Jeff Thornburg

We always want to think about everything.

As my wife often tells me, I'm in my head too much.

That's very much an American.

But you know what?

And commercially, yes.

Because you deem that elegance to hit a price point that's going to make you both commercially viable and viable for the defense industry as well.

Well, and China's completely aligned in their military-industrial complex.

I mean, there's only one chain of command, one person that makes those decisions.

Exactly.

The interesting thing about all of that is that when I testified before Congress in 2015, it was about, why are we sending all this money to Russia and buying their engines when we've got engineers we need to train in the United States and we have commercial companies that can do the job?

And that was my argument.

And I said, hey, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy,

Starship, Raptor are coming.

It's going to be a thing.

Fortunately, I was right on all of that.

What I would say today to different committees before Congress is our adversaries are coming for us and we are cutting R&D spending.

We're cutting engineering.

We're cutting science.

We're cutting all of the things we need to be competitive.

Yeah, and China's made no bones about they want to be the preeminent superpower in the world.