🔴 LIVE | Jared Isaacman outlines NASA Moon Base plans in virtual update

Well, we've certainly been very busy. If you recall, ignition was just before the Artemis 2 mission launch. So, let's start there. I don't think any of us were quite over what an extraordinary mission that was. We launched Artemis 2 April 1st, sent them around the moon, and brought them back safely to Earth. Got a lot of great data, some great lunar science out of it. And it wasn't just weeks after we brought them back and had their splashdown event at Johnson Space Center that we brought everybody back and announced the Artemis 3 crew. And we're not slowing down there. We've already given the go for stacking. So, we're getting ready to start assembling the Artemis 3 hardware with the goal of getting it outside and getting into wet dress before the end of the year. We're making progress on Artemis 4 hardware as well. We are parallel tracking to the greatest extent possible and we have teams that have been going out in the field to meet vendors all across the supply chain and driving outcomes. In fact, just yesterday I was with Kelly Loeffler from the SBA administration talking to her about how we are going to partner and take some of the pressure points out of the supply chain where valves, hypergolic thrusters would be very applicable for the moon base are slowing down progress, and working with some of the great small businesses from across start producing these and be able to provide them some of the capital to get going with that small business administration initiative. So, those are just some examples. That's all part of the return astronauts to the moon game plan throughout the Artemis program. Then there's the Moon base. We already gave an update about a month ago where we announced some of our first awards along with some of the first rovers that'll be on the lunar surface. So, when our astronauts get there, they'll have something to drive around in. Here we are giving Moon base update two where we're going to have additional awards. Like you said, this is going to be a thing. We are going to come together every month. It won't just be about contract awards of who the next vendors are, but what progress are we making? What behind-the-scenes footage can we show you of some of the landers being assembled, the rovers being assembled, some of the integration of the scientific or tech demonstration payloads, when it's getting out to the pad, and of course, what I know we're all going to be excited for is when we start seeing footage of the launch and landing. So, we're making a lot of progress. Might we turn over to our Moon base guy? What more specifics do you have?

No, other than just reinforcing the importance of going through these phases. This is drawing on the playbook that worked very well for NASA during the 1960s. We didn't just jump right to Apollo 11. Mercury, Gemini, lots of Apollo missions. We want to get back into a rhythm of this. We want lots of reps. It's incredibly challenging just going to the moon, let alone going to the South Pole of the moon and being able to operate in permanently shaded regions. This is extremely difficult. So, let's do a lot of littles and let's learn from every one of them. As you tune in and start watching the robotic, uncrewed landings, starting in 2027, every single time, not only is that a useful mission for the long-term goals of building out a moon base itself, it's bringing down risk for when the astronauts arrive. Every landing we're going to have an opportunity to learn from. So, I think it's exciting. It gives people a lot of opportunity to tune in, see the progress we are making. There will be scientific breakthroughs from every one of them. There will be tech demonstrations, but we're learning and building up to doing something extremely hard, which is being able to operate astronaut crews on a near continuous basis on the lunar surface. This is drawing on the playbook of success from the 1960s. We're bringing it back. This is how you do the near impossible. Just eager to see the first mission get underway.

Sure. I will give you the four. We've got four landers, three vendors. The first one, two awards are going to Astrobotic. The second, we have an award going to Firefly Aerospace, which is their Blue Ghost lander. And then third, we have Intuitive Machines, which is based on their Nova C lander. I will turn it over to our moon base guy to give you the specifics.

If the United States wins the World Cup, we will absolutely find space.

They will have to beat Spain in the quarterfinals, which is predictable, but we will see what happens. But absolutely, we will absolutely.

That would be an awesome capability. First of all, core moon base objectives, having a nuclear RTG on it allows us to go anywhere we want regardless of the illumination. Surviving the lunar night is going to be one of the bigger challenges. With this capability, we wouldn't have to worry about that. So, long traverses, getting into those very hard to reach areas, just like Curiosity and Perseverance have shown us on the surface of Mars. That would be awesome. But then we have payload capacity significant on this thing. We're going to work with our partners in the science mission directorate to find the best payloads we can have, put them on this rover, and get groundbreaking science out of it. We're very excited about this possibility, which we're still studying, but anyway, we are in the business of the near impossible, so why not?

Just a layer on to this. Some time has gone by since the anomaly right now and Blue Origin's response to the situation is almost beyond impressive. That's not just a NASA assessment. You've had representatives from the DOD Space Force out there and seeing the amount of resources they've been able to muster to the problem, how quickly they've already started cleaning things up, the progress they are making on the investigation. I think the CEO Dave Limp is doing a fantastic job putting updates out there. Today they just revealed their new hybrid assembly complex concepts of operation that they're using for New Glenn. So, they're making great progress. Plan A is very much still to launch the Mark 1s on New Glenn and we have time. They are very committed to getting back in the business of launching New Glenn before the end of the year. We've got time beyond that point into 2027 before we're getting nervous. In the spirit beyond just the Blue Origin anomaly, NASA does not sit on our hands and wait for hardware to show up. We are going out and driving outcomes. We are doing that across the entire Artemis initiative. Every one of the ignition initiatives, we are deploying NASA subject matter experts to drive outcomes. It would be almost irresponsible with the importance of the moon base, how the moon base sets up for our Artemis astronauts to return to the surface, not to have plan B's. But plan A was always New Glenn, and plan A is looking a lot better today than it was weeks ago based on the progress the Blue Origin team is making.

I got that here. So, for example, one award is around $144 million. We're giving that to Firefly and Intuitive Machines, and it's in the order of 280 something million dollars for the Astrobotic landers.

Just again, go back into the fact that we're not just sitting around saying we hope it shows up on time. Not with any of our vendors. The whole deploying subject matter experts in the field to drive outcomes gives us insight into where their problems are. The vendor we selected is doing a fantastic job. However, their subcontractor for, say, COPVs or hypergolic thrusters has a backlog. What can NASA do about it? This is why the SBA and NASA partnered and made that announcement yesterday. We are going out and funding where we know there are challenges in the supply chain. We are bringing online some of our test capabilities. After the shuttle era was retired, a lot of our hypergolic test capabilities were diminished. Now, as you put this huge demand signal onto industry and everybody is spooling up, there could be a very long line in getting some of their hardware through our test chambers. We are making investments to bring online test chambers that have been decommissioned for 10 or 15 years to alleviate some of the pressure in the system. It is not all on the vendors and it shouldn't be. It wasn't like that in the 1960s, won't be like that now. NASA will play a part in ensuring the partners we are selecting throughout the Moon base initiative, all of the ignition initiatives, including Artemis four, five, and beyond, are being driven towards the outcomes people expect.

Which is all part of getting the ground truth, objective number two of phase one. So, very valuable. In that version of a rover, smaller ones, bigger ones that will come later, we're going to be getting tons of data from the South Pole, which, again, we know very little about right now.

Good question. In the first set of landers, like the ones we announced today, we're actually going to have stereo cameras that will be looking at that plume surface interaction for us to better understand what's happening when different types of engines — this is a different set of landers — what is happening, and can we characterize and model that very accurately. Then, in the future, part of the technology demonstration initiatives have to do with surface preparation. So, today, if we did nothing, we think we would have to put the landing sites like a mile and a half away from anything meaningful that you don't want impacted. But we don't want to just settle on that. We may start there. We envision potentially building berms that can surround these areas, also nuclear reactor to protect the crews and equipment from radiation. But all of this is just a vision. We've got to try that out. That's why early on we'll be putting rovers and potentially lunar terrain vehicles that will help us try out surface preparation stuff, even if it's just moving some rocks or trying to build a mini berm. All of that plays forward into really building the assets that in phase two will help do the job.

Oh no, there is another. It exists. In fact, I think you showed the video of it. It's real.

I mean, the farthest I can go is we're thinking about it, but I promise you we're thinking about it and we're going to. We've got the hardware, and this is exactly what we should be trying to do: put wins on the board. Getting a capability like Promise to the surface of the moon, we'll probably make some adjustments to some of the instruments that are on it. It's going to bring an immense capability to the lunar south pole in short order. But it very much exists. That there is another reference to...

We have been witness to it. We tried to drive it ourselves, but the experts took over. But yeah, it's there and it's been tested extensively in the JPL Mars rock yard.

Well, I think it would hitch a ride with a commercial lander, to be clear. But the idea is that we have hardware now that was designed for an incredibly harsh environment, equally so on the south pole of the moon, that we can get there and continue the learning. That is an extremely capable vehicle. So there's very little that would hold us back from making use of that hardware at this point. And there are others, too. We have flight hardware that would have gone to the International Space Station, now at Kennedy Space Center, that's no longer required or suitable as a module on the ISS that we might use to start learning — just put it on the lunar surface maybe with some soft goods and something inflatable. Maybe step one to gathering additional data for what the right habitability module should look like on the surface. So continue to expect this. The taxpayer has invested in capabilities, and if it's living in a warehouse at one of the NASA centers and doesn't have an immediate mission need outside of the Moon base, we're probably going to find a way to either put it on the moon or use it elsewhere and start gathering data.

Yeah, and I wouldn't… I mean, we're on Moon Base update two right now. So there's going to be a lot of Moon Base updates. We're doing this monthly going forward. You have a national space policy that calls for building a Moon Base. The President of the United States wants to see a Moon Base. You have bipartisan support from Congress to build a Moon Base. We're going to be sending crew and payload to the moon for a very long time. So if you're in the business of making hardware and you're continuing to think about how to improve that hardware — which you should do when you have a demand signal that goes from infrequent bespoke landers to 'let's do this all the time' — you're probably making worthwhile investments at this point. So there's going to be a lot more Moon Base updates going forward.

Yes to both. I get daily updates. NASA has teams involved. The next morning Blue Origin accepted where we've embedded personnel into the pad recovery effort as part of the anomaly investigation. Not just the Moon base, but Blue Origin is a critical player for the Artemis 3 mission and certainly potential for crew landings to the moon thereafter. So we are informed. It is based on data. It should very much be plan A that we provide all the support we can to get them going again to support Moon base and the Artemis missions. As we said, we can afford plenty. If they're committed to getting back before the end of the year, great. It would be an amazing accomplishment if they did. They can go beyond that. NASA is still funded up until a point. If we start tracking towards mid-2027, that now has implications for the Artemis 3 mission and for uncrewed landers, and that would be more concerning. That's why it's our responsibility, as I said before, across the supply chain, across every vendor contributing to all the ignition priorities, to have the ability for NASA to drive outcomes. But based on the progress we've been seeing so far and the great communication from Dave Limp on this one, we don't have any reason to believe that we would have to select an alternative pathway yet.

Oh, very different. Good question. So, Viper is there to look for volatiles. That core science objective is getting to the south pole of the moon, looking for those volatiles that potentially have been there for thousands of years. We want to get to them. But Viper uses solar power, so we're constrained to the terrain we put it on, how much illumination it gets, the time of year, where it can go. It certainly cannot potentially go into some of these permanently shadowed regions and stay deep in there. Then, based on the lunar nights, it will have a lifespan that is limited by that. Of course, we will try. We work with our science community partners and the Science Mission Directorate to select similar payloads because with Promise, we would not be constrained by solar power. For example, Curiosity and Perseverance have been on Mars for years — I think 15 and 6 years or something like that. So if we have a capability like that, we could choose to embark on long traverses and hit several of these areas where there are permanently shadowed areas. And who knows what other payloads we can put in there depending on the payload capacity.

So, there were two providers, and one of them dropped out rather recently. It's a vendor that we count on for other components to support the Artemis program even beyond the suits, and we're trying to play an active role in that. At this point, as I stated publicly, we are going to put all of our resources into driving outcomes. We're doing it with our landers, we're doing it on the Ignition initiative, and we're doing it on the suit. Since my meeting with Axiom earlier this year, we've embedded people into their operation. I've seen the suits in testing. I've seen NASA astronauts in suits doing simulations and gathering data applicable for lunar operations. So we did have two; one dropped out. We've made our bet on this, and we're putting all our resources into trying to drive a successful outcome. If there is any indication the timelines will not be met, we are not giving up our timeline to return astronauts to the lunar surface because we don't have a suit ready. So as long as everything is tracking, we'll continue to be very supportive partners in this. If anything goes off course, then similar to any of our Ignition initiatives, we'll step in and ensure we meet our timelines.

Well, we've been learning an awful lot on the International Space Station in microgravity on how to keep human beings alive. Human physiology and psychology are both very applicable on deep space missions. What'll be interesting to see is how that changes in one-sixth gravity. Does that take as much of a toll on the human body as spending nine months or a year in microgravity on the ISS? This is why it's the next logical progression. There is much still to learn before we send humans nine months away from Earth on a two‑year mission to Mars. We've done an awful lot at the ISS and we will continue to do so. It is still a great area for research and a proving ground. Just as we're going to take some of the Axiom suits up to the ISS in late '27 or late '28 — ideally late '27 — before we take them to the surface of the moon. We still can do a lot on the ISS, but we will do an awful lot at our moon base. When you're four days away from coming home, if something is problematic instead of what could be more than a year, this is the next logical step on the journey. We should be very grateful we have a moon in such proximity to work with.

That's the challenge, okay? So team USA, get the job done. We've already sent it to the International Space Station. The next one is you have to find a way to get this on a lander.

Well, it always existed. When I was making my way around to all the centers, we went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL takes care of Perseverance and Curiosity. And I was like, 'Okay, so this is one‑for‑one of the actual flight hardware that's on Mars right now.' It made sense very early on. If you've got some sort of hardware in the loop tables here — iron birds you may have heard of — you might want to test it out on that before uploading it to a vehicle that's actually in space or on the surface of Mars. We've had years of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we've got this hardware that the taxpayers have invested a lot in. So the question was posed, 'What if we send it to the moon?' And JPL is great about these good ideas. No surprise. They've got Moonfall, Skyfall, they obviously make great videos. So for Promise, it existed, you just didn't know its name. You may not have seen it very often if you weren't at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but it's probably going to find its way to the lunar south pole.

Yeah, what a time, right? There are so many reasons to be excited and enthusiastic around here. My appreciation: the entire NASA workforce has responded so well coming from the Ignition event. Everybody is working incredibly hard to deliver the outcomes that we're all eager to see right now. You launched a flawless Artemis 2 mission. You announced Artemis 3. You're already go for stacking. We're pulling in Artemis 4 hardware. We're looking for opportunities to pull in Artemis 5 hardware. We're moving very quickly on Moon Base. We've got plan A's and plan B's depending on launch vehicle hardware that's going to be available. We're rebuilding our X‑Plane portfolio around here, by the way. X‑59 is doing great; it's flying a bunch. It's quiet supersonic profile. We're looking forward to seeing a lot more of it. You are going to see in the days ahead some of NASA's fleet of aircraft participating in our 250th birthday celebration here over our nation's capital and other locations. So we're taking our fleet out on the road. You'll see it a lot at space‑themed air shows around the country. Roman has arrived at Kennedy Space Center. We're going to see that. We continue to get earlier on our time frame for that. Before the end of August, we should see Roman fly. We've got a rescue mission going up off of an L‑1011 Pegasus at Kwajalein, which could be tomorrow. There's just a lot of exciting things going on. Not to mention we have a crew up on the International Space Station doing awesome work. I think the entire agency is coming together. Our international partners are all making big statements and commitments in support of the Moon base right now. It's an exciting time to be at NASA. So I hope everyone is tuning in, paying attention. We'll be back with you in a month giving you the next Moon Base update number three as we continue to make progress. And yeah, just try and change the world in air and space.

Thank you.