We are going to get back into the habit of launching moon rockets in months, not years.
Why is it so important for us to go back to the moon?
This was a promise that was made and a promise we need to keep.
When we return to the moon, America will not look down on the prime lunar real estate while our rivals occupy it.
NASA astronauts will be on the surface building President Trump's moon base and we will realize the scientific, economic and national security potential surface operations provide.
A lot of people, when I came to this job, was like Industry's not going to let you do what you want to do and the politicians aren't going to let you do what you want to do.
But you know what?
They all understand the difference between America winning and losing on the moon, staying for 35 years and putting 100 billion in and then coming up short and that doesn't have national security implications.
You're completely mistaken.
What does it take to win a new space race?
For decades, space exploration was defined by a single moment, landing on the moon.
But today, the challenge is different.
It's not just about getting there.
It's about building the system's infrastructure and cadence to return and stay.
NASA now faces a new kind of competition, One that is measured not in decades, but in years or even months.
That shift is forcing a rethink of everything, from how missions are built to how capital and talent are deployed.
The question is not whether we can return to the moon, but whether we can do it fast enough.
Recorded at the A16Z American Dynamism Summit.
Morgan Brennan speaks with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman about what it will take to get there.
It's great to be here with so many entrepreneurs operators, investors and policymakers who are helping us build the next golden age of space exploration.
I love being around the people who not only look up and imagine what is possible, but possess the experiences and the will to bring ideas into reality.
There is no organization, I can tell you, that appreciates that kind of determination more than NASA.
On that note, in the weeks ahead...
America will send the brave Artemis II astronauts potentially farther into space than any humans have ever traveled in generations, flying around the moon on a 10-day mission to test the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft before returning home to Earth.
Now President Donald Trump took the decisive steps of establishing the Artemis program during his first term.
He recently in fact, was the day that I was sworn into this position reaffirmed America's commitment to space superiority, giving NASA a clear mandate and a focus to return to the moon.
Build the base, so this time we return to stay.
Thanks to historic investments secured in the Working Families Tax Credit Act, NASA has received nearly 10 billion in support of that national imperative.
The bipartisan commitment signed into law by the president, gives us the resources to move forward with purpose and urgency, knowing American leadership in the high ground of space is on the line.
So we have the presidential mandate.
We have the resources.
We certainly have the historic experience.
We have plenty of hardware.
We have domestic and international partners.
So why does it all take so long?
Why does it cost so much?
And what are we going to do about it?
So lots of those answers are because we have lacked real competition for decades.
After the last space race, we were the only game in town.
So we built partnerships all over the world to spread goodwill.
We spread ourselves thin with broad-based science.
We took on lots of side quest projects, some of which are very cool but ultimately distract from the world-changing mission that taxpayers have entrusted us with.
It costs a lot because we outsourced a lot of our core competencies.
Industry consolidated.
We let stakeholders set the priorities to serve constituent interests and adopted policies in the attempt to make everyone happy.
Maybe make everyone happy other than the American people and really people all over the world that were waiting for the headlines that only NASA could, was capable of making.
As a result, you get moon rockets that fly only every three plus years the worst cadence by far of NASA-designed rockets, hardware that is obsolete by the time it's delivered.
51 nuclear propulsion programs that have never flown.
Less flagship science and discovery missions, less X-planes, less astronauts in space, less kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween.
I don't like this.
President Trump doesn't like it.
Clearly President Trump doesn't like it and doesn't like it, given what he's trying to accomplish in national space policy.
But maybe this was tolerable to some when there was no geopolitical rivals capable of challenging America in the most important strategic domain.
But that's not the case anymore.
Not anymore.
NASA has stated we will achieve the national imperative to return to the moon and establish an enduring presence before the end of President Trump's term.
Now, our rival has stated before 2030.
So it's not hard math.
That's less than one year of margin, and they might be early.
And if recent history says anything, we certainly might be late.
President Trump does not like to lose, and if I'm doing my job right at NASA, that won't happen.
Now, I've spent the first few months getting my arms around the challenges and the opportunities, and it generally revolves around ensuring that the extraordinary resources that are made available I mean NASA's budget is 25 billion a year and concentrating them on the most pressing objectives clearing out needless bureaucracy and really any obstacles that impede progress to empower the workforce and make sure our capital allocation is done in a thoughtful way that ensures desired outcomes are achieved and ideally ahead of schedule.
So to that end, we are standardizing the SLS rocket, increasing launch cadence from years to months.
We're inserting a new mission in 2027 to buy down risk and increase confidence for lunar landing attempts in 2028.
As I've said many times, Artemis is a program.
Where we begin with SLS is not where we end.
There will be dozens of missions living on long past, where Apollo 17 ended with the aim of affordable and repeatable crew and cargo missions to the surface for decades into the future.
We're also going to stop leaping right to the dream state as a service and build a moon-based, step-by-step and an evolutionary approach.
We're going to start with CLPS programs and LTV style landers and rovers.
We're going to provide a strong demand signal to industry for launch landers rovers that we can outfit with power navigation communication, surface improvement capabilities, scientific and other capabilities that we can experiment to ultimately inform the phase two infrastructure and move towards long-term habitation.
So, the folks in this room, if you're ever coming to pitch me on the Mars-based dream state as a service where the only customer is NASA, it costs billions of dollars and it's never been done before, I can assure you we probably won't be that receptive.
We're not going to force an orbital economy where it doesn't exist, but I can certainly provide a demand signal for what we need, in line with President Trump's national space policy.
And we are going to do everything we possibly can to ignite the space economy that we all know is inevitable.
When we return to the moon, America will not look down on the prime lunar real estate while our rivals occupy it.
NASA astronauts will be on the surface building President Trump's moon base and we will realize the scientific, economic and national security potential surface operations provide.
NASA will achieve the lunar objectives and do the other things.
We will invest in nuclear power and propulsion in space so we can undertake the next giant leap to Mars.
We will ignite the orbital economy and launch more missions of science and discovery.
We never pursue these grand endeavors alone.
We have international partners.
We have commercial industry, like many of those in this room.
But we also require the scientific, the software development, the engineering, technical and operational talent to execute on the mission.
So I'm pleased to announce, with the immense support of OPM Director Scott Cooper, we are launching NASA Force to rebuild NASA's core competencies.
These term-based appointments from industry partners will provide mentorship and training and help season and rebuild the core competencies within the NASA workforce.
Similarly, these programs offer exchange opportunities for NASA talent to rotate through industry.
At NASA, we have no excuses.
We have the policy, the resources, the will, the support of the most technologically forward-leaning industry, and we have the winning playbook that achieved the near impossible on July 20th 1969.
It starts with having a very focused plan, concentrating resources again on the most challenging objectives staying organized, assembling the best and brightest around the nation, instilling a culture in them that requires immense competence, extreme ownership and urgency, partnering with industry, taking meaningful steps towards a larger goal, constantly listening to data and learning and never accepting defeat.
This is how NASA once changed the world, and this is how we're going to do it again.
Thank you.
Now, please welcome to the stage, Morgan Brenner.
Hello, everybody.
Administrator Isaacman, thank you for joining me here on stage.
So much you just covered at the podium that I want to dig into.
But first I have to start with this idea of NASA force and this idea of bringing talent into NASA and making NASA great again, cool again.
Yeah, I mean, people ask me, what was your biggest surprise since taking the job?
And I'd say a lot of things were actually as expected.
I had an opportunity to prepare for it more than once.
But what I'd say was what stands out having visited every one of the centers on this really epic roadshow is just You know what a large portion of our core competencies that have either been lost outright over the years or we've outsourced.
And then you know you take a look at a program like America's Return to the Moon with Artemis and you got five prime contractors, hundreds of subcontractors and 75 percent of your workforce your workforce, not partners, not commercial partners in this are contractors.
You know, through staffing agencies.
So they're all using different software tools, collaboration tools, different HR systems, talking to different prime contracts subcontractors.
Is it a surprise to anyone that we're 100 billion deep into this years behind schedule?
No, I mean, it's right in front of you.
So, look, things like mission control, mission control is outsourced.
I mean, I got to imagine that would shock most people in this room to say, like when the astronauts come over the radio and say Houston, and the person respond back it's outsourced.
Launch control, turning our pad.
People have been freaking out since I've said since last Friday that we are going to get back into the habit of launching moon rockets in months, not years.
Apollo 7 to Apollo 8, nine weeks apart.
Nine weeks apart.
We're on this cadence of every three and a half years.
And they're like, that doesn't make any sense.
You're never going to be able to pull it in from three and a half years.
It's an unrealistic plan.
It's like no, we're going to go back to doing what we did before, because we're going to rebuild the workforce that knows how to do these things.
That's part of our history.
So yes, we incredibly value the support from Scott and OPM to let us go out, bring the talent back into the agency on things like turning our launch pad so we can launch with frequency.
Managing launch control, managing mission control.
We definitely need our partners.
We don't do this alone, but NASA's got to have those core competencies back within the agency.
So move more quickly, and I'd imagine it sounds like also cutting costs in the process.
Bringing this in-house, more of this in-house.
Yeah, I mean when I went to every one of the centers and started talking to the workforce and said okay, so you work in mission control.
You're one of our contractors.
I get we treat everybody kind of the same.
Do you want to be a civil servant?
I mean, there's certain benefits associated with it.
And they're like I've wanted to work for NASA since I was a kid.
They get paid exactly the same, but you have, you know, tech companies that put a well staffing companies put a 40 gross margin on it.
So the the answer is about 14 billion a year is lost in science and discovery Because someone 30 years ago or so said there's these artificial hiring ceilings on civil servants.
So 75% of the workforce became contractors.
Contractors that have been there for decades and will stay there for decades if we don't change it.
We're having these conversations actively.
We're seeing these conversations actively on the defense side, this idea of recruiting the best and brightest.
What does that look like at NASA?
When you do talk about that competition with the tech industry and private sector,
Well, so I mean, to me NASA is supposed to be doing the near impossible, where you can't close a business case where there's no obvious demand besides NASA.
You know.
So at one point we had to open this whole thing up with.
You know, heavy lift launch vehicles and propulsion design.
I mean, we again, we're the only game in town.
That's not the case now.
Launch observation and communication, there is a market for.
I mean, that is the foundation of the space economy.
So if NASA is doing the same thing that industry is doing, we're screwing up.
And that's going to make it very hard for us to recruit talent.
It's going to make it very hard for us to retain talent.
So what do you do?
You pivot in a direction that others shouldn't necessarily be working on.
Nuclear power and propulsion is a great example.
Lots of great nuclear companies right now.
I think there's a lot of demand, terrestrial demand for energy.
So maybe that's probably the near-term demand signal.
So NASA can do what probably others wouldn't want to take on the liability of of launching a nuclear reactor with power and propulsion, so we can get to Mars someday and actually bring our astronauts back home.
That's a great example of where NASA should be, you know, recalibrating again to the near impossible.
All right.
Let's dig a little deeper into Artemis because you just did announce this restructuring.
Artemis 3 is not going to put boots on the moon.
You're turning back to low Earth orbit to test out the human landing system technology there, too.
I mean, you're moving quickly.
Right.
It's been, what, two months, two and a half months since you got in.
How did you decide on the restructuring and how did this path forward emerge as the one that makes the most sense?
Yeah, I mean, to me, I think it's obvious.
I don't know why.
You know these decisions weren't made sooner, but you cannot launch a rocket as important, as complex as SLS every three and a half years and think it's going to lead to a good outcome.
You know, we had hydrogen leaks on Artemis 1 three and a half years later.
What do we have?
We had hydrogen leaks.
We had helium flow issues on Artemis 1.
We have three and a half years later.
Why is Artemis 2 back in the Vehicle Assembly Building instead of around the moon right now?
Helium flow issues.
You get no muscle memory if you're launching that thing every three and a half years.
People are working to launch the mission and then they're going to move on and go somewhere else and you have to rebuild all those competencies again.
It's not a recipe for success.
Again.
We also have tended to just go right to the dream state and forget that you need to do things as challenging as returning to the moon in a iterative, evolutionary way.
We had Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, an awful lot of Apollo missions before 11.
Now, We should have learned some things since then.
We do have the power of our great industry in order to help us.
So I don't think you necessarily need as many missions.
You certainly need more than one trip around the moon and then land and call it a day.
That's not going to work.
So We're getting back to some of our basics.
We're inserting another mission in 27 to, again, ensure that we have the muscle memory at the pad.
So when we intend to launch, we actually can launch.
And then you got a rendezvous with one or both your lander providers in low Earth orbit, just as we did with Apollo 9.
Get confidence in the systems, buy down risk before you send people to the moon.
I mean, it's the difference between, if something goes wrong, you're hours away from being in the water or days away.
So we got to we got to get it right.
It's incredibly hard to return to the moon.
We got to do it.
And, you know, again, a smart approach.
The SLS rocket is a very expensive, very exquisite, complicated rocket.
You just talked about, you know, three and a half years. can Boeing turn it out quickly enough?
Can you actually get to enough of them to keep up with the cadence you want?
Yeah, you know.
Look, I mean a lot of people.
When I came to this job was like industry is not going to let you do what you want to do.
And politicians aren't going to let you do what you want to do.
But you know what?
They all understand that we are talking about months, the difference between America winning and losing on the moon and all of the associated implications of You don't think there's national security implications of saying for 35 years and putting 100 billion in that America will return to the moon and then coming up short and that doesn't have national security implications.
You're completely mistaken, because that says if they're broken here, imagine where else they're broken.
So yes, I think industry and various politicians have forced in the hand for a long time.
And now everybody is waking up and realizing we've got months of margin and it's time to start doing things different.
So I am grateful for like what has become essentially unqualified support to do it the right way.
And that includes industry saying we're ready to get in gear.
Now, it takes more than promises, right?
Like we are going to embed responsible engineers in every one of the prime contractors, every one of the subcontractors that has components on the critical path.
CEOs of these companies are going to brief me every 30 days on how they're going to meet our timelines, because a lot is at stake and we have to get it right.
And I've said it before publicly look The whole SLS program was vehicle architecture was conceived before industry was landing rockets on ships.
You can look at it and say it looks kind of like shuttle, but not really shuttle.
That's because a lot of the hardware there came from shuttle.
So, yes, it's like 50, 60 year old, you know, type hardware that we're leveraging now.
But it's the start.
It's not the finish.
You know, the president created a program that's going to live on as hardware evolves, which is it's going to be necessary if you're going to undertake missions to and from the moon at great frequency, because you've got a base there to sustain.
So we've got Artemis through at least or SLS through at least Artemis 5 or 6.
We're going to make the most of it.
And then we will continue to evolve our architecture until 2020.
We are watching NASA astronauts going to and from the moon measured in months, not years.
Yeah, I mean we're seeing the demand signals, even before your announcement last week with Artemis, across industry in terms of, you know, invest more, focus more on these lunar ambitions.
So I do want to.
Just before we move on to other topics, I do want to just get to the human landing system piece of this, because it's Blue Origin, it's SpaceX.
Are they ready to go?
Can they deliver as quickly as you need them to, especially if we're talking about low Earth orbit rendezvous and they're developed for something deeper space.
Yeah, I mean so again when we went public with our plan to actually have an achievement, achievable strategy to getting to the moon.
We didn't do it in a vacuum.
We spoke with industry, made sure we had commitments.
That's why, when the announcement came, you saw every one of the players come out and put a tweet out and support, and a bunch of politicians do the same, because this is the way back to the moon.
Now, both SpaceX and Blue had to do uncrewed tests of their vehicle.
It was already part of the plan.
So they were planning to launch these spacecraft in 2027.
Now we're asking them to consider how we're going to rendezvous with us in Orion and start buying down risk.
And they all acknowledged, yes, we need to do something like this.
And we're going to work with them on it.
I will say, considering the technology that both Blue and SpaceX are investing in, which is way more than just going back to the moon to put footsteps in a flag here.
I mean that is, the capability to truly build out a base, put lots of mass at low cost on the surface of the moon and really again unlock its scientific and economic potential.
It is a complex approach to do it.
So for them to rendezvous with us in low Earth orbit is substantially easier than it would be um for them to rendezvous with us, for example, in lunar orbit, where that would be not necessarily a great trade, if you're if you're having to expend numerous launches that you could otherwise use for a landing.
So this is the right interim step.
Why is it so important for us to go back to the moon?
What are what do you see as the administrator of nasa?
What do you see as the potential benefits and rewards compared to the risk?
Well, I go back to this was a promise that was made and a promise we need to keep.
I mean, again, 35 years we said we were going to do this.
I mean 100 billion that have expended along the way, for us to just come up short and say now well, we did it.
You know, we did it in 1960s and 1970s.
So what's the big deal?
Yeah, that was the position you had to take 35 years ago.
Once you said you're going back and the new race is on and you've committed again 100 billion in taxpayer dollars.
You have an obligation to see it through.
And I'll say again, if we come up short, I mean, the implications are significant.
Our rival is going to say if they're broken in space, which is probably the most important strategic domain, where else are they broken?
And start encroaching on our territory across all the most important technological domains.
That's a problem.
That's real national security implications.
But what happens when we get there?
We are going to learn things.
That's why we're on the greatest adventure in human history of exploring our solar system and the galaxy and universe around us.
We don't know what we may learn that could change everything.
I will say it is absolutely the proving ground For future missions to Mars.
I mean to be able to get on the South Pole and do institute resource manufacturing working with ice.
These are the capabilities that we are going to need to be able to use reliably on Mars if we're going to send astronauts there and back.
And I emphasize the back part.
It's a lot easier to get them there.
It's very hard to bring them back home.
Let's use the moon as a proving ground, when we're a couple of days from home versus nine months.
Do you see this as a space race with China or otherwise?
Yeah, 100%.
The only thing I'll just say though, is that regardless, if we had a rival, that is again within potentially a year of our schedule on this, the changes we announced last week is still in the correct direction.
Like whether you had a rival or not, you don't launch a moon rocket every three and a half years.
You don't go from flying around the moon to landing on the moon.
You still have to do things in a thoughtful, iterative and evolutionary way in order to achieve grand endeavors, which was how we defined America for a period of time.
If we're going to get back to it, we have to do it the smart way.
The fact that we have a competitor should motivate us, but it should also concern us if we come up short.
What is the timeline now for Mars?
How do we get there?
What does that look like as you think about the moon in a bigger broader meatier, near-term fashion?
Well, that's why again, I have the best job in the world and I have a national space policy that, you know, aligns whole of government towards what we need to achieve and the financial resources to do it.
So the president didn't just say return to the moon and build a moon base.
He also said invest in the next giant leap capabilities.
That's where nuclear power and propulsion comes in.
And I checked in with the president multiple times on this.
I promised him America will get underway in space on nuclear power before the end of his term.
That's going to be a huge breakthrough.
You know, especially NEP technology is not going to be the fastest way to get from point A to B, but it's going to be a way that we can move a lot of mass towards Mars.
And it's also going to be the same type of reactor technology we'll use for power on the surface, so we can mine propellant and come back.
We are taking meaningful steps in that direction.
We will be able to use the moon base to prove out capabilities before we undertake it.
And look, I think like we're going to see astronauts on Mars in our lifetime.
What does it mean for the NASA budget?
I, I, I've told everyone that I've come across, look, we got the right top line to work within.
We do have to be better capital allocators.
We spent $200 million last year on a canceled program.
I was like, I don't understand this.
It's canceled.
Why do we spend $200 million?
Um, we have, we're not great capital allocators at all.
We spread it out.
We do lots of littles and look, a lot of that is driven from external stakeholders.
Like Which, as I referenced in my prepared marks, when you don't have a competitor and the idea is build goodwill everywhere fine,
But when everything's on the line, you've got to concentrate your resources on the objectives that the taxpayers depend on you to be able to achieve, why we were created in the first place.
So you ask me, is 25 billion a year, plus the plus up that came from one big, beautiful bill, enough to get the job done.
Yeah, sure as hell is.
A lot of times people forget.
A million dollars, a million dollars, a billion dollars, a billion dollars, $25 billion a year.
I mean, look, world-changing companies have been started for less than a million dollars.
We can do an awful lot with $25 billion a year.
Yeah, and of course the relationship with private sector and commercial space companies continues to grow and evolve and change too.
So I guess we put a really fine point on it, since I know we have some space entrepreneurs in the audience.
What do you see as their domain versus yours here?
Yeah, look again, I think it's NASA's job that we should be doing near impossible, where no other agency organization company could ever close a business case on, because your demand signal is one and there's probably no logical revenue model to underwrite it.
That's where NASA should be putting our attention.
And when we have big breakthroughs, we hand it off to industry and Let you know competitive dynamics improve the product or capability and bring down costs.
We owe industry demand signals of where we can forecast lots of demand, where it is potential that there will be other customers beyond us in the, you know, near to midterm.
And that's what we're going to be doing in the near future with Moonbase.
I mean, you're going to have lots of launches.
I mean...
Lots of launches, lots of landers, lots of rovers, and that's going to be an opportunity to experiment again with comms navigation, in-situ resource manufacturing, scientific experiments, habitation.
You know power like we are going to be able to give demand signals, so industry knows where to concentrate the resource.
They'll just say, when we do it, we're going to do it with lots of littles iterative way and not not jump to the, to the dream state, because that's that's where no one lives.
The taxpayers don't win.
No one gets the capabilities they want in the timelines that we require them.
Yeah, I mean, NASA has really been on the forefront.
This has been the case for a number of years in terms of public-private partnerships and thinking differently about contracting.
So how does that continue?
It does continue.
Like, we can't go at this alone.
I mean, there is no question.
I mean right now.
This is the most competitive, healthy commercial space industry in the history of America's space program, right now.
When we need launch, there's lots of companies we can buy launch from.
When we need landers, lots of companies can buy landers.
We need comms and observation, navigation capabilities around the moon.
There's multiple companies that are capable of competing for it.
This is good.
So we will, again, I don't think people have long to wait.
We'll put the demand signal out there for what we require.
And I'm grateful that we have, you know again, the most technologically advanced well-financed, capitalized industry, ready to meet the need.
Life elsewhere.
Do you think we're going to find it?
Uh, do I think we're going to find it?
I would say that if we went and uh, brought the samples back from Mars um, which is a program that people have been asking about for a while, it was canceled in the last administration because it was super expensive.
Um, I think the odds are extremely good you'd have direct evidence of once microbial life.
I think the odds are really good of that.
But I don't think, no matter how many robotic missions we land that are doing analysis, that phone home and say yeah, it's like 90 chance there was something there, that anyone will buy it, until we actually bring the samples back and make a conclusive statement.
But what I will say...
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but if you're ever, you know the late night, having having cocktails with friends and looking up at the stars and being like is life out there.
Right.
And people generally say, surely it must be somewhere.
I mean, you know you got two trillion galaxies and how many stars are in them and how many of them probably had planet formations within a Goldilocks zone.
Yeah, I'll take that bet.
But if you do find proof of microbial life at some point on Mars, when you bring those samples back?
You know we have missions to Europa Clipper that are out there searching for life.
You've got a octocopter, nuclear-powered octocopter, that we're launching to Titan in 2028 searching for life.
If you start getting biosignatures, you know from other worlds within our solar system, it changes the dynamic entirely from like.
Surely it must be out there somewhere.
To what if it's everywhere?
And it might be possible in our lifetimes to prove that.
Okay, we're out of time.
One quick kicker question for you.
You're going to go back to space at some point?
After you're done serving in the government or maybe while you are.
I think I'm going to be very busy the next couple of years, but we'll see.
Thank you.
That's the idea, right?
We're trying to be able to open it up for everyone.
And thankfully you've got industry putting lots of good resources into bringing space from the few to the many.
Jared Isaacman, administrator of NASA.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
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