All right, good afternoon. Welcome, Administrator Isaacman. It's great to have you here today. I'll just do a brief introduction. As the 15th administrator of NASA, Administrator Isaacman oversees a big portfolio covering exploration, science, flight research, and a lot more. He formerly led the payments technology company Shift4, co-founded an aviation training company, is an accomplished pilot, and flew twice to lower Earth orbit with SpaceX. So I thought we could just dive right into questions. I just wanted to start, Administrator Isaacman, with a couple about how you're trying to run the agency, which is really a sprawling organization in a lot of ways. You've got many programs, thousands of employees, contractor relationships, diplomacy, policy, White House and congressional oversight, and a lot more. So my understanding is you've been really involved in decision-making at NASA, have been very hands-on about wanting to make calls. I wonder if you could talk about why you sort of took that approach versus, say, like delegating more as you've sort of started ramping up at the agency.
Sure. Well, first, my apologies for the delay. Trying to... So, I appreciate the accommodation moving things around a little bit. So I mean, this is... I'm doing the most rewarding work I've ever done in my life. My career started at 16 when I built my first company, which is Shift4. So grateful every day for getting to lead the world's most accomplished space agency. But I'll tell you, I'm not there at all for the notoriety, the politics, or the title. It's purely outcomes, right? I mean, I was inspired by the NASA of decades past. Who wasn't? Neil and Buzz walking on the moon July 20th, 1969, achieving the near impossible, and very aware of the fact that there is a second space race. It will come down to months, not years. The Chinese will absolutely put their astronauts on the surface of the moon, do what the Soviets never could, and I think the implications of that will be felt around the world. So I am there to drive outcomes. I'm lucky. I have the support of the president of the United States. I have a national space policy. I have bipartisan support from Congress, the resources to execute. So yes, I try and be very much in the weeds to bring extreme focus to the mission. Ensure that we actually, you know, deliver these world-changing outcomes just as quickly, affordably, safely, and successfully as we possibly can.
I mean, you've talked about wanting NASA to move faster since the day you were sworn in last December. And does being in the weeds, making calls directly help you do that?
Of course. I mean, look, the... you know, having again... I've started two companies and, you know, there's nothing like those early basement days where you have access to all the information you possibly need in order to make decisions and your batting average should be, if you're competent, like reasonably good. And the problem is as an organization scales you get access to less and less information in order to make those decisions. So and as a result your batting average can go down. I think it's imperative, you know, to have a pulse on as many aspects of the organization as possible. What's going well so you can do more of it? What's not going well so you can fix it. So access to information is key and there's a lot of ways you can do that. Like there's a lot of mechanisms that we have for feedback loop. Part of it is just having a flat organization structure, eliminating as much, you know, of the needless bureaucracy as possible to get access to the information to make the good decisions. And look, this is not a... you know, a... this is a radical departure like we are bringing disruption to NASA wrong. Like this is simply going back to the playbook that achieved these near impossible outcomes from decades past. I mean just to give you an example, the time period between when Artemis 1 launched, which was an uncrewed robotic mission, and Artemis 2 launched, which was that historic mission where there's four astronauts went around the moon, launched on April 1st, 2026, president just bestowed the congressional space medal of honor on them, the time frame between those missions, NASA flew all of the Gemini missions, 12 missions, uncrewed and crewed missions during the 1960s, right? I mean we are just trying to, you know, get our swagger back here, get back in a rhythm of what we did. And the difference is, you know, in the 1960s, we had extreme focus on the mission. The NASA Authorization Act in 1965 was like five pages. It said, 'Beat Russia to the moon.' It's 155 pages now. We're doing a lot of things in a lot of direction. And as a result, we're doing everything other than what we're supposed to be doing for the interested public. We're bringing that focus back. So really, when you talk about all these things, the change is going, we are just reverting back to the formula of success from the 1960s.
Can you think of one example that you've stripped away out of your of kind of the process since you've come in to try to go faster?
Well, I can think of a lot of examples.
Just give me one. We don't have that much time.
Yeah. We look, we pivoted off of, you know, programs that were a distraction to the mission. For example, the lunar gateway, which was a... we were going to build the space station above the moon so we could look down and watch the Chinese having all the fun on the surface. To actually building a moon base, which is what we were intended to do. That was a program that was costing billions of dollars, way behind schedule. It was one of those programs where you're trying to bring everyone together. You know, lots of flags for the press release other than what we were supposed to do, which is get our astronauts back to the moon and build the base and prepare for where we go next, which is Mars.
Let's stay on Artemis for a little bit. For anybody that doesn't know, Artemis is NASA's flagship human exploration program. The administrator mentioned Artemis 2 which was conducted earlier this year. Three and four are coming up, supposed to be in 27 and 28. I encounter a great deal of skepticism in my reporting that NASA and its contractors are going to be able to keep to that schedule. You take the other side of that, like what do you know about what the agency and its contractors are doing that makes you confident that that schedule can keep?
Oh, well, I mean, I'm running the agency so hopefully I have a good, reasonably good handle on what we're doing. I'm out in the field constantly. Like I said, I mean one of the first things I did was make sure that I could have a pulse on things directly from the field. You know, I put engineering strike teams across every one of the major what we call our ignition priorities, which are basically all the priorities outlined in the national space policy to achieve. And again, like people, it's like their minds are blown like we want to do things like launch a rocket once a year. Throughout all of NASA's history on NASA design programs, we averaged a launch every three and a half months. So like going from three years to one year, it's like it can't be done. Like no, we should be trying actually, we should be trying to get back to the every three and a half months type thing. Although our rockets seem to cost a lot more these days. So we are driving outcomes. When you say contractors, well that's part of the problem. NASA outsourced our workforce extensively over the last few decades. I mean just to give you a sense, up until some recent changes, this is all part of a rebuilding core competencies program I implemented. 75% of NASA's workforce was rented essentially from staffing agencies. There's nothing wrong with that. There should be certain examples when you'd want to do that for surge capacity or, you know, really demanding technical problems that you're not going to encounter all the time. It was 75% of the workforce we were renting indefinitely because 30 years ago somebody instilled these arbitrary civil servant caps on our various centers as opposed to anything statutory. So what did we do? We started bringing them back. But you want examples of that? You want to know why it was taking so long? The people that designed the rockets, build the rockets, launch the rockets, mission control had one civil servant in at NASA. Like so when the astronauts called home to Houston, it was from staffing agencies. So we're bringing that all back in house. So when they, you know, so when you say like I don't know, the contractors are skeptical. Well, I'm solving part of that problem, which is bringing them back in and aligning them towards mission outcomes instead of hourly rates.
I mean part of I guess what was undergirding that question is the lineup of hardware that you need for Artemis 3 and 4, including two new landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX and new space suits from Axiom Space in Houston. The landers for in the space community have been a topic of great discussion and they haven't been tested yet. Blue and SpaceX haven't flown them to the moon yet. Like how do you, I guess like to be more specific, like why are the landers going to be ready on 27 and 28?
Sure. So just a quick answer if you... kind of hard but all the ingredients that go into it's hard, right? I mean we haven't been back to the moon and, you know, we haven't landed since Apollo 17 so it's been a half century so the answers are naturally a little bit long. But we are changing things like the original requirements, like NASA, we forgot our formula for success and started jumping right to the dream state on things. The suits we were building decades to replace, you know, our prior generation essentially Apollo era suits, grew from requirements that were like four six-hour EVAs. I mean, just things that were impossible. So, we stripped those down. Let's get back to doing things in a logical iterative way. Building blocks success. Fortunately, some of the landers we built, we did, we contracted with landers that will put so much tonnage on the moon that in a very short period of time, you'll go from an outpost to a small city. Probably should have done that and something a little bit more, you know, grander than the LEM to build up to it. But we are fixing these things. Same thing. We were going to go with this $2 billion rover as a service, jump right to the dream state. Now, we're buying 10 rovers, progressively getting better. So all the ingredients that need to come together to put astronauts on the surface of the moon are being changed to get to the outcome again as I said, as quickly, affordably, safely, and successfully as possible.
So how do you sort of meet tough deadlines especially around human space flight and especially during missions like Artemis 3 and 4 that are going to use novel technologies and how do you do it safely? Is it just talk about like accelerating without letting the risk aperture go too far out of whack?
Well, I mean, I think you first of all, you want to bring your risk posture back to some degree of center because we went to a point where it was nearly no risk for some time, which is just completely unrealistic when you're trying to explore the worlds beyond ours. You know, when you if you're going to go to the moon, come back safely and have people riding rockets at 25,000 miles per hour, there is some degree of risk. I would just say the only thing novel in the whole architecture is probably the cryoprop transfer on HLS, which is the space vehicle. They have a hundred billion dollars and some of the smartest people in the country to solve those problems and there and not to mention it underpins a multi-trillion dollar TAM. In fact, I think Elon said it's, you know, the TAM is Earth, which is a heck of a statement. So I have no doubt, I'm highly confident that they will solve the problems of rapid reusability and cryoprop transfer because again it's critical to the entire strategy. Every other component including the Blue lander leverages capabilities that have already been proven before in space. So like we will get this done and I also just don't think people should be that shocked. We have, you know, two and a half years to meet the timeline the national space policy. We can't achieve this. We did an awful lot knowing absolutely nothing about this domain in over eight years in the 1960s. We have a lot of capability today.
Just for the audience really quickly, the cryoprop transfer is this Starship to Starship transfer of fuel that SpaceX is developing to use Starship for deeper space missions including, you know, a NASA moon landing in 2028.
Yeah. I mean what SpaceX is pioneering is rapid reusability. They don't want to throw away the spacecraft anymore. I think Elon does a great job with the example all the time. How much would it cost to take your family to Disney World if you threw the 737 away? They're basically doing the equivalency of air-to-air refueling. It's a game-changer for America's competitiveness in space from commercial applicability, economic potential, science, national defense, and of course putting astronauts and a lot of mass on the surface of the moon. They will solve this.
What's your understanding of when, just on this front, one more question, when SpaceX is going to conduct that mission?
Oh, they'll do prop transfer tests in like very early 2027, maybe end of this year. I don't want to try and nail it specifically because they learn from every one of their launches. Their next launch will be in a couple weeks. They'll learn from that. They've already cryofed the next vehicle thereafter. Like, as we've all seen, they can go from, you know, zero to pretty outrageous outcomes very quickly.
Administrator, there's a lot of space companies, a lot of companies that want to work with NASA. Maybe some are in this room today. I don't know. I'm just curious though like what are the capabilities or technology that you think that NASA just absolutely must have in-house versus like the stuff that you can buy from the private sector. Like what's the right line there?
Well, I think they look, there's if if something, if NASA can be one customer of many or has a high probability of being one customer of many, we should be absolutely buying it as a service and let competitive forces make it better like self-landing rockets and drive cost down. So launch, observation, communications, hands down those are real markets. NASA is very much one customer of many. If it's like a very, you know, high TRL, so like high technical readiness level component that lots of people are buying and it's, you know, almost commoditized, you buy it at fixed firm price. And if you are trying to mature something that is extremely low TRL like that next cutting edge capability to extend American leap reach farther into the solar system like nuclear-powered spacecraft, which I'm a big proponent for, then NASA probably needs to be managing and building those kind of capabilities. And when it matures to the extent that DOD is buying and international allies are and commercial, we have, you know, nuclear-powered starfleets everywhere, then NASA again pivots to fusion-powered spacecraft or that is like what your space agency is at its best is doing what no other agency, company, organization, or nation is capable of doing.
