard model rockets to leading one of the most ambitious aerospace companies in the world, describing his move from a 30-year career scaling consumer technology at Amazon as a deliberate choice to spend his final professional chapter on something truly missionary.

Limp breaks down the three pillars Blue Origin is pursuing to drive down the cost of reaching space by orders of magnitude: reusability, high-volume manufacturing, and radical vertical integration of the supply chain. He explains how building factories capable of producing hundreds of rockets per year requires a fundamentally different design philosophy, and why owning everything from material science to the foundry is not just an operational decision but a way to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

The conversation covers Blue Origin's vision of lunar permanence, the company's self-funded lunar lander program, and what Limp calls the "amazing gift" of the Moon as a launching pad to the rest of the solar system. He also walks through Project Sunrise, Blue Origin's orbital data center initiative, as an early and concrete example of the broader mission to move polluting heavy industry off Earth entirely. Limp is candid about the Launch Complex 36 anomaly, the emotional all-hands that followed, and how Jeff Bezos's words that day galvanized 1,000 workers running 24/7 to get back on a path to flight by the end of this year.

Throughout the conversation, Limp reflects on what drew him to a role whose biggest payoffs he may never personally see, the urgency of getting to the Moon before China and staying there, and the refreshing speed with which NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has pushed bureaucracy aside in favor of genuine public-private partnership.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:11 gradatim ferociter and the Anomaly
2:30 Jeff Bezos's Rallying Cry
4:11 Dave Limp's Origin Story
5:22 Building Infrastructure in Space
7:26 Reducing the Cost of Launch
11:01 New Glenn and Factory Scale
12:06 Protecting Earth by Leaving It
14:53 Project Sunrise: Orbital Data Centers
15:19 NASA and Public-Private Partnership
18:09 Lunar Permanence and Beating China
21:42 A Mission Bigger Than One Lifetime
24:02 Closing Thoughts

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