Today, the NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine, tweeted he will be meeting Elon Musk on Thursday at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Bridenstine will be discussing the progress of SpaceX on Crew Dragon, a spacecraft that the company is collaborating on with NASA. Accompanying the two men will be Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, two astronauts who are scheduled to take flight on Crew Dragon's Demo-2 flight test to the International Space Station.
This is following the recent updates by SpaceX and Elon Musk regarding another project. On September 29, Musk unveiled his plans for putting SpaceX's gargantuan spacecraft dubbed Starship in orbit in half a year, in a presentation at the company's Boca Chica test site near Brownsville, Texas. Starship is the company's initiative for space travel and for inhabiting other planets in the future, as Musk claimed in his tweet.
But the presentation invited some critique by Jim Bridenstine, the NASA Administrator, vis-à-vis the affiliation between SpaceX and NASA on Crew Dragon. Bridenstine reminded the entrepreneur via a tweet that NASA's Commercial Crew was still "years behind schedule", called for the "the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer", and signaled that "it's time to deliver."
Since then, it's been back and forth between the two of them. Musk responded to the administrator's tweet by clarifying at the presentation that only a handful of resources were being invested into Starship and that whereas "the vast majority of our resources are [focused] on Falcon and Dragon, especially Crew Dragon."
As such, how things unfold at the meeting on Thursday will certainly be interesting. There might even be a live stream, so stay on the lookout on Bridenstine's twitter account.
As always, we're keen on hearing your thoughts. You can sound off in the comments section below!
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