The Most Honest Conversation About NASA You'll Ever Hear - Jared Isaacman

This is hard. It's dangerous. I mean, 8.8 million pounds of thrust is what accelerates that capsule to 25,000 miles per hour. That's a lot of energy to put into a vehicle. We now have a competitor once again, a rival on the world stage that can do what the Soviets were not capable of doing in the 1960s.

Yeah, so it's an interesting question.

So, great question.

I love your questions. Do you do homework on these? Because these are like the biggest NASA problems, right?

What do you want? And I fully agree, and I think a lot of people do at NASA. We have all our eggs in one basket, so in some sort of man-made disaster that could create an extinction event for us. Who knows whatever. AI goes wild, and we have Terminators hunting us down. Or the next tier is you have a dinosaur type of event.

It's great to be here.

So, I'm Jared Isaacman, as you mentioned, I'm the 15th administrator of NASA. I had a very interesting career, kind of parallel careers in business and aerospace since I was really a teenager. So, Shift Four, you mentioned, is a company I started when I dropped out of high school at 16. And I was just looking for pizza and beer money, maybe slightly underage at the time. But I've always had a passion since quite literally kindergarten for aviation and space. I mean I went to space camp as a kid. You know, watched Right Stuff, Top Gun. I just always enamored by that. So I started a parallel aviation career when I was about 20 years old. Flew air shows, set some world records, built the world's largest private air force to serve and help train the Department of War. Been lucky to go on and lead two missions to space. So the first all civilian mission to orbit and then followed up with a development mission, did a space walk. And before I knew it I found myself an opportunity to lead the world's most accomplished space agency and here I am.

I love my job. I mean this is a great... I think it's the greatest job. I mean that maybe you know, the President of the United States he has a great job with a lot of responsibilities, but I'll tell you I couldn't be happier every day. I mean I get to work with the best and brightest from across the country to pursue and unlock the secrets of the universe. It doesn't get any better than this. I mean it's a hard job for sure, but I'm very grateful to have it and serve the President.

Well, I think that overarching right is we're here to change the world in air and space. And really with specific to space is to unlock the secrets of the universe. Now how we do it, we have a national space policy that says return American astronauts to the moon. So we're going back. The opening act Artemis 2 which just wrapped up a couple weeks ago couldn't have been done better. I mean incredibly challenging mission by the way. You send a spacecraft 25,000 miles per hour around the moon farthest from Earth than any humans have ever gone before. And supported by four incredibly talented, very professional, but astronauts, but just amazing human beings. I mean, these were our ambassadors to the stars, and they did great. But that was the first. We're going to keep going. We're going to have Artemis 3 next year, Artemis 4 in 2028, where we're going to put astronauts back on the surface of the moon. In parallel, our national space policy says, 'Don't just go back for the rocks and the flags this time. Build a base. Establish an enduring presence on the moon. Realize its scientific, economic potential. Prepare for where we go next, which is Mars.' And along the way, we are doing things to stimulate an orbital economy, maybe a lunar economy. And then we're launching the greatest discovery assets the world has ever known, like Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope. Well, there's a lot more just like that. Again, trying to answer all those questions people have thought about since the beginning of time.

Well, it's a great question. And for a while, we weren't trying. So, I think that's important, you know, it's like Artemis 2 is first time we've sent humans around the into the lunar environment in 53 years. Well, we haven't been trying to go back for 53 years. I mean, we did the near impossible on July 20th, 1969, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and then we brought them home safely. I mean, what an accomplishment during a time when we knew so little about this domain. And then, of course, we went back for subsequent Apollo missions, and in 1972, on Apollo 17, we said we achieved our objectives, and we shifted our focus to lower Earth orbit. We built the space shuttle, which was another engineering marvel. And we put astronauts in lower Earth orbit near frequently. We built an International Space Station, this orbital laboratory, in lower Earth orbit, where we learned how to keep human beings alive in space for essentially 25 consecutive years. If you're 25 years old or younger, you haven't lived a time on this Earth where there wasn't an astronaut in space orbiting above you in the International Space Station. So, we just changed our focus. And along the way, look at all the things we have. We have satellite-based communications. You have Starlink. I mean, accessing information anywhere on Earth is kind of foundational to solving a lot of the world's problems. We have observation Earth science satellites up there, weather satellites. We can predict and respond to natural disasters better. So, we've done a lot of good things in space, but yes, I would say, in the last few decades, especially during President Trump during his first term when he created the Artemis program, we said it's time to go back. And that's where I think it becomes a fair question of well, since then, why has it taken so long? And the answer, sir, is we didn't have competition. We certainly did in the 1960s. You know, it was us against the Soviets trying to get there. Competition is a great thing. Heck, even now when we're asking companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin to build the landers that will take astronauts back to the surface of the moon, that competition is great. I mean, you get two of the wealthiest individuals in the world that love space and get those hard-charging personalities competing, good things happen, right? Costs go down, that's great. Well, we now have a competitor once again. We have a rival on the world stage that can do what the Soviets were not capable of doing in the 1960s. The Chinese can absolutely and will put their astronauts, their taikonauts on the surface of the moon. And now we're back firing on all cylinders. We're rebuilding muscle memory. We're getting back at it. And you just saw Artemis 2 in the next couple years and you see astronauts back on the moon again. That's what competition does.

And it's such a good question. And I like getting it. The answer is look, we can do both, you know, we should put a lot of our resources into solving the problems of today, the hardships that people are encountering every day here on Earth. But you don't hit the pause button on progress, you know, you still want your children to grow up into a better world, a more exciting future for them, right? So, you make small investments into the future. NASA's budget is a quarter of a percent of the discretionary budget. That's a pretty small price to pay for all that we might learn, all of its economic potential, the technological benefits we get back here on Earth. Again, think of GPS, think of communications, think of weather satellites, right? How we respond again to natural disasters, forest fires. Those are all orbiting assets above us that make life a little bit better here that we wouldn't have, you know, if a half century ago people said, 'Whoa, let's stop this whole Apollo thing and going to the moon, and let's just focus on the issues today.' So, the answer is both, right? I mean, the vast majority of our resources should go to the hardships of today, but I think a quarter of a percentage for all we can learn, all we might stand to gain, economic potential, and how about inspiring the next generation to grow up and do it better. I mean, how many more children are going to dress up as astronauts for Halloween because of the mission we just flew a couple months ago? That's worth the price, right?

So, they were that crew was picked before me.

They were training for over 3 years. And it showed because they were fantastic. I will say that's not the normal schedule. We don't want to launch complicated moon rockets every 3 years. We want to launch at least every year. So, we're about I would say a couple weeks away from naming the Artemis 3 crew that will fly in 2027. And you always select the crew that gives you the best chance to meet the mission objectives. So, I've been to space twice. I got to pick my crews both times and I was extremely fortunate but always came together with the people that gave you based on their backgrounds, their skills, how you all kind of come together and work as a single team. And you do that to give your mission the best chance of success because look, this is hard. It's dangerous. I mean, 8.8 million pounds of thrust is what accelerates that capsule to 25,000 mph. That's a lot of energy to put into a vehicle. Things happen in just split seconds and you need the very best there. We obviously got that right on Artemis 2. We'll get it right again with 3.

I mean, yeah, you're talking about essentially a controlled explosion of enormous magnitude. That's what your 8.8 million pounds of thrust is. Two solid rocket boosters, four RS-25 engines that are accelerating again that tiny capsule to Earth escape velocities. So, being able to so much velocity, so much energy going into that spacecraft where if you send it away from Earth, it may never come back. Like that's the potential you have there. Now, we obviously pick our trajectories and you use the moon's gravitational influence as well to bring it back around. But yeah, that's a lot of performance right there. And like I said, you know, it all happens in seconds. That's your reaction time. So, they train an awful lot for it. And then, after the mission is over, all of that energy that you put into that tiny spacecraft, now it slams into Earth's atmosphere 25,000 mph, becomes a big compression event into the atmosphere. You've got plasma going around the vehicle. It glows like a fireball. And that's when the heat shield does its thing to start taking that energy out. And then you've got the parachutes that bring them back into the water safely.

Great question. You know, one of the some of the changes that I put in place coming back, which is I can't take credit for any of this because all I'm doing is dusting off the old NASA playbook from the 1960s. But you know, we didn't just jump to Apollo 11. We had all the Mercury missions, Gemini missions, a lot of Apollo missions before 11 came up. So, we try and launch with frequency and get into a cadence of learning. And what we learn, we use to inform the next mission. So, when I came in, there was going to be Artemis 2, which we just saw fly. And then there was going to be Artemis 3, which was going to land on the moon.

3 years later. And that wasn't going to work. You have to do things in phases to learn and inform what comes next, or you're taking way too much risk. So, now we're going to launch Artemis 3 instead of in late '28, it'll be in '27. And instead of going to the moon, it's going to stay close to Earth. But what it's going to do is it's going to rendezvous and dock with the landers that we will use on the moon. Now, we did the same thing in the 1960s. It was called Apollo 9. And the idea is you were testing out two spacecraft docked together, but you're doing it when you're hours away from the ocean here on Earth instead of 4 days away on the moon.

So, something goes wrong, you don't like it, you're in a much safer place. So, that's what Artemis 3 will do is it'll test the lunar landers. And from what we'll learn from that, ideally we'll roll into Artemis 4 when we take those landers to the surface of the moon. And you see NASA astronauts walk on the moon again.

And then for all the skeptics, they'll be fully answered.

There's no deniers. I'd be clear, we 100% went to the moon. In my office at NASA, I have the boot that touched the lunar regolith in my office. I've talked to the astronauts who've been there. I have moon rocks in my office that we brought back from Apollo 17. But I get it. It's been a while. You know, the camera footage back then wasn't quite as good. We're... There'll be no doubts this time.

Yeah. So, I mean, we're going to try and do essentially what we did with the International Space Station where we maintain a continuous presence. Now, we don't keep people up there for 25 years. They go up for 6-month rotations, 9-month rotations. Early on, they might have only been a matter of weeks or month. So, I would expect something similar with the moon base. Now, the first couple missions, they'll just be on the moon for days. We haven't been there in a long time. Let's not push it. But as the moon base builds out, which will be done in an iterative way, phase, lots of littles, learn and from the next one. Eventually, you'll get to kind of the habitation modules where you could potentially keep a crew on the moon for maybe a month. And then eventually, you work your way up as you add more modules and logistics capabilities to potentially 6 months. Then you bring them back, rotate the next crew in. And what's so important there is the International Space Station has been microgravity, essentially is zero G, which is an interesting learning environment. Now we're going to go to a reduced gravity environment, 1/6 gravity. What can we do there? What can we learn from that that's different than microgravity? And what else can you interact with? How about the lunar regolith? We're going to be 3D printing lunar regolith.

So, the lunar regolith, so literally the dust, the rock that's on the lunar surface. We're going to 3D print. We're going to work with. There's water ice on the South Pole of the moon. We are going to work with that. We're going to perfect in situ resource manufacturing. So, taking water ice and using it to make liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which are propellants we use in rockets. And why is this important? Because in the not too distant future, let's just say in the 10-year time frame, we could send astronauts to Mars. The hard part is, how do you bring them back? You got to refuel. Now, we're also going to make bets in nuclear power and propulsion in kind of next generation spaceships. But, you may actually have to make your own propellant on Mars to come home. And if you're going to do that, I think it's better to sort that out 4 days away from home at the moon than it is, you know, 9 months to a year away on Mars.

4 days.

Call it 9 months, but that's only every 2 years when the planets align perfectly.

So, those are just windows where you can undertake a mission to Mars in a timely and efficient manner with propellant. Nuclear power can change that a little bit, so we could have expanded launch windows, but essentially every 2 years you could potentially take a trip to Mars and call it 9 months. It depends on the performance of the rocket.

Yeah, I mean I think 10 to 15 years is all very reasonable. I mean, to be frank, when you see astronauts walk on the moon again, so that's again late 2028 type time frame, know that at that point the capabilities to put astronauts on Mars is actually a lot closer than you may think because the velocities to get to the moon or Mars are near identical. The difference is you got to keep people alive for 9 months to get there versus 4 days. And then how do you bring them home? That's the hard part. That's what's going to take time, and that's why we need to go to the moon first and use the South Pole as our technical proving ground to learn how to make propellant with water ice there because it's hard to do here on Earth, and that's under an atmosphere and 1 G. So it's very hard. It's going to be hard to do it on the moon. It'll be even harder on Mars. So we're going to figure all that out, but yeah, the real hard part is can you bring them back home? And there's no one-way missions at NASA. So that's what's going to take the most time.

Well, I would tell you the journey leading up to going to space is just as good as the mission itself. And it's kind of like my job at NASA today. I mean, I got to spend years with some of the absolute brightest, most talented, hard-working human beings imaginable that are not just coming together to make a mission like those that I've been on happen, but they serve like a bigger goal, making life multi-planetary, making humankind a spacefaring civilization, giving us the tools to venture out and kind of satisfy that curiosity that I think is inherent with everyone when you look up at the night sky and just wonder about the possibilities, right? That being part of that and watching them work was awesome. I mean, these are some of my closest friends. Now, I will say when you are on mission, it's a hell of a view. You know, you feel very, very fortunate to be in that position, to have that perspective that few others get. You certainly know how hard it is, like how dangerous it is to put all that energy into a spacecraft to get you into space, how hard it is to bring you back home alive. You certainly, your point before, sir, you get such an appreciation for scale. Like you said, even some of the most brilliant scientists in the world, it's still very hard for them to get their arms around the size of our solar system, let alone the trillion other stars that are out there in our galaxy, the two trillion other galaxies that exist. It is extremely hard to get your arms around that. So, I'd say when you're there, you get this extreme appreciation for how small we are, like quite literally a speck of sand in the vastest desert you could ever imagine.

So, my first mission, we were at about 550 km, which is above the International Space Station, it's above the Hubble telescope. And then my second mission we went to 1,400 km to the inner portion of the Van Allen radiation belt. That was actually a record at the time for the farthest humans have been to Earth since the last moon landing mission. Two of my crewmates were the females who had traveled farthest from Earth ever. And we knew that when the Artemis 2 mission all those records would be broken and we said we can't wait for our friends to do that. And that rocket was so powerful that in the first 13 minutes of flight they broke all the records.

But yeah, it was a fun mission.

Yeah, so it's an interesting question because we had this highly elliptical orbit. So when we were closest to the Earth, we were only 190 km above it, which is very low. So you actually see literally civilizations. You can see contrails from airliners. I remember distinctly like you could see how busy the air traffic was above Europe from all these airliner contrails. And then when you swing around to your apogee, the farthest you are from Earth at 1,400 km, it's the blue marble. I mean you can see continents. And that would happen essentially every 100 minutes.

So I mean imagine that perspective. And the Artemis 2 crew, they had an even wilder highly elliptical Earth orbit. And the reason we actually did that, it's slightly different reasons for Artemis 2 because their mission was ultimately to go around the moon. For us, it's because we were kind of kissing the inner portion of the Van Allen radiation belt. So for those who would say we never went to the moon, they'd say that is like a brick wall and you hit it and the radiation just kills you. Well, I can tell you having been there, I'm still alive and well and I still run marathons, but it is very high radiation. So, actually in a matter of, I would call it seven orbits. So, really, call it like less than 10 hours, the radiation exposure my crewmates and I received was the equivalency of spending 3 months on the International Space Station.

So, it's very survivable, you just need to go through it very quick. So, that's why the top portion of our orbit, the apogee, would hit the radiation belt and then to balance out the radiation exposure, we came in very close to Earth, which is a much lower radiation environment.

Yes, for sure.

Yeah.

There's no doubt.

Great question. This is what... because there's been so few people that have been to orbit, I think nations generally try and preserve somewhat of the hero image of it all. I can tell you that 50% of the people feel horrible their first 3 days in space. Like, think of it as like the worst motion sickness you can imagine, they can throw up. And then the other 50%, the lucky 50%, you feel like you're just hanging upside down from your bed for like 3 days. After like 3 to 5 days, your body kind of adjusts and you're normal, I would say. You'll always feel congested because basically all the fluid in your body, absent gravity, kind of flows up to your upper torso and your face. So, you get kind of like these chipmunk cheeks. So, you always will feel a little congested and such, but

Yeah, that's the reality. For the first 3 to 5 days, half the people are really sick and the other half feel like they're hanging upside down from their bed. And then you settle in.

The longer you're in space, the worse it is on your body. So, all sorts of impacts: bone density loss, cardiovascular system, vestibular system. So, when you come back from space, you feel like you're on a boat. Now, oftentimes these days you are on a boat, 'cause that's how we get you out of the water.

But then when you're back on land, you're still on a boat. And basically the horizon is just kind of moving a little bit. And that also can make people sick for a bit. But eventually you get back to normal.

Excellent question. I'm going to give you the really long answer to it. People ask me all the time, 'Hey, if I want to grow up and be an astronaut, what career field would you recommend?' I'm like, 'Look, there's great ones. You don't have to just be a test pilot or an engineer.' We're building a moon base. We're going to go and build an outpost on Mars. We need people with all sorts of backgrounds. But if you want one position that's really safe, medical field. Because the human body doesn't like being in space, and we're not going to fix that anytime soon. So, the more doctors and health care professionals that you have in space, the better. And you just asked a question that we don't have a good answer for, which is: we send somebody up in microgravity on the International Space Station for 9 months, you bring them back to Earth, they're not walking. They're falling over. They're probably going to throw up. Maybe if people held them up a little bit for a period, but they're going to be hard up for at least a week, maybe 2 weeks before they're kind of a little bit more normal again, right?

So, it begs the question: you send someone to Mars for months, and they're about to do their Neil Armstrong moment and take the first step on Mars, what happens? Do they fall over and throw up in their visor? We got to solve that. So, we put exercise equipment on the International Space Station to try and help. And some point in the future we can make artificial gravity, just spinning the spaceships like you see in sci-fi will work. Is that enough to help? Is the reaction in 1/3 gravity on Mars, the physiological reaction, not as bad as when you come back to 1G on Earth? We don't know.

Well, if you're on Mars, it's going to be extremely cold. You're also in near vacuum, by the way. Mars has some atmosphere, but it's predominantly CO2, really it doesn't have much at all. From a pressure perspective, you might as well be in the vacuum of space. So, there's a lot of challenges to deal with there, but we know how to manage that. Astronauts go out and do spacewalks kind of all the time. It's actually extremely hard to dissipate even body heat in space. Generally the concern more is that you overheat in those suits. We have to use liquid cooling to help. But yeah, there's no doubt. It's just going to be cold all the time generally on Mars. But even now when we do spacewalks, when you're in the sun, you can have positive 250 to negative 250 degree swings.

I love your questions. You must have done some great homework going into these, because these are like the biggest NASA problems, right?

Yeah. I say it all the time: we will probably get to the point where we will have the technical means to send astronauts to Mars and bring them back before we fully understand the physiological and psychological implications of doing so. So you're spot on here. We don't generally draw attention to things that we try and maintain a hero image on, but there have been psychological issues in space. Several times it's happened to our astronauts, happened to the Russian cosmonauts before. And that's when you're hours away in lower Earth orbit from coming home. If you really needed to, we try and plan. We did a medical evacuation, nothing to do with these subjects, a real genuine medical condition developed. We brought the astronaut home and the crew safely in a couple days, but we actually could do it in hours if need be. So, you think of a psychological stressor of being in this very dangerous environment. You're surrounded by everything that's trying to kill you. Micrometeoroids, orbital debris. Billions of bullets whizzing around that can cut through a spacecraft. Radiation environment. No atmosphere, no pressure, no breathable air around you. Everything's trying to kill you, plus it's a high stress job. We've had those issues when hours away from being in the water. Now, you're on the moon, you look out the window, you look through the visor of your space suit, it's a blue marble. It looks like Earth. And you're 4 days from coming home. When you're on Mars, there's no marble there. It's a tiny blue speck of light. And you could be years away from coming home depending on planetary alignment. So, do I think that's going to create some psychological issues? You bet. So, I think it's very important to make sure, as we've done to the best of our abilities and continue to as we keep learning, to make sure we send the right folks that are well prepared for that environment. I've had people come to me and they're like, 'I can't wait to sign up to go to Mars. I'd go one way, no problem.' You're not making the cut if you tell me that.

Generally speaking, as a nation, as a space agency, you want to send people that love life, that want to go there on behalf of their nation for all we may stand to learn, and come back to tell us about it and make good decisions and be able to handle an environment that does not get more foreign to us than sending astronauts to Mars. You want to make sure you send the right people.

Well, if I may, I think the best thing that can come from actually sending people to space would be figuring out what is the space or orbital economy. Why I say that goes to one of your first questions: this stuff isn't inexpensive. How can you put so many resources into this when we have problems here on Earth? I fully stand by that a quarter percent of our discretionary budget is worth it, but you're not going to get that sci-fi future we may have imagined as kids with lots of orbiting space stations and space hotels and near light speed hibernation. You're never going to get any of that if it's perpetually funded by taxpayers. At some point you run into the limit where that balance you and I talked about before kind of crosses the line. But if you can find something, just as we learn, where you can get more value out than what you put in that requires that unique environment of microgravity or lunar regolith or something, that's different because then all the other money comes in. If you can do that, that's how we get that true spacefaring civilization we all want. As you see in all good sci-fi movies, whether it's spice or something else that people are mining, you need that economic driver. That's to sustain humankind's ambitions to collectively go out and explore and discover. What would be the single greatest discovery wherever you go is to answer the question: are we alone?

Yeah.

I think what Elon and I fully agree on, and I think a lot of people at NASA and those that commit to what I think is the greatest adventure in human history, believe that we have all our eggs in one basket. In order of most likely to occur: some sort of man-made disaster that could create an extinction event for us. Whether you think of nuclear weapons or chemical or biological weapons. That's the most likely scenario. Next, or who knows, AI goes wild and we have Terminators hunting us down. The next tier is a dinosaur-type event. At NASA we have responsibility for the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. I feel reasonably good that especially as our capabilities improve over the next 10 years, we will have a good handle on true extinction level type asteroids and be in a position to have options to protect humankind. But if you have an interstellar object traveling at those velocities, a comet coming from outside our solar system, there's probably nothing within our technological abilities in any near term to defend against that. Is it likely? Is it possible? Dinosaurs... the moon looks pretty banged up to me. So, having options for that. And then, inevitably, our star is going to go the way of other stars. The only question is when do you want to do something about it? I think Elon's saying, well, he's here now. He's got resources and a lot of bright people. Why not take some of the first steps in the direction of diversifying humankind?

Sure. We also get that question a lot because people assume this is a new development.

[clears throat]

In the space race in the 1960s, we didn't go to the moon alone. Grumman built the lunar lander, the LEM. Boeing built the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft. So, everybody came together and contributed. Many of those companies still contribute today. And then you got new ones like SpaceX and Blue Origin, but you got Rocket Lab, Firefly, ULA, Stoke. There's so many companies now that are taking advantage of this new commercial space economy. And SpaceX, look, they're the best. They pioneered rapid reusability. Launching rockets, catching them on ships, Falcon Heavy with those boosters coming down and landing. How impressive. In doing so, they reduced the cost materially to put mass in orbit. Whether it's a human being or cargo or a new telescope to search for biosignatures or landers that'll go on the moon someday. They brought cost down big time. That is so important to our mission, for national security, for what the Department of Defense does, for commercial capabilities. Starlink satellites and such. So, they're doing great. They are one of our two vendors. Not only do we rely on them for launch a lot, they're the only way we send NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. And they're also building the lander that will take astronauts to the surface of the Moon and take a lot of mass to the surface to build the moon base. That's incredible. Blue Origin, they're doing very similar things. They have their New Glenn rocket, which is very impressive. They demonstrated reusability on that. They were also building a lander for us. They're building landers for astronauts, landers for cargo. They're building a bus architecture, a standard template spacecraft that you can put science instruments on or other payloads. So, they're doing that, which is really interesting. And there's others. To do the near impossible, you can't go at it alone. We're lucky to have SpaceX, lucky to have Blue Origin, and others like that.

And it's already happening. To achieve those things.

Take the Soviet Union. We had a great race to get to the Moon. They jumped out way ahead. We had the Sputnik moment. 'Wow, they put a satellite above the Earth and kept it in orbit.' Then they put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. Not only put him in space, put him in orbit. Took us three crude launches before we had John Glenn in orbit. Alan Shepard was suborbital, Gus Grissom suborbital, then John Glenn. They were the first to do a spacewalk with Alexei Leonov. They came out way ahead of us. Then we mobilized the resources of the nation and rose to the occasion, met the moment. We landed Neil and Buzz on the moon. It was pretty incredible. What did we do thereafter? We had the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program, very famous, where we docked the Apollo spacecraft with the Soyuz spacecraft. There's a great picture of the American astronaut and cosmonaut shaking hands. This was during the height of the Cold War. Then what did we do? We built a space station together. We cooperate on the International Space Station. Every time you see a NASA SpaceX Crew Dragon launch to the space station, there's a Russian cosmonaut on board. And every time a Soyuz launches, including my good friend who's launching this summer, Anil Menon, a NASA astronaut, he's launching on the Soyuz. How we have continuity of station is that it guarantees there's always a Russian cosmonaut and an American NASA astronaut up there to work together. Rivalry from the first space race led to cooperation and collaboration. Had we not had that initial competition, would any of this have come to be? Would we have landed on the moon? Would the Russians have pioneered the first spacewalk? Probably not. So it absolutely can lead that way. Right now with China, we see ourselves in a race again. The high ground does matter. Do I envision there could be some world in the future where there is collaboration just as there was with the Soviets? For sure.

I think so in some ways. There's more than just national prestige on the line. July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin land on the moon. The world paused, took notice, and said, 'Wow, if America can do this, I wonder what else they're capable of doing.' I bet it gave some of our adversaries, some of our rivals, additional pause before they encroached on things of national security importance. Maybe it led to less conflict, less wars, and less lives lost. But I think the inverse is also true. If you make a promise and put a lot of resources into it, and you mobilize what you believe is your absolute best in technological might, and you come up short, it also sends a message. 'I wonder if this is broken, I wonder what else is.' I take that very seriously. I think that's a national security obligation for the agency. Yes, we have competition, and maybe someday that leads to future collaboration. China, the US, and our international partners, we all benefit from these investments being made. Just like we talked about earlier: GPS satellites, weather satellites, the ability to anticipate natural disasters, to guide in rescue forces. These were all benefits we have here in large part due to the investments made into our space program, and that will happen again for China and the US. We all have derived benefit, but this competition is moving us in the right direction. I do think it's imperative the United States not come up short in this, because it sends a message that something isn't working the way it used to. Under President Trump's leadership and my leadership at NASA, that is a message we would ever be willing to accept.

The United States has lots of international partners. As you just saw with Artemis 2, there was a Canadian Space Agency astronaut. Many people probably don't realize this, but since American astronauts were the only ones who ever went to the moon during the Apollo era, Jeremy Hansen from Canada is the first non-American to fly to the moon. It's kind of cool. Parts of our spacecraft are made by the European Space Agency. We call it the European Service Module. Parts of the moon base are going to be built by the Italians. UAE is contributing to it.

They're looking at rovers, communications right now. They were also working on an airlock for us. They're looking to maybe adapt some of those investments to surface applications. They want to be partners on the moon base. They're doing impressive work. They've got a Mars mission coming up. We're going to support them with the Deep Space Network. So, yes, we don't go at it alone. In terms of other countries with human spaceflight programs, as of today, America, Russia, and China have the capabilities to put astronauts into space. India will be next, I believe. They've been working on their program for some time. ISRO is a very capable organization. They've already put astronauts into space through our programs here at NASA, but they're building their own indigenous human spaceflight program. We're pretty excited to watch that. We want to be helpful.

Unlikely in that respect. By the time my kids are in their 30s or 40s, we will send astronauts to Mars and we will almost assuredly have some sort of an outpost there. A scientific outpost, think of what we do in Antarctica. Send teams for 6 months, learn what you can. Next, maybe it's more like 18 months. Next time planetary windows align, you bring them back home. Maybe we have nuclear power and propulsion spaceships. That's a big priority of mine. That would open up more launch and return windows. So, that'll happen. The moon base, I imagine, will be on another scale. I think there'll be multiple space stations at that point. But everything in space, for as glorious as it is to be there and see with your eyes what that environment is like, it's extremely dangerous. You're never getting close to the Southwest flight in terms of safety. What I think you need is that space economy, orbital economy, lunar economy, to necessitate more people living and working in space. There is a lot of scientific potential on Mars. It is a planet, unlike the moon. There is an atmosphere. There's things to do there. There's water ice there, subsurface and in the poles. So, there's a lot to do there. If my kids said, 'Hey, I want to be a scientist and researcher. I want to go to Mars,' I think that is a viable path. If it's, 'I want to take a vacation to the sunny tundra of Mars,' not likely. Probably not a good idea.

Humans going there?

If we're talking about uncrewed robotic missions, they're all interesting. A lot of the moons are of greatest interest to us. We have prioritized where we think the highest probability of maybe discovering microbial or other type life could be in our solar system, let alone our galaxy. We already launched a mission called Europa Clipper. That's going to the moon of Europa where there is an ice ocean. There is a possibility that we might learn that there could be biosignatures there. We are sending a nuclear-powered octacopter drone. This isn't like the drone in your backyard. This thing is like 2,000 kg. It's big. We are sending it to Saturn's moon of Titan, which is always considered an interesting spot for potential biosignatures. It's going to fly around and scout out and look for biosignatures.

There are other high potential moons that might be of interest. We are looking to send an orbiter to Uranus as a potential mission. The outer solar system we don't study much. That's because we rely on solar power. Once you get past Jupiter, the effectiveness of our sun drops materially, like sub 4%. But nuclear power and propulsion opens up a lot of opportunities. Get to Mars faster for crew, put nuclear power plants on the moon, on Mars to make propellant. It also allows you to explore the outer solar system in ways you couldn't do previously. In the search for life, people think about the two trillion other galaxies that are out there and surely it must be somewhere. But the simple reality is it could even be in our backyard.

The NASA team, our partners, the workforce, they're doing all the heavy lifting, believe me. They're doing the inspiring work. I'm just grateful to work alongside them and happy to be here and share a little bit about the journey we're on.

Thank you.