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Over the last few years, NASA has been 1 of SpaceX's biggest supporters and funders. Without the system's support, SpaceX would never have made it as far as information technology has. But the human relationship between NASA and companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin has been complicated by their divergent goals and timelines for human spaceflight. NASA has its own heavy booster that it'southward bringing upward, the Space Launch Organization, and hasn't necessarily been pleased at the idea of SpaceX or anyone else muscling in on its turf.

At least, that's been the status quo upwardly until a contempo presentation past NASA's head of homo spaceflight, William Gerstenmaier. He showed slides with a number of currently operational rockets, rockets expected to be operational in the most-term, and proposed time to come designs from a number of companies, Ars Technica reports. He then remarked: "My point of this chart is this is a smashing manner to be, and I'm not picking whatever one of these, I love every ane of these rockets. We will figure out some way to use some subset of these every bit they mature through the industry and come out the other side."

Gerstenmaier's remarks are a surprising follow-up to statements made by the former administrator, Charles Bolden, who saw companies similar SpaceX and Blue Origin as competitors to the Space Launch System NASA is building. The SLS has been controversial partially due to its size and price — while it will have the heaviest throw weight of whatever rocket expected to be operational in the next decade, Congress hasn't approved sufficient funds for NASA to utilise it often or for much. As Gerstenmaier notes, launching the SLS once per year isn't compelling for manned space exploration. It besides creates high maintenance costs for a rocket that only occasionally makes it into orbit.

SLS 2

The SLS is supposed to scale upwardly over time, eventually fielding designs that can lift more than than even the Saturn V

At the aforementioned time, however, relying on private manufacture has scarcely been a smooth road thus far. SpaceX has lost two high-profile rockets and NASA continues to accept concerns about the company'southward fueling practices and how they might affect the coiffure of the sheathing in an emergency (SpaceX insists that its arrest mechanisms would have saved a crew in the company'south most recent failure). And there's the added question of whether Congress will approve closer ties between NASA and its potential individual partners. The same pecker that commissioned NASA to build the SLS also contained highly specific text regarding the applied science that platform was to exist based on and the companies that were to build it. Congress has often been derided for using these kinds of requirements to bring jobs to favored districts (the SLS is besides known equally the Senate Launch System, later all).

As things stand today, companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX are nevertheless proving they can handle the risks and requirements of manned space flight, while demonstrating a robust delivery to safety equal to or greater than NASA's own. In the long term, partnering with individual firms might give NASA more liberty to focus on greater projects and less pedestrian activities, while other firms handle the heavy lifting of moving cargo from ocean level to orbit.