Michael collins talked about the american presence in space from its earliest days to blue origin, a privately funded venture designed to make spaceflight more frequent and affordable. The hourlong conversation hosted by the Smithsonian National air and space museum is moderated by David Rubenstein, a billionaire philanthropist. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Im the director of the Smithsonians National air and space museum. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the john glenn lecture. We inaugurated the lecture in 2004. They quickly became one of our most popular annual event. Tonight is no exception. We will feature historic conversation between a legendary space pioneer and a visionary rocket entrepreneur. In addition to those lucky enough to have secured tickets, many more will be watching on a live webcast. Which also will be in our archives. If you want to review it sometime in the future, senator glenn cannot be with us tonight. But he sent his best regards. His accompaniments are great inspiration for all of us. Thank you to our speakers for being here. Mr. David rubenstein. Cofounder and coceo of the carlyle group. Regent of the smithsonian, he will be tonights moderator. Mr. Jeff bezos is founder of amazon and blue origins. Hes here to discuss what will take to unlock spaceflight base flight for everyone, everywhere. Coming home today, Major General michael collins. Who once held what some have called the best job in the world. Director of the smithsonian museum. Air and space welcome back. [applause] as the founding director, general collins was responsible for the design and construction of this building. Which opened as a bicentennial gift for American People on july 1, 1976. More than 327 million visitors have walked through this building since it opened. Which is why we are renovating it. [laughter] in confirming that the heat he built, like the ship he flew to the moon, is a priceless national treasure. In two weeks, we will celebrate four decades of unparalleled success and rededicate our main gallery. That gallery, were so many millions discovered the story of flight is one of the worlds great public spaces. We have boeing to thank for helping us reinvented for the decades ahead. Over many years, boeing has partnered with the smithsonian on countless important project. To sponsoring the john glenn lecture series. We would not be the museum we are today without their support. On behalf of the museum and our past, present, and future visitors, i would to think boeing for the steadfast support. We look forward to celebrating the Company Centennial anniversary along with our 40th anniversary along with our countries 240 anniversary on the first of july or we will have an all nighter. You are all invited. I disapproved that the first time, they came back and said you are not the target audience. [laughter] i will get it started and i hope you have a great time. It is now a great pleasure to introduce the chairman, president and chief executive officer of the boeing company, mr. Dennis mollenberg. [applause] good evening. It is a pleasure to be here with all of you. Jack, thank you for that kind introduction and the kind words about the boeing company. We are honored to support and partner with you and the national air and space museum. It is a really important mission. Thank you for your leadership and service for our country. Lets give jack a welldeserved hand. [applause] as general daily said, this is an exciting year for us. The 40 anniversary of the national air and space museum. Boeing will be celebrating its centennial. 100 years old on july 15. We will have the early celebration on july 1. One that has involved all aspects of air and space. We think about the First Century of aviation, people went from walking on the earth to walking on the moon. We went from riding horses to flying airplanes and spaceships. It has been an incredible journey and boeing has been honored to be a part of that. Tonight, it is my privilege to introduce the speakers and moderator that will lead tonights discussion of it i can type personally have a space enthusiast, how excited i am that this is the topic for tonight. First of all, i want to reckon as michael collins. It is a National Hero with us tonight. When i told my 15yearold son that i was going to meet him this evening, he said, no way [laughter] he has done a lot to inspire the country and i think we can all remember back to the apollo 11 mission, whether we thought real time or have seen it since, the inspiration decorated and the longterm impact to the country and world is well recognized. It is great to have michael here with us tonight. The command module pilot for the apollo 11 mission. Also, a great privilege for us to be with jeff bezos. One of the great entrepreneurs of our time. Great Business Leader in another space enthusiast and among other things, we have the privilege of working with jeff and his blue origins team on a future rocket engine and space opportunities. More broadly than that, jeff and his team are breaking barriers and low cost reliable access and fundamentally changing the equation of how we will get to space. That is exciting to see. Thank you for your leadership. Lastly, i would like to recognize David Rubenstein as well. He has been a great friend and Business Leader, community leader, philanthropist. Well known here. A great historian, great and of great fan of the Space Business and also a great supporter of the national air and space museum. David will be our moderator at this evening. I like to welcome all three of you gentlemen to the stage and we look forward to the discussion. [applause] my last duty here was to try to make this podium descend. Im an engineer by traits i by training, so i suspect this is the real reason i am here today. That is boeing technology. [applause] thank you very much. How many people here would like to go into space . How many people would like to go to the moon . You will hear a lot about that tonight. First, let me ask you each an individual question first. Michael collins, you were the first director of this museum. Getting it off the ground and the money, was doing that harder than getting to the moon . [laughter] i think it would have been if they were not for Barry Goldwater wanted badly to get this museum underway. What he told me was if you are ever here with a kin, please mention that. I would be delighted to mention im here with my daughter kate from chicago and from boston. I asked her, suppose she had been in Neil Armstrongs shoes, which he have said one small step for woman. She would have said, no, does this suit make me look fat . [laughter] maybe that is why she was not picked. Jeff, you build one of the greatest Technology Companies in the world. In twentysomething years youve taken a company from nothing to amazon. Was that harder to do than try to get a Space Company off the ground . Which is more of a challenge to you . Totally different challenges. One of the things i find, i think back on the last 20 years. 20 years ago, i was driving packages to the post office myself. In my 1987 chevy blazer, dreaming that one day might be able to afford a forklift. That is 1995. 21 years later, the internet is the gigantic thing, there are many successful companies. Entrepreneurial dynamism is incredible. With this new challenge im taking on, what i want to do is put the heavy lifting infrastructure into place so that the next generation can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion of ideas. And inventions in space, just like weve had with the internet. The reason you cant do that today is because there is too much heavy lifting involved. Getting to space is so expensive and so hard. When we started amazon, i did not have to build a Logistics Infrastructure system to deliver parcels. There was ups. It already existed. The u. S. Postal service already existed. I do not need to build a remote payment system. Similarly, there were computers around. All of those things would have been hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure. The longdistance phone network became the backbone of the internet. But it already existed. Dynamic,this entrepreneurial explosion because the heavy infrastructure was in place. For space, it is not like that. The price of admission is so high. That is the big difference. Im excited about lowering the cost. I want to dramatically lower that cost so that 20 years from now, a new generation of people with startup money, real entrepreneurs can do Amazing Things in space. Think how cool that would be . People have day jobs now who are trying to get to space. You have a day job. Why dont people have fulltime jobs getting into space . Why is it only people like you who have day jobs who are doing all these things . For one thing, it is expensive. You need a lucrative day job so you can afford your night job. [laughter] blue origin i think will be a profitable business one day. You want business to be itself sustaining so they can do Amazing Things. But it needs a lot of funding it needs a lot of funding for a long time. I am happy to do that. But i can only do it because i was lucky with amazon. This is something that is hard to believe, he landed on you and your team landed on the moon in july of 1969 and we will get into that in a moment, why do you think sony people in some people in the world still think it was fake and in a studio . Was there studio you actually filmed this in . I would love to get them all together into one room. The Wright Brothers flew in kitty hawk North Carolina and it was december in the evening before, the 16, every year they had the meeting of the man will never fly society, and one year i was the guest speaker. That was one of the finest speeches i ever made. I was forced to reveal that it did take place if you drive south out of kitty hawk. This gigantic sand dune. We filmed just on the other side of that. [laughter] if you look at the unretouched nasa photographs, you see a crushed pack of marlboros. And a dr pepper can over there. So that is roof. What was your question again . [laughter] in the heyday of the mercury and Apollo Program, everyones attention was captivated by it. Everybody wanted to be an astronaut. Why do you think the u. S. Government has receded in its mission to go to the moon . Where is the u. S. Government . Is it a case of been there, done that, and i dont want to do it anymore . For both of you. I think most things, especially in the world of economics are cyclical. We came to the crest of the wave in the latter days of the Apollo Program and that momentum was hard to keep going. I think we are in a time of hiatus. The focus should be on mars. I friend you armstrong was a far better engineer and i thought it was worthwhile to stop off and get a little more organized on the moon before heading on to mars. I disagree with that. I think we all to just go. I thought nasa should be renamed then National Aeronautics and mars association. Why do you think it is that the u. S. Government has receded . Is there some way to recapture the u. S. Government interest . You think back to the heyday of the 1960s and the Apollo Program, all that excitement, my gut instinct on this is that we as a civilization, we has humanity pulled them in landing way forward, out of sequence to where it actually should have been. It was a gigantic effort with what is in many ways, should have been impossible. They pulled it off with barely any competition on power. Slide rules. They cannot numerically model the computers. A lot of these important processes a combustion inside a rocket engine, so hard today, but we can do it a little bit. Did not have competition on fluid dynamics. Everything done in a wind tunnel. Nothing done on a computer. I think the reason we have taken a hiatus may be in part because we pulled that forward to a time when it should have been impossible. Once it was done,we had to wait to let Technology Catch up. The reason all these companies today, margins, Virgin Galactic, spacex, the only reason we can do this kind of endeavor is because we are standing on the shoulders of nasa who invented all of this technology. We are still using all the things they invented back in the 60s. We have refined versions, but even the computer codes that were used to validate our designs has been honed and finetuned by nasa over decades. I think we are finally, i believe, we are entering a new golden age of space and space exploration. The time has come for that to happen because we as a species have up level ourselves in terms of technology. We are ready to do it. It is amazing that we did it in 1969. Lets suppose the next president of the United States, whoever is elected, cause you up and says i want to jumpstart the graham, give me some advice, what should i do . Back to the moon, go to mars . Should i build a Space Shuttle again . What should i do . Michael, what would you say . I would probably be so nervous that i dropped the telephone. I never had the president of the United States asked me a question like that. As i said earlier, i happen to believe mars. One of the wonderful things about the Apollo Program was what john f. Kennedy said, he was president and wanted a man on the man on the moon by the end of the decade. Simple. You have questions about that . We all understood what we were supposed to do. We need something similar to that today. I dont know what that is. As i say, have every hope, i think mars is the focus. You need a lot of support from the president of the United States. You have to have the feeling that he is a man or woman that thinks about things, like the expiration of space, thinks it is a worthwhile investment for the government and puts it pretty high on the priority list. Regardless of you like, we have not had a personal involvement since john f. Kennedy. It was a wonderful help for us. There it is. You can write it on your thumbnail. Off you go. What would you do . I want to jumpstart Public Interest in space. I think big prizes would be an interesting thing to do. Just like darpa has on the darpa grand challenge is which kicked off self driving cars, nasa for many years has done detailed mars return mission. An automated, robotic vehicle that goes to mars, collects mars samples and then lift back off and goes to earth and bring some martian samples back. Very expensive mission. Very complex. One thing that the government could do is offer a very large prize to have our first brings back some mars samples. It would be very interesting and that kind of horse race would create lots of attention. People would compete for it. Who knows how it would end . If nobody brings the samples back, they cost taxpayers nothing. It is an effective way to get a lot of interest and teams competing and try to come up with creative ways to do that. I also would advise that nasa needs to go after gigantic Hard Technology goals. An example would be in and space qualified nuclear reactor. For deep space missions. Very difficult and challenging. Not something the president would undertake any time soon. Another thing gigantic we hard, would be hypersonic pointpoint travel. Nasa is not just about i think prizes and Hard Technology programs. Either of you believe in ufos . Roswell, new mexico . Do you think we have ever had . Ny ufos in our earth one of the horrible things is that word, ufo. Anyone who has flown the night sky, occasionally sees something. A flock so a flock of geese were think she is happy to be pointed correctly. Have i seen something, yes. Do i think it was inhabited by little green men from far away, no. Some lighting condition that caused it. But im not answering the question. On the backside of the moon, you did not see the men or women . It was nice. I could not hear mission control. [laughter] do you believe there is life elsewhere in the galaxy . Yes. But i dont think they have visited us and they are not abducting people. Its not a giant government conspiracy to hide it. I think when they come, if they ever do, they will make themselves quite visible. How did you first get involved in the Space Program . You are a graduate of west point and a fighter pilot. How did you get selected . You just explained it. I was eight years old and looked into the night sky and said the moon is for me. I used to make model airplanes. Neil armstrong made model airplanes. Thats how you got selected, making model airplanes . Mine would confuse me a little bit. My solution was to wind the rubber band a little bit more. Neil built a wind tunnel. Did you know that . Anyway, i got into it stepbystep. I went to west point. My father and my brother and uncle had all gone there. Fundamentally, i went there because of the free education. Then i had a choice of army or air force. My uncle was army chief of staff and i was like, nepotism. Snuck off to the air force. The choice was fly or dont fly. Fly. Big ones or little ones . Big ones are better. Fly the same ones over and over or the new ones . I wanted to fly the new ones. Next thing i knew, i was a test pilot and nasa was looking for test pilots. When you finally got selected, did you ask, how did i get there or how did they get there . Back up a bit. Before there was a Space Program, the bureaucrats or whatever, the scientists, they all got together and try to figure out who did they want to hire . What kind of people . Some of the proposals were bizarre. Mountain climbers who were not used to breathing. Or a scuba diver. It is dangerous so we ought to get bullfighters. All these crazy ideas were compiled and put together in a paper to president eisenhower and he said, ok, has a graduate of an accredited test pilot school. Today, nasa is looking for 12 people in a year or so, they have over 18,0