"Bottom line, somebody in the Trump administration is going to say 'we want NASA and the private sector to collectively, as sort of a national space enterprise, we want them to go further, we want them to go faster, we want them to go more frequently, and we want them to go less expensively," Muncy said.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket will be launched for a sixth test flight next week, the latest experiment by the Elon Musk-owned aerospace firm to create reusable spacecraft after a previous test resulted in a “seminal moment” for the company.