On Wednesday, NASA's chief of human spaceflight, William Gerstenmaier, flashed an interesting slide during a presentation that showed 23 different rockets, from the small Orbital ATK Antares and Russian Soyuz boosters all the way to SpaceX's massive Interplanetary Transport System. Some of the boosters, such as the Soyuz, have flown often. Many, like the massive SpaceX ITS vehicle, remain PowerPoint rockets.

What was notable, however, was not the chart but what Gerstenmaier said. "My point of this chart is this is a great way to be," he told his audience at the Goddard Memorial Symposium in Maryland. "And I'm not picking any one of these, I love every one of these rockets. We will figure out some way to use some subset of these as they mature through the industry and come out the other side."

Gerstenmaier's public comments represent a significant shift from the attitude shown by NASA's former administrator, Charles Bolden, who left the agency in January. Bolden viewed efforts by SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop large boosters capable of delivering payloads into deep space as competition to the Space Launch System that NASA has contracted with Boeing to develop. "If you talk about launch vehicles, we believe our responsibility to the nation is to take care of things that normal people cannot do, or don’t want to do, like large launch vehicles," Bolden said last year. "I’m not a big fan of commercial investment in large launch vehicles just yet."

NASA/Ustream

NASA/Ustream

NASA/Ustream

NASA/Ustream

Perhaps now that Bolden has left the agency, Gerstenmaier feels more able to speak out. During his comments this week, he noted that due to its high cost, the SLS rocket will only be able to fly once a year. "That doesn't make for a very compelling human-spaceflight program," he said. "We're going to be using some of these other rockets to augment what we're doing with SLS. So SLS is used for that unique case where we have to launch one very large mass that can't be broken up into separate pieces"

The private rockets under development, he said, will have a role in the transportation of cargo—and perhaps even crew—into deep space. This is very different from what the agency has done before, such as with the Apollo and space shuttle program, when the agency had a single transport system designed for a specific mission, be it sending humans to the Moon or operating in low Earth orbit. Now, Gerstenmaier said, the agency is fortunate to have a menu of different rockets and spacecraft to choose from as it develops plans to explore cislunar space and eventually Mars. "At this timeframe, it's really hard to predict the winners," he said. "We'll let the market sort it out."

Can you feel the love tonight?

Gerstenmaier's attitude reflects an emerging narrative in Washington, DC when it comes to big rockets. For several years, there has been an uneasy tension between NASA and its traditional aerospace contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin on one side and outsider new space companies, led by SpaceX, on the other. The old guard has painted the new space companies as over-promising and unreliable, whereas the new companies have said that traditional aerospace companies charge way too much and are hindering the more rapid development of space.

Within the first few months of the Trump administration, a truce of sorts has begun to develop—at least publicly. The panel discussion on Wednesday featured not only Gerstenmaier but representatives of both the NASA-led rocket effort and the commercial space industry. And both Mary Lynne Dittmar, executive director of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, and Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, were on the same message.

"The exploration and utilization of space is an 'and' proposition," Stallmer said during his remarks. "It is not an 'either or' proposition." In other words, if NASA is to have a viable exploration plan beyond low Earth orbit, both traditional aerospace and new space companies can have a seat at the table. "Space is a big place, and there's plenty of room for us all to succeed," Stallmer said. In numerous conversations with industry officials in recent months, Ars has heard the same message—"and," not "or." It appears to have become a DC talking point.

Will the truce hold?

It's one thing to say nice things about everyone's rocket at a space symposium. The temporary truce will be tested in the coming months by the budget process. The Trump administration and NASA are in the process of negotiating a budget request for fiscal year 2018. Officials familiar with those negotiations say funding levels for NASA's SLS rocket will largely stay the course, allowing its development to continue toward a 2018 or 2019 initial launch. At a time when the federal government is cutting non-defense, discretionary spending, this is a strong indicator of where Congress has lined up in this discussion.

Congress, of course, will work closely with NASA as it seeks to develop a roadmap for exploration. Some senators and representatives from Alabama and other states closely aligned with the SLS rocket pushed back against NASA's plan to develop commercial access—via private rockets and spacecraft—to the space station. Will they now be willing to allow NASA to partner with SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others for the use of their rockets in the early 2020s if that means fewer missions for the SLS?

What seems more likely is that the private rockets will have to fly often, and reliably, before Congress allows NASA and Gerstenmaier to incorporate them into their plans for deep-space exploration. This is not a killer for SpaceX and Blue Origin—they have begun developing commercial manifests for their Falcon Heavy and New Glenn rockets, respectively—but certainly they could be brought into service for NASA sooner with government support.

It's also not clear where the Trump administration will ultimately come down in this debate. There are elements of support both for the SLS and the new space approach to rockets. On Thursday morning, for example, new space advocate Newt Gingrich tweeted, "Newly passed NASA authorization bill will be obsolete within a year. Private space efforts will move faster than NASA and require new bill." This suggests that the existing public truce is indeed fragile.