(gentle music) - What are your thoughts on the efforts of the new folks, SpaceX and Elon Musk? What are your thoughts about what Elon is doing? Do you see him as competition? Do you enjoy competition? What are your thoughts? - Yeah, first of all, certainly Elon, I'd say SpaceX and some of his other ventures are definitely a competitive force in the space industry.

And do we like competition? Yeah, we do. And we think we're very strong competitors. I think it's, you know, competition is what the US is founded on in a lot of ways and always coming up with a better way. And I think it's really important to continue, you know, to have fresh eyes coming in, new innovation.

I do think it's important to have level playing fields. And so you wanna make sure that you're not giving different requirements to different players. But, you know, I tell people, you know, I spent a lot of time at places like MIT. I'm gonna be at the MIT Beaverworks Summer Institute over the weekend here.

And I tell people, this is the most exciting time to be in the space business in my entire life. And it is this explosion of new capabilities that have been driven by things like the, you know, the massive increase in computing power, things like the massive increase in comms capabilities, advanced and additive manufacturing are really bringing down the barriers to entry in this field and it's driving just incredible innovation.

It's happening at startups, but it's also happening at Lockheed Martin. I talked about some of these like, you know, Maya and Orion, but, you know, we're in the middle of what we call smartsats and software-defined satellites that can essentially restructure and remap their purpose, their mission on orbit to give you almost, you know, unlimited flexibility for these satellites over their lifetimes.

So those are just a couple of examples, but yeah, this is a great time to be in space. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)