Forget Boeing. What about SpaceX?

Sunita williams say this one day, all right, when Bruce Wilmore and Sunita Williams took off for the International Space Station, they thought they were going on an eight day trip the Boeing Starliner, which had had billions spent on it was supposed to safely take them up and bring them back. However, the Starliner began having malfunctions. Even on the way up, there were parts that weren’t working. There were indicators of significant problems, and NASA, which had really become very cautious because it had lost people in Apollo disasters and in space shuttle disasters and recognized space can be very dangerous, and so all of a sudden, they decided not to use the Boeing Starliner, even though we literally had spent billions creating it, testing it, And it was supposed to be a reliable vehicle. Instead, it now looks like what’s going to happen is that SpaceX, the private company created by Elon Musk, will go up and rescue them early next year and bring them back home. SpaceX has a very good track record of safety, and has been working very diligently by itself. It launches more satellites than the entire Chinese program, and it is growing at a remarkable rate and developing remarkable new technologies. In fact, they are building a starship which will be capable of going to the moon or to Mars, and which will really represent a revolution in our ability to get things done. I’m very proud of the way SpaceX has worked, because many years ago, Congressman Bob Walker, who was the chairman of the science space and technology committee joined me, and the two of us offered an initial amendment to spend $400 million building a reusable rocket. NASA took the money, hired a firm who couldn’t do the job, and they failed. About a decade later, Elon Musk came along and built a reusable rocket, and he’s learned now how to literally get 10 or more launches out of each rocket, which, of course, brings the price down dramatically. The most deflationary cost lowering impact of the last 10 years is the fact that SpaceX took 90% out of the cost of going into space. And it’s a reminder, if you watch, every time you hear a story about these two astronauts who are doing very well, and they, frankly, probably think it’s an amazing experience to be able to be up there doing science and being in space this long. But as you read those stories, remember, because of lobbyists, because of bureaucracies, because of old fashioned systems. Boeing, at great cost, has been building systems that simply do not work, and the system needs dramatic reform so.