I'm Tom Thatcher with my colleague David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show,

and we're very pleased and privileged to speak to Hank Aalwan, who is at Huntsville,

Alabama, across the Marshall Space Center near Rocket City.

This is the fundamental original rocket boosting program

that led to the triumphs of the 20th century

and is intact to endorse the triumphs of the 21st century.

And I want to mention commercial space

because often it's regarded as standing

alone. What I've learned is the seed money for commercial space came from NASA. And that is a

great deal of the success these days, people making money on that seed money. Is that something that

NASA talks about, Hank, and Congress is aware of that NASA's the driver for the Blue Origin, for rocket lab, for SpaceX. Do people talk about it?

Yes, absolutely. NASA has a major presence in trying to help to instigate this burgeoning commercial

aspect of the new space economy. Certainly around here in the North Alabama region, we have a heavy

presence of stakeholders into space sector.

Private companies, no doubt, are interacting with NASA.

They receive funding from NASA.

NASA is very proactive in searching for these private public relationships.

They have whether it's the large private companies in the space sector or whether it's a startup looking to get their feet into kind of the NASA ecosystem. So a very heavy presence from a funding perspective is incumbent on commercial organizations to try and figure out what their relationship is or what it could be with NASA for them to succeed, especially with startups trying to figure out what their place is in the new space sector, perhaps with supply chains for NASA or for larger private organizations.

So there's a lot of interconnectedness here between public and private entities.

David, you have a question.

We have yet to see the NASA administrator with the new administration.

Do you think that the choice of that administrator

...