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Replies

Chase Million @millionconcepts.com · 04/09/2026

This is absolutely correct and important. Most of the "new space" industry has been passing around the same $10B that originated from NASA. The ones that are now doing ok pivoted into defense. There are a lot of companies providing services and technology for which no non-government market exists.

we also need to fund several new crewed vehicles too? To the author’s point, nothing stopped one company from building a suborbital vehicle and operating it dozens of times without NASA as an anchor tenant, but I think market realities have spoken and the service appears to have been paused.

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Chase Million @millionconcepts.com · 04/09/2026

This use of "if" is a MAJOR shift from the policy discussions and approaches discussed in Project Athena and pushed early in Jared's tenure. As I've said, NASA already has a robust and highly productive "science-as-a-service" ecosystem, but we call it "research and analysis grants."

[2] America and NASA are not giving up our astronauts, and as a commercial astronaut, I state that as emphatically and patriotically as possible. Of course, if useful research and affordable data become available as a commercial service, similarly to how we purchase and make available Earth observation data, we would have to look at it.

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Chase Million @millionconcepts.com · 04/09/2026

1000xYes. There has been a meme in and around NASA for >10 years that "commercial" is a magic word that solves every problem. I've heard it described as "commercial fairy dust." There is a further meme that "requirements" are what make space hard and expensive. (We can call that "magical thinking.")

3] I am about as pro-commercial space as it gets, for what I hope are obvious reasons. But to be clear, you cannot simply slap the word “commercial” on every problem or opportunity, pound the table about “deleting NASA’s burdensome requirements,” and assume it automatically produces a more affordable, better solution supported by a thriving market. When people talk about relying on private capital and commercial

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