NASA PRESS Confrence 7/24/2026 Jared Isaacman

Thank you, sir. It is absolutely great to be back here at EAA Oshkosh. Those aren't aware, NASA actually, for whatever reason, took a year off last year from attendance here, and I can tell you there's a lot of places that NASA should be at, but one place for sure that we belong is here at EAA Oshkosh. So, I'm really pleased to see the F-15, the F-18, the T-38 here, and then the great team from NASA behind me that's here representing these aircraft. Please take some time, go up, talk to them, learn a little bit about the history of these aircraft and what they do. You know, when you see an F-15 and F-18 with what we do with that mission, very different than what the Navy and the Air Force does with those aircraft. We do high-altitude research, we do flight test. It's pretty exciting work. And that T-38 behind you is what we use for high-consequence training for our astronauts that undertake pretty exciting missions like you saw recently, for example, the Artemis 2 mission. And I'll tell you, take a look at the serial number on that one, 61. I'm willing to bet it's even older than the B-52, which is good because it says a little bit about our history at NASA. You probably have T-38s there that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin logged some time in. Probably also says something about our budget, but we love the T-38. So, we got a bunch of them. So, let me use this time to tell you a little bit about what we're working on at NASA. If you're following what we're doing, you've probably heard some of this already. And then I'd love to hear from you. Love to take some questions. And if I don't know the answer, we got a lot of great really smart NASA people behind me that we can bring up to the stage. So, starting with Artemis 2, America's back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon and bringing them home safely.

Artemis 2 was a great mission. And I'll tell you, like a lot of us here in the aviation field, you have a good debrief where you capture good lessons learned. And what we experienced during that mission, of all the things that we imagined could go wrong and trained for, it went pretty smoothly. Very minor issues. We had one of four water valves, some small helium flow issues in the pressurization system. But what we took away most is you can't launch a rocket as complicated, as powerful as SLS with 8.8 million pounds of thrust sending those astronauts 25,000 miles an hour, and do it every 3 and a half years. Because that's when Artemis 1 flew, which is the uncrewed demonstration. And 3 and a half years later, April 1st, 2026, Artemis 2 flew. And had we done nothing, Artemis 3 would have been the crewed lunar landing about 3 years thereafter. And I think we can all appreciate in the world of currency, you don't do anything well if you only do it every 3 and a half years, whether it's flying an airplane, an instrument approach, or if you're a golfer. I can't imagine your game would be very good if you only hit the links every 3 and a half years. So, what are we doing? We standardized the SLS vehicle. We stopped trying to turn every one of them into a work of art. We committed the resources at NASA to launching SLS every year and use it as an opportunity to bring down risk and inform the next mission. So, Artemis 3 is already coming together. The vehicle assembly building in Kennedy Space Center, we already started stacking the solid rocket boosters. We will push that vehicle out before the end of this year, run some tests on it, send a little bit of a message that we know how to do this with repetition. We already announced the Artemis 3 crew. They're in training. And what are you going to see in 2027? You're going to see the three most powerful rockets in the world launch in quick succession. First will be the New Glenn rocket that will put the Blue Origin test vehicle into lower Earth orbit. Then the SLS rocket will launch with the crew of Artemis 3. And then the Starship rocket will launch, which if you're not paying attention, they've got a launch schedule for later today that should be pretty exciting. And then the Orion spacecraft plus the two landers will converge in lower Earth orbit. We'll rendezvous and dock with both of them. We'll test out the interoperability, controllability of the integrated vehicles. We'll start rebuilding that muscle memory. We'll gather data from it. It will certainly inform hardware and software procedural changes, and we'll roll that into Artemis 4 in 2028 when NASA astronauts will return to the surface of the moon.

Now, in parallel, we're building a moon base. President Trump's national space policy said return to the moon, but do so to stay this time. This is really important. This is the first time humanity is building an outpost on another world. And we are fortunate that we have been gifted a moon 3 to 4 days away to use as the technological proving ground for where we go next. So, starting in early 2027 on a near monthly basis, you're going to see uncrewed robotic landers, rovers going to the lunar surface. Lots of little, we call it the science of survival. Figure out what does and doesn't work in that extremely harsh environment on the South Pole of the moon. And we're going to use that data to inform surface communications, power, what will eventually be habitation, mobility for surface improvements. We're probably going to, just like we have runways here, we're going to probably pave landing pads in the lunar regolith. We'll use it for logistics. We'll use it for astronaut transport. When the Artemis 4 crew gets to the moon in 2028, there will be rovers waiting for them. Which is pretty cool to think about that.

We're also doing all the other things. International Space Station. For those of you here who are 25 years old or younger, there hasn't been a time that you've been alive that we didn't have astronauts in space above you at the International Space Station. We're learning every single day in the unique environment of microgravity. We even had the first in the history of human spaceflight medical evacuation on Crew 11 earlier this year. That's the power of the American space program that we can bring our astronauts home when we want to, pull forward the next mission, launch Crew 12 a few weeks thereafter. Crew 13 is getting ready to go to space and relieve them in September. We've got an X-Plane portfolio that we're rebuilding right now. If you're here at EAA Oshkosh, I'm guessing you're interested in that subject. There was a time that a lot of the technology that you see demonstrated here in the F-22 Raptor like thrust vectoring controls, fly-by-wire was pioneered by NASA. This is during the days when we had X-Planes that included the SR-71 Blackbird. We're down to one, that's not enough. We're rebuilding our X-plane portfolio. We're going higher, we're going faster till we blur the lines between in and out of the atmosphere, and that's underway right now.

Science missions. So, we've got the next great exploration asset launching on August 30th. It'll be a Falcon Heavy. So, you don't see those every day, although I suspect over the next couple of years you're going to see a lot more of them. Those are three Falcon 9s, it's going to accelerate the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and send it out to a Lagrange point. Nancy Grace Roman to Hubble Space Telescope, everybody here's heard of Hubble, 100 times the field of view, 1,000 times the scan rate, going out to unlock the secrets of the universe. And we're going to pair that with the James Webb Space Telescope. So, think about Nancy Grace Roman is going out and trying to catalog the universe as quickly as it possibly can, and when we find something that we think is interesting, then we slew James Webb over like a soda straw and do a deep dive analysis in it. We're going to launch the first nuclear-powered interplanetary spaceship. America will finally get underway under nuclear power in space after decades of failed programs, about 20 billion dollars of taxpayer dollars that went to waste, no more. We're repurposing a lot of hardware, resources, and we're essentially commissioning our version of the USS Nautilus. We're going to usher in a new nuclear NASA, extend our reach farther out into the solar system, maybe try and conquer some of the tyranny of distance that exists in our solar system, let alone in the galaxy around us. That mission will launch in '28. We call it SR-1 Freedom, and it will release the Skyfall payload of three Ingenuity-class helicopters to Mars, which will scout around with ground-penetrating radar, look for subsurface water ice, scout out future locations for when American astronauts set foot on Mars in hopefully the not-too-distant future, which is pretty exciting to think about. We've got Dragonfly, which is a nuclear-powered octacopter that we're sending to Saturn's moon of Titan. That's one of many missions between Dragonfly, Europa Clipper. We're going to hopefully create some new missions to perhaps Enceladus, a moon that just goes to the heart of what we do, which is trying to answer the question if we are alone. And embedded in all of this, everything we do at NASA is inspiration. All right? Every time we send astronauts around the moon, set foot on the moon, have world-changing scientific breakthroughs in the next generation of X-plane aircraft, that seems to inspire the next generation to want to grow up, carry the fire of exploration, and take us farther than we ever could have imagined. And that is your NASA right now. Happy to take questions.

I'll tell you, like you, sir, I've been patiently waiting for the return of astronauts since I was a child. I certainly want my kids to see it. I want my kids to grow up in a world where we have a moon base, we're sending astronauts to Mars. And a lot of the progress that's underway right now, how we're able to add missions and concentrate our resources back towards doing what the taxpayers fund us to do, which is the world-changing headlines in air and space, is because we are very much in a real space race right now. And certainly the President of the United States understands that. He created this program during his first term and created the Artemis Accords. He created the Space Force because he understands, even though we seek the peaceful exploration in space, that it is a war-fighting domain. And there are others out there that look to militarize it. And I will tell you right now, the Chinese have stated they will land their taikonauts on the surface of the moon before 2030. That means 2029. We've said before the end of President Trump's term. So, that's 2028. Success and failure is going to be measured in months, not years. And absent global competition, the reason you've all been waiting for a long time is because without competition, NASA was generally trying to make everyone happy. I mean, some of that is Congress likes things happening in every district out there. Some of it was self-inflicted wounds. Some of it was our international partnerships. When you try and make everyone happy, generally speaking, no one is happy. And that's all changing right now. We are getting back to extreme focus on doing what no other agency, no other company, no other nation in the world is capable of doing other than what NASA can. Return to the moon, build the base, prepare for where we inevitably go next, which is Mars. We have extreme focus right now, and we are liberating the best and brightest minds across all NASA centers to do what they wanted to do when they came to NASA in the first place. Again, change the world in air and space, clearing out all the obstacles, and unleashing them to get the job done just as we've done in decades past, and we're doing it again now.

Yeah, so if I may, I'd like to just talk recruitment in general. Because I think NASA is at its best when it's doing the near impossible mission that no one else is capable of doing, and I think we're at our worst when we are doing what everybody else is doing. And you think about it, in the 1960s, we pioneered chemical propulsion. Even today, Saturn V and those engines is just remarkable technology. But now industry's doing it. You have amazing companies, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke, so many companies that are doing incredible things in chemical propulsion. NASA shouldn't be doing that. If you're doing that, then you're going to have a problem recruiting your talent and retaining them when you've got other companies that are, their equity's appreciating, and they're doing very cool things like catching rockets with giant towers. If you want to recruit and retain the best talent, you must do what no one else is capable of doing. That's why it's imperative that NASA get underway under nuclear power in space. Start unlocking a little bit more of the energy potential in matter and extending our reach farther beyond the limits of chemical propulsion. You actually have that Hyman Rickover nuclear navy moment at NASA. And it's going to change the game. It's how we're going to be able to put astronauts on Mars with the fewest miracles required. It's how we're going to be able to explore our solar system, evolve it from there into fusion, and eventually we might get even more wild with antimatter annihilation, but that's something for my great-great-grandchildren to consider. But that's the way if you're ever going to get beyond our current star system. So, the point is NASA needs to constantly be recalibrating back to doing what no one else is capable of achieving. If you do, I think you're going to recruit the talent that wants to be there, and you're going to be able to retain it. And we're taking a step in that direction with SR-1 Freedom. As for astronauts, with Crew Dragon right now and Orion, two different human-rated vehicles underway, Starliner eventually will get fixed. We need astronauts, especially when you think about long-duration missions. They're gone for a while, they train for a while, and then they need to recover for a while. So, we've been bringing good astronaut classes, 2021, 2024. I'm sure we'll host another board and have another selection of astronauts in the near future. And these will come on board during the time when they'll probably be occupying movies, which is pretty exciting.

Yeah, it's a good question. For those that didn't hear it, Artemis 3 is a very ambitious campaign. Like I said, three of the most powerful rockets in the world coming together to bring the hardware to converge in lower Earth orbit in that project. Which not only is an essential test mission for ultimately putting astronauts on the moon, it's a little bit of a glimpse into the future. We are certainly long past the world where we need to have one giant rocket to do everything for us in space. Like we are going to use on-orbit assembly to build massive space stations. The nuclear-powered spaceships I see in the future that will take astronauts to Mars and back will be assembled through numerous launches of low-cost commercial providers, and then we build our spaceship that will actually undertake the mission in Earth orbit. But the question is, if that is delayed, if we don't have an opportunity to meet the test objectives, which is the rendezvous and docking of Orion with those spaceships, what does that say to the overall lunar landing mission in 2028? The answer is you can afford some slipping there. And the reason is because of moon base. Every one of those uncrewed robotic landings is going to teach us something. And a lot of them will use the Blue Origin Mark 1 transfer stage and Blue Origin Mark 1 lander, which has a lot of commonality with the actual Blue Moon crewed lander. So, as long as we're continuing to make progress with moon base build out and we're getting some shots on the moon and we're learning in that extreme environment of the South Pole, we can help drive outcomes on the lander development, then we're okay. We don't have a lot of time, but that's where competition keeps industry in check and competition will keep the US very focused.

I will certainly submit the request. I think it's an opportunity here to inspire and educate the next generation. I think our greatest commercial space companies, SpaceX is certainly the greatest of them all. If they were here, it would go a long way to getting the next generation pretty excited to grow up and contribute to this unbelievable adventure we're all on. Good luck to your son, sir. We're all counting on him.

That's a great question. This is a debated topic at times, too. Is the moon our technological proving ground or is it a fueling station? And I would say it's much more the former than the latter. So, we are going to, we've been gifted this moon again 3 days away for us to work with the water ice on the South Pole and master the skills for undertaking a mission to Mars. And I think we want to use every bit of that opportunity once it's gravity to get very comfortable with our suits, with habitation, with logistics, nuclear power even. We're going to the lunar South Pole base that we're building will be eventually nuclear powered in the early 2030s. And we want to get very good at manufacturing propellant. It's hard enough to do under 1G and 1 atmosphere. It's going to be even harder in vacuum and in reduced gravity environments. Let's test it out on the moon before we go to Mars. That said, what that means is you really don't get a whole lot of benefit. The velocity that's going to be required is almost essentially the same whether you're going to the moon or Mars. So, you'd be using a lot of delta-V to get to the moon and then just to reset again. I would say that you're going to probably have your fueling depots in lower Earth orbit and then in highly elliptical Earth orbits, but you're going to figure out everything you need for the confidence to undertake that mission on the moon. Also, I would say be nice if we can minimize the actual need for making propellant initially on Mars because of how hard it is, and that's where again nuclear power propulsion comes in. And I think in the early 2030s, we would be able to undertake a crewed mission to Mars with chemically augmented nuclear electric propulsion and not have to refuel on Mars. Which would be great and a step towards eventually having the surface propellant manufacturing that will almost assuredly be nuclear powered as well.

Yeah, well, I'll tell you, every year we put out at NASA almost a billion in grants to universities in the United States. And we have said, and I'll tell you, we're even doing that differently because it probably won't shock you to know as Stack Bears here, the government wasn't always the best at allocating those grants in years past. Now we are getting very focused. We're not changing the hard dollars that will go to universities. We're telling them what we want. We want instruments for the moon. So, right now, I believe you're going to have university students across the nation that are going to be touching hardware that'll be on the surface of the moon in the next 2 to 4 years, 6 years time frame. Because building out the moon base, there's going to be so many landers and rovers, there's going to be so much excess mass and volume available on it that you're going to be able to start pairing all sorts of science instruments and tech demonstrations from university students, which is great. The thing to be hands-on with hardware that'll be on the moon. On top of that, we take on average about 2,500 approximate internships every year, which is less than 1% of the applications that come in. So, that's good. NASA's still hot. And we're going to keep doing that. So, I highly encourage university programs that are on the receiving end of some of our grant dollars have a great opportunity to collaborate with NASA on hardware that'll go to the moon. And then also our internship programs, I'd highly recommend that as well. Not to mention, commercial space industry is insane right now. Every one of those companies has got internship programs. So, if you're excited about building, working, potentially even going into space at some point in the future or any of the associated fields with it, there's no better time.

So, the Blue Origin detonation event, which if you haven't seen the video, it's pretty cool. I think they're still debating whether it's in the top five largest non-nuclear explosions. But yes, it absolutely had an impact. I'll just say to you, when people look at it and try and contrast some of the setbacks that industry has, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, where they try and move very quickly and fail fast and learn and roll it into the next program, that's what we did. That was NASA. This is not something new to contrast. This is actually more NASA lost their way from decades past. Go look at YouTube of late '50s and early '60s. We blew up plenty of rockets as we were learning the right approach to it. Industry is doing that. The downside is that learning, and they'll get good data from it, happened to take place at their only launch pad. And so, that's not good. And they know that. They're moving incredibly fast. I have to say, a lot of people across government and industry were skeptical when they gave their initial time frames to rebuild their pad and get back at it. They're being very transparent. They're putting videos out of their progress. They are moving at impressive speeds. So, whether it's end of year or early next year, whatever it'll be, it'll be a record. And I would say it has almost no impact to the Artemis program in terms of getting crew to the surface of the moon. Where it had an impact is on building a moon base. No question. We had some early missions that would have launched later this year that are going to slip to the right. But honestly, if they get launching again even a year from now, which they're going to be well ahead of that, they'll still be able to make our time frames for some of the most important moon base landers including the rovers that'll be sitting there waiting for the Artemis 4 crew when they arrive.

Well, I don't know if NASA is bringing an F-14 back, but there is an act going through Congress. It's called the Maverick Act. If you're not generally a politically active person, this one, believe me, this one's worth a call to your congressman. There's three D models left out in the desert and there are those in Congress and in my personal non-NASA capacity I'm being very helpful with on trying to bring back a Tomcat for a number of amazing reasons that I'm sure everyone here would agree with, at least one of which is damn that'd be cool.

Yeah, good question. Can I ask which center do you work at?

Oh, awesome. Well, thank you for all your service. I got to imagine everyone here knows JPL, but if you don't, that's where we dare mighty things. That's where you put the rovers on Mars. And absolutely, some of the best minds we have in the nation are there. So, thank you for all your contributions. I love getting out to JPL. So, here's the answer, and it may be unpopular. I've loved to force to get to a point in time where you can advocate we can do more with more. The answer is our budget's 25 billion. Well, that was always appropriated by Congress. We got 10 billion in supplemental funding on top of that in President Trump's working family tax cut act. But 25 billion a year plus a one-time $10 billion, that's a lot of money. And we're not always great with how we allocate capital. That shouldn't shock anyone here. It's the US government. And we throw away a lot of money with canceled programs. We make mistakes. And again, I think absent global competition for a long time, our mission became to try and make everyone happy. And right now we have clear vision on it. We're returning to the moon, extreme focus. You want to inspire the next generation, do that. Put astronauts back on the moon. There's going to be no shortage of kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween on that. Build the moon base. Keep world-changing science going on the International Space Station. Launch more flagship missions to unlock the secrets of the universe. We can narrow our focus in a few ways. And believe me, we can get a lot of great outcomes for the 25 billion a year the taxpayers entrust us with. And I think you put enough wins on the board, that's when you earn the right to go back and ask for more. But right now I look at it and I can rattle off about $8 billion worth of canceled programs that we got nothing to show for the taxpayers. That's unfortunate. Sometimes that should happen. You're doing the near impossible, you're going to go for some ambitious things and maybe get a few of them wrong. But every one of those comes at the expense of more astronauts in space and more missions of science and discovery. So, I welcome the president's challenge to do as much as we can with the resources available. I guarantee you we'll do some pretty incredible things with it.

Well, I'm pretty busy as long as I'm in this job. But look, I'd like nothing more than to see a world where there's more people living and working in space, more commercial space missions, more private missions. So, perhaps when this is over, we can pick up where we left off. But I'll tell you a little Pleiades Don story. Perhaps for those that aren't aware, two of my crew members, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, they became the women who traveled farthest from Earth ever on that mission. We went to 1,400 km. And in the first 12 minutes of Artemis 2 under SLS, Christina Koch blew away that record. That's what 8.8 million pounds of thrust can do for you, and she became the first woman to go around the moon. Pretty cool. Another thing is I was just in Baikonur, Kazakhstan about 3 weeks ago, where Anna Menon's husband, Neil Menon, if you're thinking about applying to NASA, check out his resume. He sets the bar pretty damn high. He just went to space. Unbelievable mission, great human being, unbelievable NASA astronaut.

Well, look, the paint scheme's probably going to hold. We'll just have to change out the 250. I like this kind of contemporary NASA, but still has throwback and it's got some stars in it. A little futuristic. Anyway, we've got five of them. There are four that are here. The fifth one's in paint. And expect to see them at any of the air shows that have even remotely a space component to it. We're using them for workforce incentive rides like crazy. Every center has an opportunity to nominate some of their best employees at NASA and we take them up for flight experiences. And we'll use them to warm up the crowd before big rocket launches. We're getting there. That was yesterday was good. We'll see how we do today, but we'll keep moving in the right direction there. And expect to see more of these guys around on the road as well. So we didn't get them all dressed up for nothing.

Yeah. You just, if it works right, you wouldn't know it did it.

Yes, 100%. I mean, it just doesn't do us any good to have, NASA's got one of the largest air forces within the US government and no one gets to see it very often. So we're fixing that. X-59 is very much still in its envelope expansion phase of its test program. Once we get that thing going, by design it's supposed to overfly cities and see if we annoy them. So might as well bring it to Oshkosh, but expect to see more. I promise you that. We've got some more X-planes coming.

Uh, look, I don't...