Let me tell you, there is a space race right now. China will do what the Soviets never could during the first space race, and in 2029 you will see Chinese astronauts on the moon. And I think that has serious implications. I mean, that sends a message to the world. You know, whose technology should I be buying? You know, whose military security guarantee should I trust? Whose standard should I conform to?
We are back with Jared Isaacman, who is the administrator of NASA. Been a huge fan of NASA for a long time. I watched one of the last space shuttle launches in 2010 when I was like five. I still remember it vividly. So it's amazing to have Jared here with us. Welcome to MTS.
It's great to be here, and we got a lot of fun things to talk about at NES.
Yeah. So why don't we start with the United States Space Academy that you just announced? Like, what is that all about? What's the plan?
Well, certainly. I mean, the president of the United States just announced it, and it was really exciting because the president came to Johnson Space Center in Texas to bestow the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, our highest award for valor, to the four extraordinary Artemis 2 astronauts who went farther into space than any humans in history and around the moon. And while he was there, he dropped the one more thing, which is, by the way, we're commissioning a United States Space Academy. So it's really exciting. It's also really logical when you think about it. We have a lot of service academies. Three of them are dedicated to the maritime domain. So you got the Naval Academy, you've got the Merchant Marine Academy, and you got the Coast Guard Academy. Well, I can tell you there's a lot of space out there, and it's increasingly important. I mean, you're talking our communication satellites to connect the disconnected, internet connectivity, information is pretty foundational to solving a lot of problems. Weather satellites, natural disasters, national security implications for sure. It is the ultimate high ground. Not to mention all the commercial potential, the scientific potential. We're going to the moon, building a moon base. Should it be that surprising that we would actually have an academy to graduate, you know, the engineers, the technicians, the operators, the pilots, the astronauts that we're going to need to build this really cool future in space.
Has there been any similar academy in the past? And is this like an alternative to college? Is it like a trade? How is it different?
Yeah, so I would think about this like you would the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, the Merchant Marine Academy, the Coast Guard Academy. You know, this is a federal academy to prepare the future leaders for this, again, increasingly important domain. Now, 10% of the graduates from the Air Force Academy go into the Space Force. So you think about that, all our federal academies for these important domains, and we get 10% of one of them to prepare the leaders for, again, this increasingly important domain for all the reasons I described before. So it's a four-year degree program. Eventually, I'm sure it'll have postgrad programs, and you can graduate from it. And you can come to NASA. It is NASA. We expect the majority of graduates to come to NASA for a period of time. But you could also go into the Space Force. You go into the Air Force potentially. You can join other government agencies.
On that, how do you attract top talent to NASA, and you know, especially competing with the private sector, which is like private sector in space is bigger than it's ever been?
What a great question. So I would tell you first, it is not hard for us to attract talent. You know, the NASA logo, the meatball as we call it, is pretty widely recognized around the world. The hard part is going to be retaining it because right now a substantial portion of what we do at NASA does in fact overlap with industry. And that's a dangerous place to be because you can graduate from school, you can be really excited, I'm going to NASA, I'm going to work on chemical propulsion rockets. And then you're there for four or five years and you're like, but there's companies that are doing this and they're landing their rockets on ships and I get stock options. So why do I want to stay at NASA? And that's why you can't have overlap with industry. NASA always has to recalibrate back to doing the near impossible. That's why we're building nuclear-powered spaceships. Something no company, no other agency, no other nation is capable of doing but NASA. So that's how you recruit your talent, but then you retain them because they're working on things they can't do anywhere else.
Why do you think NASA has so much aura compared to like literally any other government agency? Like there's lots of other government agencies that do cool things, but it seems like NASA is the only one that has like... the IRS does cool things or like Social Security. Yeah, they do some cool things, but you know, people don't get like merch with the Social Security logo on it. It's just NASA. And like similarly, it's so like everything they do is so bipartisan. Like when the Artemis 2 launched, like I couldn't think of anything I've seen that was more like universally beloved because we're going out to unlock the secrets of the universe.
I mean, our job is to answer the question, are we alone? I mean, what kid, you know, didn't at some point as like a child look up at the night sky and just imagine the possibilities? We get to do that for a living. I mean, that is so cool. So whether it's our humans going into space, our astronauts going to the moon or building a moon base or building nuclear spaceships or launching great telescopes of discovery to again try and unlock the secrets of the universe. We have the coolest job really on behalf of all the American people, but really the space-loving curious dreamers all around the world. It's awesome.
It is like one of the most universal goals you can have like just as mankind. Did you want to be an astronaut? Yeah, totally. I was so obsessed with space when I was like four. I was like, this is the only cool thing my city has. So I'm curious, what are your thoughts on Elon committing to the moon as a goal and refocusing from Mars?
Well, first of all, I'm very appreciative that there is now like almost complete alignment from the private sector, from the government, you know, that we need to go to the moon. We've made promises for 36 years. We've committed a lot of taxpayer resources. We must return to the moon. We need to do so to stay, build the base for a lot of reasons, and some of it is extremely important to companies like SpaceX that do want to unlock the economic potential. I mean, you know, Elon and SpaceX talked about mass drivers on the moon, you know, 3D printing satellites and shooting them off from the lunar surface. That's awesome. Like we want an orbital economy. We will never have the future that probably a lot of us imagined as kids if it's only paid for by taxpayers. So moon is a great proving ground for where we go next, which is Mars. So I guarantee you SpaceX has not taken their eye off the prize, which is making life multiplanetary, which means you need to get to another planet. And that planet is Mars. But we'll certainly take a proving ground three days away from home to test out habitability, test out new spacesuits, mobility, power, all the things necessary to keep this fragile human being alive out in space. Let's test that out on the moon before we go to Mars. But Mars is always part of the, you know, it's always just one more step on the grand journey.
Does NASA have any kind of plans at the moment, including sort of very abstract far future ones for like going to permanently like other solar systems?
So, the first step on that journey is fission power. So like really in my simplistic view on it, for us to overcome the tyranny of distance in space, we need to continue to unlock more of the energy potential in matter. And chemical rockets, it's negligible now. With fission power, we're unlocking like 5% of it, but that's a huge deal. I mean, that really helps us go farther into space without having to refuel. And we're going to get very good at that. And we've only done it once, 1965, but we are going to build a grand nuclear-powered starfleet. You know, and then next up is going to be fusion power. And then we're going to be able to unlock a little bit more of that potential of matter until eventually you get to like, which is something that my kids and my grandkids and future great-grandkids probably won't ever live to see, which is something like antimatter annihilation, where now you're unlocking like the full potential of matter. And that's what's going to get you to the type of speeds that are going to be necessary, the velocities to go out and venture to another star system. But this is all going to happen at some point. We just got to keep pressing on outward.
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Going back to my question earlier about like NASA having aura, you know, obviously space is really cool. Everybody loves space. Another area of technology that we're seeing a lot of right now is AI, and generally speaking, people kind of hate AI. They like, they don't see the vision of the good future. The main emotion felt by most people, I think, is more fear of change. What do you think like developers of AI, proponents of AI can learn from NASA and others in space on like how to make the objective awesomeness of the technology like apparent to more people?
Yeah. Well, I think there's storytelling, and like I said, you know, what we do at NASA is always a very good story, right? Unlock the secrets of the universe, answer the questions, are we alone? You know, put hero astronauts into space, put them on the moon, build a moon base. AI is going to play a role in a lot of that. You know, we talk about the potential of AI. Yes, there's this whole doomer thing of where it sends us down a really poor path. There is the whole optimist side of this, which is it has the potential to elevate and transform civilizations. Right? Now, the worst thing we can possibly do in all of it is to say, let's just stop and trust that our rivals in this great power competition are going to somehow wield this technology better than us. So for better or worse, you're not putting the genie back in the bottle. If you don't like data centers in your backyard, fine, let's put them in space. You know, the physics is not broken there on that. There's certainly some economic challenges to make it viable, but do that. We'll put them in space. That's great. Orbital economy, good thing. But you know, if you care about this potential, from what this technology can yield, then you're going to want to continue investing in it. Because again, hitting the pause button on progress and hoping our rivals will somehow look favorably on us if they get to a superior capability is not a wise strategy.
How is NASA thinking about the orbital economy? We talk to founders all the time and sort of in the SF sphere about orbital compute, but how are you guys thinking about it on the NASA side?
Yeah, I would just say generally speaking, like I love this whole commercial space industry that's emerging right now, and there's a lot of areas it can help us. Generally what we work on does not have a good business case to support it. Like we should be doing the most wild, near impossible things to open up new frontiers. And along the way, you know, if you can create, you know, there's economic potential from your effort, fantastic. Launch, observation, and communications, no question, real markets for it. NASA's one customer of many, thriving commercial industry we can benefit from. Well, launch companies can look to extensions of that and say, well, I'm already really good at launch, I'm already good at communications, now I want to put compute on orbit. And I think being vertically integrated advantages them in that regard. And if it works out, fantastic. You know, we're not part of the Department of Commerce. We're not always trying to go out and enable these things, you know, enable economies around us. We want to again go and discover things, what might be in our own backyard in our solar system. But along the way, if opening the new frontier, there's economic potential, fantastic. We're putting lots of landers on the moon. I can't guarantee you're going to get more value out of the lunar regolith and all the cost of being there and refining it, but we'll put a demand signal out because we need to build a moon base. And if along the way there's a lunar economy, fantastic.
