2020 was a significant year for NASA. From sending crewed flights to the International Space Station to picking dust from an asteroid and launching a Mars rover, it was a banner year for space exploration.

2021 looks to bring more highlights for the agency with the Mars rover, Perseverance, landing on the red planet February 18, another crewed flight scheduled to launch this summer, and the expected launch of the Artemis I, an uncrewed test flight, into lunar orbit. Robotic payload services from commercial carriers are also expected to land on the moon, which would be the first such landing in more than 50 years – part of a process to pave the way to a 2024 moon landing.

NASA’s most noteworthy event of 2020 may have been the November launch of the SpaceX Crew-1 mission, marking the first crew mission of a U.S. commercial spacecraft to the International Space Station since 2011.

It was the culmination of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, and the new era of NASA partnerships with private companies to explore space and develop new technology. It’s also part of a new space economy valued in the hundreds of billions.

“NASA is delivering on its commitment to the American people and our international partners to provide safe, reliable, and cost-effective missions to the International Space Station using American private industry,” former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at the time of the November launch.

Bridenstine, who left the agency in January, has been credited with piloting the space agency into a new age. TIME referred to him in November as “something NASA always needs: a leader with both a vision to sell and the ability to sell it.”

We sat down with Bridenstine back in 2019, and he shared his fundamental views on what NASA’s public-private partnerships mean for space travel, why the space agency’s resurgence is critical to future advancements and all the ways NASA helps science and the economy here on earth.

Following is an edited version of our conversation.

Jim Bridenstine: We're seeing more private capital flowing into the market than ever before. And that's a very positive sign for NASA. We like to see a healthy market for space. We're working on commercializing low Earth orbit specifically, so that NASA can be one customer of many customers, and we can have numerous providers that are competing against each other on cost and innovation, the goal being to drive down costs and increase access to space for humans.

So, why would NASA want to see commercial human activity in space? The answer is because we want to see breakthrough capabilities for life on Earth. You mentioned the $400 billion economy. Some people would say it's over a trillion dollars depending on what you measure and what you don't measure. All of those capabilities are communication, remote sensing, weather, national security and defense. All those kind of capabilities added together look like a pretty big chunk of the economy. What I'm talking about is human activity, which is something that doesn't exist yet. Commercial markets for human activity in space and that's really where NASA is focused in low Earth orbit, but it is also focused on going to the moon, and it is going to do that with commercial partners.

Jim Bridenstine: The goal is to create a sustainable exploration program that involves commercial partners and international partners with growth capability in a way that historically has never been done.

Go back to the 1990s early 2000s. It was the United States of America alone. We had no commercial partners, we didn't have reusable rockets. We didn't have the miniaturization of electronics and the computing power and the ability to store energy or electricity in the ways that we can store today. Those are the reasons those programs failed. Technologically we're far more advanced, we have commercial companies and we have international partners, none of that existed as robustly as it does right now. So right now is a unique time where we can actually make it happen. And we are and that's why we're seeing a lot of the investments that we're seeing in the space industry.

Jim Bridenstine: One of the challenges, is if you're looking for return on investment, sometimes it's going to be a 10 or 15-year return on investment.  Quite frankly, that's why private equity matters because private equity, in many cases, have time horizons that can go five years or beyond.

The challenge is sometimes NASA’s big corporate partners are trying to make quarterly earnings. But there's this middle ground that needs to be developed in my view of private equity and institutional investors getting involved that enable us to look at longer time horizons.

Make no mistake, when you do these kind of investments, there is risk. One of the reasons it's important to have NASA as a partner is it can help mitigate that risk as we are developing the markets from which future capabilities will com;e. The goal being NASA can be a partner initially and then commercialize, and then NASA can use its resources to go further and do other things like go to the moon and go to Mars, always focusing on an element of commercialization – how do we take where we are right now and commercialize it and then NASA can go where there isn't yet a commercial marketplace. 

Jim Bridenstine: This is an important question.

So here's what we need to think about: what are we doing today that 50 years later, people will still be celebrating like the moon landing 50 years ago. It's about national pride, it's about prestige, it's about American leadership, it's about leading a coalition of international partners, but it goes beyond that. Think about the economic activity. We talked about the space economy.

It’s navigation, it's national security, it’s climate, it's all of these things combined. It's disaster relief. Space has transformed the human condition, not just for the United States of America but for everybody in the world. It is an export for the United States of America offsetting the deficit and the balance of payments.

All of that is very positive. And what we have to do at NASA is we have to think every day what we are doing today. How are we affecting our balance of payments, increasing exports, affecting foreign policy? How are we being, you know, an agency that can support our initiatives, whether it's for the State Department or other diplomatic initiatives. We want to be that agency for the U.S. government, but we also want to be a major contributor to the American economy.