NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman: SpaceX helped lead America’s shift to methane rocket fuel. "SpaceX was one of the first to move on from their current propellant structure, which is basically refined diesel and liquid oxygen, to liquid methane or liquid natural gas and liquid oxygen. But we know so very little about it and what we get concerned about very early on is what happens if something goes wrong during testing? And we assumed a lot of worst case scenarios. But other companies, so Blue Origin, for example, decided, this is the right path we should go on to. Now the problem is you have all these companies working on this new propellant system, and we had to take very conservative views, which would have actually shut down testing and launch operations at multiple centers across the United States. And this employee, Berkowitz, he came up with the analysis that determined, actually, it's a lot safer than we may think it is, and it's permitted us to conduct lots of simultaneous operations. It was a real enabling breakthrough work he did, and that's why he was honored."