Ariel Ekblaw

I mean, NASA has this playbook with the International Space Station where they got SpaceX to begin doing commercial missions to ferry crew and cargo to the ISS.

It worked incredibly well.

People give SpaceX a lot of credit, but really it was that NASA model shifting and the government contracts that enabled SpaceX

SpaceX's amazing growth today.

They were able to build a cult of personality around SpaceX because they got people engaged in the iterative prototyping and the failure.

But yeah, NASA was never given the space to do that, and that is a tricky dilemma there.

And so that same playbook that worked with SpaceX for the International Space Station, NASA's doing for the moon called CLPS, Commercial Lunar Payload Services.

They're getting commercial companies to provide the transportation and the landing infrastructure for NASA to then be able to go out and do the science.

And I think that there's a tension between watching NASA cede some of these activities to private enterprise, but what it's allowing NASA to do is what NASA does best.

Let's free up NASA from the bit of an albatross of the International Space Station.

Let's let NASA go figure out if there's life on Europa.

That's something only NASA could do.

And I think eventually we have to free that up.

I think this is a really important question for NASA.

And part of what they have done is kind of hybrid themselves into this new domain for private enterprise by doing public-private partnership.

So VAST and Axiom, they're still working closely with NASA because NASA has these incredible standards for the safety of human spaceflight.

So I think what we're hoping to see in the space industry is that we don't just toss out everything that NASA learned.

We take the best of what NASA learned, and we take some of the maybe better agility that a commercial company would have, and we try to marry the two together.

It doesn't mean that there won't be the exact risks that you said, but it means that we're trying our best to get the best of both worlds into this next phase.

In that context.