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"It's very, very difficult to predict how this is going to end up," said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and SpaceX consultant who is a professor of astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California. "I think it could end up never working, or it could end up revolutionizing our entire future of activities in space " and geopolitics," he added, referring to the US goal of displaying technical superiority to China in a new space race.