Jeff Thornburg

Yeah, so about the time, the early 2000s is when Blue Origin and SpaceX were incorporated.

And then over the next 10 years, they started to develop capabilities to launch things that were interesting to NASA.

When I was at SpaceX and we were developing Falcon 9, they didn't believe that we could do those things at those price points.

So they kind of patted us on the head and said, that's cute, let us know when it works.

And then it did work.

And then that's when the real interest came forward because now for $60 million a launch, you could do a lot of cool things that you couldn't do with the Space Shuttle program.

And then the race was on.

It turned out huge.

A whole other ballgame.

And that's what got NASA excited about the shuttle retiring because the race was on to get Dragon on a Falcon 9 as fast as possible and get astronauts to the station and get American astronauts again to orbit.

And we put all the NASA logos and everything, and they were a great partner in all that.

But it was weird because people would come up to us and say, does NASA exist anymore?

Right, right, right.

Because SpaceX seems to be launching everything.

Correct.

First and second stage.

Correct.

And we had to put that engine in the center to help facilitate the landing burn.

Let me ask you that.

So the elegance in the engineering is that Falcon 9, basically, we actually pushed that vehicle to its absolute limit before anybody ever saw it do its thing.