Bill Whittle

And when you realize the value of what is off of the surface of the Earth, the value in terms of minerals, the value in terms of just all kinds of rare things, you can go to space for profit.

And if we're not going to space for profit, we're not staying in space.

And that's the reason I'm highly confident about this second space race

is that we understand that this is a, it has to pay its own way.

And if it does, it'll stay.

There's a bunch of important things there.

So let me just deal with them one by one.

And let me first talk about the capriciousness of depending on government funding.

We lost 14 astronauts killed on two different space shuttle missions.

And on both of those cases, the shuttle didn't fail.

The space shuttle was originally supposed to be carried aloft on the back of an airplane, should have been able to land

At any large airport, you could have landed the space shuttle LAX or DFW.

And over the course of the development of the space shuttle program, Congress kept cutting the budget for the space shuttle.

So they had to go to the external tank and they had to go to the solid rocket boosters because they kept cutting the money.

These were engineering shortcuts.

Well, it was a burn through in the O-rings on the solid rocket boosters that were a financial bandaid that destroyed Challenger.

And it was foam coming off the external tank, which was also an external bandaid that destroyed Columbia.

So it's not only difficult to plan, it's deadly if you don't

have confidence that the future is going to be as funded as well as the present.

I personally think that the most important tweet certainly of the last year and maybe of the decade or even you could argue conceivably in human history was when Elon Musk very quietly announced that SpaceX was going for a moon base instead of a Mars colony.