SpaceX, NASA send astronauts into space in historic launch

NASA and SpaceX made history as they made a joint effort to bring astronauts to space. Purdue College of Engineering Professor Steven Collicott joins Yahoo Finance’s The Final Round to discuss the outlook for the future space travel.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to "The Final Round" here on Yahoo Finance. Let's talk about the success of SpaceX's Demo-2 launch. It's an historic mission for space in the US, first time astronauts traveled to space from US soil in nearly a decade. Now the astronauts have since disembarked after launching on Saturday. They've disembarked the SpaceX Crew Dragon and now entered the International Space Station.

And for more on this, I want to bring in Professor Steven Collicott of Purdue's College of Engineering. Professor Collicott, it's great to have you on the show. It's the start of a new era when it comes to corporate-driven space missions. From your perspective, how significant is this mission?

STEVEN COLLICOTT: Oh, thank you. It's nice to be here. This is, to me, a very significant historical event in spaceflight. Sure, it's not the first moon landing. But it's right up there with first space shuttle flight.

This is an entirely new human capsule and launch method. And I was just very excited to watch it when it launched Saturday, and Sunday morning docking with space station. It's a big step, really big step.

SEANA SMITH: You actually worked with John Edwards of SpaceX when he was a student. He was an undergraduate at Purdue. Now he's the Vice President of Falcon Launch Vehicles at SpaceX. So what are your thoughts just on the success of the launch, knowing the part and the role that he played in all of this?

STEVEN COLLICOTT: Oh, yeah, I've kept in touch with him all these years. And so he worked with me, gosh, it was 20 years ago when we worked together. So it was great to see what he's doing there.

But I also want to point out, he has a lot of Boilermakers, Purdue graduates working with him there at SpaceX. They've been a big hiring center for our students. So it's not just a joy in what John is doing. It's a joy and what all of our graduates are doing there at SpaceX.

MYLES UDLAND: And Professor Collicott, you mentioned kind of the look of this rocketship was different to the layperson. I could see the cockpit looks quite different from what we'd seen, you know, with the space shuttle, and obviously going back to the Apollo missions. Maybe for a lay audience, can you outline how different it is operating one of these kinds of rockets versus how we had gotten to space maybe 20 or 30 years ago?

STEVEN COLLICOTT: Oh, that's an interesting question. You know, we've gone back to, obviously, the capsule approach. The space shuttle was designed to perform many duties, and it was a great feat to accomplish that.

But I think we've gone back to something that's, you know, by all accounts it's much more of a single-purpose type vehicle. Take humans to orbit. Let them work in orbit. Let them meet up with space station, and bring them back safely, and to do so cost effectively. So it's different that way, right?

And also, the space shuttle had three main engines and then two solid boosters. This has nine Merlin engines, the SpaceX built engines in their own rocket. So it's kind of an economy of scale, perhaps, is a simple-minded way to look at those nine engines in each launch.

And then landing the booster-- I hope everybody watched that too, that it lands on the barge. And that's a spectacular way to, again, be cost-effective. They've been re-using boosters for the satellite launches. And so that's been a remarkable step too.

RICK NEWMAN: Hey, Steven. Rick Newman here. How would you characterize Elon Musk's contribution to the field of space? Is he now in the pantheon of space pioneers or was this kind of stuff coming along no matter who did it?

STEVEN COLLICOTT: You know, no, I think he's played a remarkable role. Just being at the right place at the right time and having the mental and financial wherewithal to start this process and fund it, finance it, and get really great people involved-- yeah, it's a remarkable achievement.

Could somebody else have done it? Probably, right? We all tend to say no one's replaceable where we work. But no, certainly, it was, like I said, the right time, the right moment, the right mind with the right money. It's a remarkable change.

And we see other commercial spaceflight events also sub-orbitally. Both Virgin Galactic is flying people, and Blue Origin has been flying over 100 experiments sub-orbitally. I've had seven payloads on five of their suborbital New Sheppard flights. And they're both getting ready to start flying people like you and me for short-duration space tourism.

So yeah, the whole commercial spaceflight era that we're in now is kind of like the next 50 years of the space race.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Hey, it's Brian Cheung here. And you mentioned the commercial aspect of everything. I mean, even you mentioned the suborbital companies. But even in low earth orbit, we've got Boeing, I believe, that's also working on their own capsule. So it's not just SpaceX that's really in the race here, I guess, for some of these government contracts.

What role do you think that plays from a competitive standpoint in the innovation that we might expect to see? Because it's my understanding that maybe we might even send someone to the moon sometime in the next four or five years. How do you think the commercial companies play into that role?

STEVEN COLLICOTT: Well, that's a great point. And Boeing also has commercial crew contracts, like SpaceX. And, well, I'll leave it to the market analysts and the economists like you folks on this show to point out the details. But yeah, it motivates people. We're competitive. We want to get the job done, want to do it best. And so people work hard on that. And yeah, overall it's good.

Plus, offloading the delivery of humans to space station and back to earth, offloading that from NASA frees up NASA to be doing more space exploration work. And that's really exciting too.

SEANA SMITH: It is extremely exciting just to be a spectator here watching this all unfold over the weekend. Professor Steven Collicott of Purdue's College of Engineering, thanks so much for calling in today.