There has been an unnoticed earthquake at NASA. It’s a change so dramatic that one NASA insider calls it a “paradigm shift” and a “revolution.”

What is it? For the last ten years, there has been a struggle within the space community over two different sorts of rockets. NASA has clung to a policy of building expensive rockets, using them once, then tossing them in the ocean. These throwaway rockets are called expendables.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, have pushed a radically different approach: building rockets that can be used over and over again, like busses, trucks, and airplanes. And with reusable rockets, driving the price of access to space down from $10,000 per pound to less than $1,000 per pound.

Now, under its new administrator, James Bridenstine, NASA has made a massive break with tradition. Bridenstine has gone from insisting on throwaway rockets to accepting the new reusables. More than accepting them. Embracing them.

Bridenstine has based his entire moon program on reusables. Yes, NASA’s central program for getting men and women to the moon—the program that defines NASA’s future—will be based not on throwaway rockets from the Space Military Industrial Complex companies, the SMIC, but on reusable rockets from upstart entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

On August 2, 2018, while speaking at Johnson Space Center in Texas, NASA’s Bridenstine said, “We want the entire architecture between here and the Moon to all be reusable. We know how reusability of rockets has changed the game for access to space and how it’s just driven down the cost, and it will continue to drive down the cost.” That may be the most understated but dramatic pronouncement from a NASA administrator in the 21st century.

Bridenstine, in his Johnson Space Center comments, continued, “At NASA, we need to be looking at things differently. We need to be a customer when we can be a customer.” In other words, NASA needs to buy rockets built by private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. Bridenstine explained that, “We want to have multiple providers when we can have multiple providers all competing on innovation and cost. I think we are at the precipice of having an opportunity that didn’t even exist five or 10 years ago on the commercial side.”

Which means that James Bridenstine’s moon program will open a whole new ballgame in space. A reusability revolution. A revolution that in the long run will make it possible for you and me to contemplate a vacation on the moon.