Teenagers ask Jared Isaacman (NASA Administrator) anything!

Yeah, well, going to Mars for nuclear power, but, uh...

It's absolutely awesome to be here right now. And I did drop out of school at 16. I did wind up getting my college degree later on. So let's, you know, keep everybody remain on the wealthy [laughter] relative of higher...

Yeah.

But I would also say please also keep that in mind and calibrate your questions accordingly when they during the Ask Me Anything. It's awesome to be here. Great. Look, what an exciting time over the next couple decades, especially as all of you guys who are, you know, doing the good coding and engineering projects right now are going to wind up graduating into a time when we're building a moon base and we're building nuclear-powered spaceships and we're going to need so much talent in order to make any of these near-impossible objectives and bring them into reality. So it's absolutely time incredibly well spent being here with you all right now and hopefully getting you interested in career paths ahead in industry and at NASA.

Well, there's a lot to that. Let's start out by saying just about everything that we intentionally try and buy something from every congressional district. How about that? So it's somewhat of a... it's late in the day so I'm going to bring some of the humor out here if you don't mind. But I mean, look, the simple reality when you take something like SLS, you know, you have five prime contractors on it, quite literally hundreds of subcontractors, and yes, they were all procuring to either... they're all procuring components that are either flight-qualified previously, which case a lot of SLS, you know, quite honestly is because it all... I mean, quite a bit of it is repurposed from the shuttle era, or we go through an extensive qualification process of which NASA... I mean, we have unbelievable test chambers, a lot of them are actually national historic landmarks because they've been around for so long, but I mean, quite literally thermal vacuum chambers that we have, we use chambers for different flammability testing, vibe tables, I mean, stuff that goes back decades but we still use today to qualify our hardware for integration into whether it's uncrewed robotic spacecraft, but it's, you know, flagship level as in cannot fail, so we want to test it extensively, or it's a crewed vehicle of which you have the human-rating qualifications that are associated with it. We are very cognizant of the cybersecurity-type implications. So aside from like, look, we want to build really good spacecraft that are, you know, that help us achieve the correct outcome for our mission, whether it's keeping our astronauts safe so they can undertake their mission or to go out and again explore the secrets of the, you know, the universe. But there is, you know, secondary considerations in all of this is going to be the security of our comm infrastructure to be able to communicate and command back and forth your vehicle, and then the electronics themselves for intrusion or other, you know, again, considerations beyond just meeting its initial mission design criteria. And then we do... I mean, there are certain laws that prevent us from working with, you know, certain countries, whether it's collaboratively as individuals or from a procurement of hardware perspective, and if you need to deviate from that, there's a rather lengthy waiver process. But then some of it is actually quite by design. So the European Service Module that's attached to Orion is part of the SLS architecture, for example. Most of it is made in Europe and has suppliers from actually just about all of their ESA member states in it. So there still can be foreign components in our architecture so long as it's part of design and meets our qualification criteria.

Yeah, I mean, it's just the speed at which things happen, which just compresses your decision space a lot. And look, it's very applicable, you know, in space too. So, you know, you think about a Cessna 172 or something where things are happening at, I don't know, 50 or 60 or 70 knots, for example. You know, you have some time to sort things out. And when things are happening, you know, like you take off and land an F-5 at 160 knots. Same with like a MiG-29. So when something goes wrong, you have less time, you know, to sort out how you're going to potentially solve the problem. The, you know, I mean, we in aviation, we train an awful lot to never get behind the aircraft. That's a lot of what astronauts do to train to go to space is like to be very cool under incredibly stressful situations and assess the situation as quickly as they can and make decisions that generally come down in seconds because you think about the time when you, you know, launch a Falcon 9 or ignite the solid rocket boosters on an SLS to the time you're in orbit, you know, that's happening in minutes, right? And when something develops, it can develop... And, you know, I mean, obviously even, you know, nanoseconds.

Oh, a MiG for sure. That's not a statement on like the, you know, an endorsement of the country of origin or the manufacturer, but simply that you can fly faster and you're more maneuverable and pull more G's in a MiG than you can in, you know, in a Cessna. Not to mention, I would say structurally I would feel a lot better about the plane designed to take 9 Gs than probably one designed to take three.

Yeah, it looks... which is the first rule in aviation, by the way.

Well, no, I mean, in all things aerospace generally, it's like first rule, you know, look good. Second rule, sound good on the radio. Third rule, try and be safe.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, I have to say upfront, I'm actually very pleasantly surprised that there is... I don't even want to say minimal. There's just generally been no pushback to the reality that we actually have three nuclear payloads that will be going through Kennedy Space Center in the summer and fall of 2028. So you have the Rosalind Franklin rover. It's actually a joint NASA-ESA mission that's going to have a plutonium-based RTG on it for heating. You've got Dragonfly. So that's your RTG, you know, plutonium-powered octocopter going to Titan. And then you've got a real fission reactor, which is awesome, that's going to launch on SR-1 Freedom. And I would just say that I think maybe perhaps, you know, some of it's been the repetition. You know, you have SpaceX launching every 48 hours and, you know, their batting average is extremely good. SR-1 Freedom, Rosalind Franklin, and Dragonfly, I think all three are going to launch on Falcon Heavy. So, you know, you have an extremely reliable, competent partner that you're going to be working with on this. So I think that diminishes some of the public's concern. I mean, look, it was very different 15 years ago. You saw a rocket like every quarter and you're like, it still seems a little bit... are we putting a rocket with nuclear material? And then also the materials, the materials like for example in the fission reactor, we're going to use a very safe fuel that has, you know, basically it's got a ceramic coating around the uranium pellets, which is a very low-enriched uranium too, that's designed to, you know, survive, be not, you know, in almost a catastrophic-type situation that could happen in a reactor. So I think it's also not obvious to state the obvious, it's not critical on the launch pad. Like we are going to launch SR-1 Freedom, we are going to send it on an Earth's escape trajectory, so it's going to Mars, period, whether the reactor turns on or not. It's gone, so not our problem anymore. And then we activate and the reactor will go critical and we will shift some of the propulsion from its solar panels and start using a Brayton cycle conversion and take the 100-kilowatt fission reactor and turn it into about 25 kilowatts of power to basically the Hall thrusters that are already integrated in the vehicle. So it's gone no matter what. It's not going critical until it's already clear it's not going to be Earth's problem anymore. But what a step in the direction we must take. I mean, you know, it's great that, you know, industry and SpaceX and Blue Origin, I mean, pushing the boundaries on chemical propulsion and then helping us not throw away the rocket every damn time we have to use it. I mean, these are all such important breakthroughs for everything you can imagine in the future, like on-orbit assembly and manufacturing and building moon bases and science missions and space economy and space stations, all that. But if we really want to get out there, you know, in the outer solar system and explore our outer moons and certainly, I think, be able to send astronauts to Mars and bring them back without the firm requirement of manufacturing propellant on Mars and refueling to come back home, we got to do more with nuclear. And we've just spent way too damn long for such an obvious evolution, especially now that commercial industry is doing so well.

No, there was zero chance I could ever have imagined this. I mean, quite honestly, where I was, you know, when I left high school at 16 to start a company, I was simply... look, I was raised to be extremely independent. If I wanted anything, I had to work for it. And I'm, you know, grateful for my parents instilling that kind of work ethic at a young age. So simply like I wanted to move out. I needed to pay rent. I wanted to be able to get, you know, pizza and beer on weekends. You know, like that was my motivation. And I was lucky that I stumbled across, you know, an emerging payments field. I mean, this was at the time where e-commerce was just, again, it was emerging. Like, you know, the idea of buying something on the internet in 1999 was very different than what it is today. So there was a problem to solve or build a better solution to an existing problem, and that was my motivation from day one. Now, aviation has been a passion since I was quite literally in kindergarten. I mean, I told my kindergarten teacher I wanted to be an astronaut someday. I went to space camp. I built my first computer to play flight simulators. And so that kind of passion was always there, but my motivation was very different then. Even when I was 21, again, I could not have imagined when I was 16 that something that I started to just, I don't know, maintain a very, you know, like basic, like normal lifestyle would have evolved into what it was by the time I was 21, let alone everything that came thereafter. And look, that's the luck in life. You know, people are like, you know, you make all your own luck. It's like total BS, right? Like you got to work really hard and find your passion and try and solve good problems and stand out and elevate yourself, you know, so that you can, you know, differentiate, so you can, you know, take on new opportunities that come with life. But having the ball bounce your way a few times in life never hurts. And that's why I'm doing this job, by the way. Like I absolutely live the American dream. I know I got lucky many times over. Why I'm so grateful to have an opportunity to repay the debt to the nation and get to do it in the coolest job in all of government, which is NASA.

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly... First of all, by the way, I don't know what your next couple years are looking like, but if you're building this capability and developing the software for it, you should really look at some of the NASA internship programs. We need all the talent we can get. We're trying to do really hard things these days. So LiDAR is certainly part of some of our rendezvous and docking constructs, and we are also looking at it for lunar surface applications as well. So it's, you know, and I guarantee whatever approach we take to building our hardware will cost, I don't know, many orders of magnitude greater than what you probably spent doing it. And it'll take a lot of geniuses around here, but hopefully we'll eventually get it to probably the performance level that you've already mastered.

Well, the answer is they do. I mean, like all of you, like we're always hungry for the data. I would say where we can improve upon is how quickly we take that data and use it to inform the subsequent mission. So like for example, I love the Parker Solar Probe mission, but I mean it is also like the fastest man-made object ever, I think. And so that in itself is something that's cool. And I don't believe generally widely known, but we, a lot of our high-priority science missions are informed by the decadal survey process, which kind of makes a lot of sense in decades past when, you know, launch costs were, I don't know, half a billion dollars or more and, you know, you want to take an awful lot of time to think through what your next mission would be and get consensus because, you know, it is generally hard to make everyone happy in this regard. But now launch costs have come down so much and you are able to get data very quickly and you're able to analyze it very fast. I mean, one of our two priorities for what is a presidential mission, the Genesis mission, where how do we do a whole-government approach with AI, you know, to accelerate all the most important kind of scientific or, you know, forward-leaning tech arms of the US government, and instead of everybody doing their own thing, concentrate your resources into a team that's extremely good. DOE, you know, no secret, has had some pretty sophisticated high-performance computing power for a very long time, so it's kind of one of their core competencies. In any case, two priorities from NASA. Number one is like, what did we miss and what are we likely to miss? So not that long ago, an intern... I'm sorry, not an intern, like a high school student found a missing galaxy just from NASA archival data. Now, there's two trillion of them out there, so you can't fault us for missing one every now and then. But that's based on historic archival data. We're about to get so much more of it through new exploration assets like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is going to gather so much potential data that's going to be out there. So all the data that we've accumulated and all that we are likely to accumulate, how do we use AI kind of to our advantage in that? And then second is helping us design the next-generation fusion power-type spacecraft to extend our reach a little bit farther into space. I say all this to say like we get lots of data and we don't move as fast as we should on it. Like you should not have to wait 10 years or so to get, you know, once you have the data and it's sufficiently analyzed, to reach a consensus on what you should do next. You should gather that data from like Parker Solar Probe, just like your balloon example, and say, I learned something new, now what do I want to do with that knowledge, and roll it right into the next mission. Industry is very good at this, right? SpaceX very good with their design process. We need to be much better at it.

Data was not used very quickly for sure.

Well, I think on a lot of matters that are complicated and you haven't, you know, and you know, it's very hard to get a universal consensus. What I'd say is, you know, Charlie and a few others were certainly in the minority. There were, you know, a few thousand really brilliant minds at NASA that had done a lot of work, including using ArcJet to gain confidence that we had mitigated the heat shield issues by virtue of a modified re-entry profile. And they were right. And Charlie was wrong. Now, there's nothing wrong, by the way, of having some, like, again, dissenting voices at times, and you should listen to them all. And I did. I brought Charlie in and others, along with some journalists and all of the NASA experts, to have a roundtable and say, let's get it all out on the table because he might not know everything. He certainly didn't... he hasn't been at NASA in a long time, and you have a lot of people working every day doing the work and doing testing and analysis to arrive at the right position. So he brought everyone in the room to share their thoughts on the subject. Now, there were two dissenting voices in the room. Charlie was one of them. The other, another former NASA astronaut, changed his mind, agreed with our position. And Charlie, you know, again, he obviously, you know, stuck to his guns on that and felt that he was right. But in the end, he was wrong, and nothing was wrong with our process, though, to analyze the matter, test it, which we did extensively with ArcJet, which is a very cool facility inside NASA. And then we listened. Like I said, we were not dismissive. I brought Charlie in and others to have the conversation. And some people in the room liked the conversation, Charlie did not. In the end, we felt we had sufficient data and understood the risk to fly the mission. And the heat shield was perfect.

Yeah, of course. And obviously this is something that NASA, you know, unfortunately knows an awful lot about because we've had some extraordinary highs and we've had some very sad days at our space agency, right, from Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia. And I would say, look, we do probabilistic risk assessments on everything and then we take an integrated view of the risk and then we understand it. We try and do everything we can to mitigate it, and at some point you do have to accept it because, I mean, look, taking off an airplane on an aircraft carrier is dangerous. Flying in a helicopter, you know, is dangerous. There are a lot of jobs that we knowingly send people into. Working, you know, under the sea by a couple hundred feet and in saturation diving on oil rigs. These are all dangerous jobs, and you do what you can to bring it to zero, but at some point you do accept and move forward. Why would we think exploring the worlds beyond ours would be any different? It's very dangerous work. Now, I will say, like, what I would take away from this, again, I think the NASA team did the right thing, clearly analyzing the situation with that heat shield, but the question is, you got to rewind the clock and say, how did we get in that position in the first place? Like, we built a non-permeable heat shield, which was a departure from the 1960s Apollo program. So we forgot something, and ultimately we had to take the data that we had and, again, fully understand the situation, test it, and we did work up a modification of the re-entry profile, and it worked exactly as predicted. And now Artemis 3's heat shield will return to the original permeable design that we used during the Apollo era. But how did we wind up in that situation? Well, let's never do that again. It's one of my first priorities here. My first workforce directive actually is, say, why did we outsource so much of the talent at NASA that should be a core competency, that should be inherent within the organization? 75% of our workforce became contractors over the years. And you can't do that. You can't do that to win the space race of today or tomorrow or to deliver on the mission of all the taxpayers who fund our work here at NASA. So we've been bringing thousands of people back into the organization here at NASA in areas that we can't afford to make mistakes on in the future. So we did everything we could on the Artemis 2 heat shield the right way, including listening to those dissenting voices and giving them a platform to have the conversation. We understood the risk. We did everything we could to mitigate it through operational design. And then we flew the mission, and then what was predicted versus actual on it lined up, you know, as close to perfectly as you could get in this kind of circumstance.

Oh, okay. Copy that. What would I spend time building? Damn, I don't know. I think I'd be spending more time studying. Like, honestly, there are so many things I've been exposed to, especially in my new job here, and fields of study that I just find so fascinating and I wish I had started on earlier in life. You know, I have no regrets on my path been taken, but like there's just so many areas of great interest. So I don't know, I'd be studying. I'd be studying a lot in quantum right now. A lot of things in space medicine, by the way. Anyone who wants future careers in space, believe me, we have the technology is going to outpace the ability for the human physiologically and psychologically to be in deep space. There's a lot of things I just would probably try and get smarter on before I selected my ultimate career field. So, sorry, it's not a build answer, but it's just a knowledge-gather one.

100% of people will feel very differently in space. Period.

Yeah. I mean, it's just something that we've protected for a long time because it challenges the hero image to some extent. I mean, your best case scenario, best case scenario, 40% of the people, you feel like you're hanging upside down for like three to five days, and you have, you know, worst case is you're throwing up for five days. You have vision issues. It's all probably related to intracranial pressure that's increased. And it's been that way since the beginning, and we just don't talk about it much.

Yeah, all of that's yes. Everything you've got is right. The only thing I'd just say, look, I mean, and correct my math if I'm wrong on this one, but I think, you know, not to nitpick, we get 25 billion a year. You know, I think peaked... that's not counting the $10 billion plus-up we got from the Working Families Tax Cut Act, but you know, I think if you go back to peak 1969, you're probably adjusted for inflation in the high 40s or so. So, either way, the point being we are a smaller percentage of the discretionary budget today than we were then. But what's changed? Yeah, nothing existed then. I mean, heck, our first vehicles were all ICBMs. Like, we had to borrow stuff from the Department of Defense, Department of War. We have industry to draw upon now. NASA is one customer of many in launch. You got Falcon 9 for Starlinks. You got Falcon 9 for NASA and scientific missions, for DoD missions, for commercial satellites. So cost has come down materially to put mass in orbit, which is great. It helps. And then I will tell you the private investment coming from, you know, an Elon Musk or a Jeff Bezos and such is well in excess of the government contracts. You know, like HLS, that believe me, they're put... well, you guys know they just raised a hundred billion dollars for this effort. They're putting in 10x whatever the taxpayers are putting in. So that's all enabling. The issue is not a topline in NASA. I mean, look, I would always say like I'd love for us to be so dialed in that we could do more with more, but the reality is for the longest time, absent global competition, we've been spreading money around everywhere and not concentrating our resources on what you expect of us. You know, more missions like Artemis 2, building a moon base, nuclear-powered missions, more X-planes. Like we've been spreading around to everyone to play nice with everyone. And now we wake up and we find that we're in a world where in the next two to three years the Chinese are going to land on the moon. And what does that say about us when we've been trying to get back for a long time and we spent over a hundred billion dollars to do it? So it's a concentration of our resources and a focus problem. Certainly an empowerment of the workforce as well. Like I really believe like there's a lot of things you don't want to throw money at until you actually get it dialed in.

Operationally. And that's that's kind of our where we're at right now.

Well, I would agree that I do believe that it's somewhat cyclical. Uh that um you know, we're in a high right now after Artemis 2, but uh you know, clearly the attention that uh you know, Artemis or I'm sorry, Apollo 17 had was very different than when Neil and Buzz walked on the moon in Apollo 11. I think you got to keep it fresh. Um you got to keep pushing the boundaries and setting new inspiring objectives, crewed and uncrewed, that you know maintain the public interest and keep momentum going you know towards uh you know the direction the agency was established to pursue from the from the get-go. I think if you if you if you get comfortable uh you know kind of in the this you know uh with a lot of repetition in your missions which nothing against the International Space Station which is

No.