Jared Isaacman

I did not use the press conference to bash Boeing about building a bad spacecraft or how we let these qualify.

Look, this is hard.

The Russians are still flying essentially the same spacecraft for more than a half century.

Not a lot of countries have built a vehicle that can take humans to and from space.

successfully.

It is hard.

We played a role in why that spacecraft was built the way it was, but worse in my mind, and that's where I chose to concentrate my energy on, is that we did not own our shortcomings.

We didn't declare a mishap a mishap and we should have done it, and we didn't have accountability when those bad decisions were made, and we didn't have the right leadership that should have stepped in at the time when it was clear that we were going off course to correct that course trajectory.

And that's what we called attention to.

So really, it's imperative that that story was told before we step into sending our astronauts around the moon, before we start landing astronauts on the moon and building a moon base.

No, look, I think the American public, the space-loving public from around the world should understand that we cannot undertake missions like this without accepting some risk, and there will be bad days.

And that's unfortunate, but it's applicable to our people that undertake dangerous jobs every single day, flying off aircraft carriers, diving under the sea, working in nuclear power plants.

These things are not without risk, and certainly,

accelerating human beings on a controlled explosion into space where there's no atmosphere, no breathable air, and everything coming from the sun and the debris around you is trying to kill you.

Yes, it's a dangerous environment.

There are scenarios like the past,

you know, catastrophic events where people say at times that made NASA too risk averse and maybe so in some cases.

And then there are situations like I saw with Starliner was, what are we doing here?

You are continuing to take risks that you don't understand.

And by failing to communicate it and acknowledging where we got things wrong, you were inviting it to happen again.