This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Baxter with Eric Berger, a senior space writer for Ars Technica.

I recommend the magazine, because it's got all these things I don't understand in it.

I love to read that kind of thing.

But also Eric's reporting keeps you up to date on space engineering.

Elon Musk at SpaceX is the go-to space engineering right now.

Didn't start out that way in the early part of the 21st century. All the sovereign powers

dominated space, big space, including the U.S. and Russia. China's the newcomer.

There are other programs, but commercial space is now so routine.

It's sometimes difficult to remember 10 years ago when it wasn't routine.

We're going now to NASA, trusting Elon Musk's innovators on the scene.

There's a lot of improv at SpaceX.

They don't have a huge number of people to assign to any particular task.

When they launched a red Tesla into space, they put a sheet up in the corner of the factory,

and that was their secret keeping of the payload.

So we're not looking at something like Boeing,

but that's important here. Boeing is a troubled company now. Once, however, it was understood

by NASA to be the supreme builder of anything we need to get to the moon, to get into

low Earth orbit. And SpaceX and NASA and another company

called Sierra Nevada that has a neat machine called Dream Catcher. Dream, Tracer. Thank you. We're

competing for the contract from NASA for a manned spacecraft.

Eric, you say without Boeing, this doesn't happen.

How is that?

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