Mark Kelly

And with the landers, certainly we're kind of in this same model, but we've always had contractors.

The big question is, how much does NASA leave them alone to do their job?

And so far with the space station, with the commercial cargo and then commercial crew programs, it has worked really, really well.

Yeah, there were delays along the way, but I got to say, I think, you know, SpaceX in particular has done a really good job meeting the moment and really bringing down the cost of what it takes to get not only cargo to low Earth orbit, but getting people there as well.

I'd say it's probably the main benefit.

The thing about risk assessment and how safe something is, you usually don't know until you start having failures.

But the Dragon capsule, which launches on a Falcon 9 rocket that goes to the space station with people, has been very safe so far and very successful.

But also they've driven, because of the reusability of the first stage, they have driven down the cost

And also because they're able to, you know, turn it around and fly it without like a huge army of people.

They've got the cost down of getting stuff into low Earth orbit to, you know, down by an order of magnitude.

You know, 10 times, I think, compared to the space shuttle.

Certainly every space shuttle mission costs about $900 million to fly.

SLS is rather expensive as well because we just build so few rockets.

But SpaceX builds a lot of rockets and launches a lot of things into space, so they've got the cost down.

And that's been, I'd say, the biggest benefit, does not have the capability of the Space Shuttle, right?

The Space Shuttle, by far the best spacecraft ever in terms of the ability to do things.

You could take seven people into space.

You had a cargo bay the size of an 18-wheeler truck, basically.

Yeah, it was about 30 feet long, so maybe not that quite long, but you could carry 35,000 pounds into orbit in that payload bay.

It had a robot arm where you could do stuff.