NASA Head Praises Branson Space Flight

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Monday praised Sir Richard Branson after the Virgin Galactic founder rode as a passenger on a flight to the edge of space over the weekend.

Branson and several other passengers rode in the VSS Unity on Sunday to an altitude of about 86 kilometers, or 53 miles, after launching from Spaceport American in New Mexico.

“We put up Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into suborbit 60 years ago, and now we’ve come to this, and I think it’s great,” said Nelson, who as a member of the House went into space as a passenger on the space shuttle Columbia in 1986, in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

The trip came just weeks ahead of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos’ own flight, making Branson the first billionaire space company owner to complete a space flight. Bezos is set to travel into space next week on his company’s New Shepard shuttle. His Blue Origin co-founder, Elon Musk, is scheduled to fly with Virgin Galactic at a future date.

“I think what these billionaires are doing is great, and I think what Elon Musk has done, going to orbit with astronaut crews, I think that is great,” Nelson added.

He went on to say, “We never want to lose our character as explorers, as adventurers.”

Nelson noted that “the real space race” now is with China, which has become “increasingly aggressive” with their own efforts, and recalled how the U.S. and the Soviet Union were able to cooperate on the International Space Station despite the tensions of the Cold War.

“The real space race, which used to be with the Soviet Union years ago, I think that space race is going to be more and more with China, as the Chinese government becomes increasingly aggressive in their space program and, I might say, very successful,” he said.

“Back in the middle of the Cold War, 1975, an American spacecraft rendezvoused and docked with a Soviet spacecraft and the crews lived together for nine days,” Nelson added. “Ever since we have had cooperation between the Russians and the Americans in civil space. They are our partners on board the International Space Station.”

He said that China’s behavior “reminds us of the old Soviet Union early days, but we broke that mold with the Russians.”