Jared Isaacman Provides an Update on Artemis Acceleration Plans

Well, that is great. Thank you so much. [clears throat] Before even beginning my remarks, I mean, how impressive is that? I'm just so proud of the entire NASA workforce, Jeremy, especially your team. I mean, we're talking a handful of months ago that Artemis 2 just launched and came back. Look at all the amazing progress you see on the vehicle for the next mission. So, with that, good afternoon.

It is my great pleasure to welcome you all back to Kennedy Space Center for an update on the Aremis program. Again want to express my appreciation, my thank yous to the workforce here at Kennedy and across NASA, our industry and our international partners who are making everything we are about to discuss today possible.

Now let us go back in time bear bear with me all for a little bit. Some 58 years ago it's October 1968 and just hours ago the Apollo 7 astronauts splashed down from the first crude mission of the Apollo program. Now, the Saturn 5 for Apollo 8, it's already assembled. It's out at launch complex 39A. And in less than two months, that mission is going to fly, sending Frank Borman, Jim Levelvel, and Bill Anders into lunar orbit. In the vehicle assembly building, the Saturn 5 for Apollo 9 is already waiting. The lunar module, the LEM for Apollo 10, it's already been delivered. And in the midst of all of that mission activity I'm describing, nine months from now, the Eagle's going to land and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin will walk on the moon.

Now, of course, it is it is no secret that NASA was playing our part in a rivalry between two superpowers. It was a different time with extraordinary national resources committed to that objective. But we also knew so very little. With so little technology to aid in our efforts and no experience operating at all beyond low Earth orbit. And yet in that remarkably short span of time, the ambitions of generations once confined to the pages of science fiction became humanity's greatest achievement. And for the first time in in billions of years, life born on Earth would set foot on another world. [snorts] And here we are today very much in a new space race. And despite decades of accumulated knowledge and extraordinary advancements in technology, this race will be much closer than it ever needed to be. And why is that? I mean, China achieved its John Glenn moment, its first solo orbital human space flight just 23 years ago. Now, at that point, not only had NASA won the first space race, we put our astronauts on the moon six times. And at that point, we had flown 113 space shuttle missions before China had put their first astronaut in space. And from there in 2003, a Chinese space program once in its infancy has since deployed hundreds of communication satellite, earth observation satellites, military satellites. They've developed autonomous lunar landers and rovers. They've returned samples from the far side of the moon. And they are preparing alongside Russia to build a moon base of their own. Now, China will soon have reusable rockets. They have spacecraft and landers and an infrastructure for a credible two launch architecture to put their astronauts on the lunar surface in the next three years.

Now this is a story as much about their discipline, focus and urgency. It is about the weight of institutional inertia and misplaced priorities and decades of decisions some imposed upon us and others of our own making that have held America's space program back. And that brings us to the moment we find ourselves in today. Because the appetite, the appetite for tolerating and defending the status quo has reached its conclusion. No longer will we create programs that are too big to fail and too costly to succeed in the hopes of trying to make everyone happy. We will not compromise our architecture, performance, or capabilities to accommodate the the lobby of suppliers or to preserve technologies. Time has passed. We will not allow layers of process and bureaucratic inertia and endless deliberation take precedence over engineering progress and getting hardware built and flown. We will not outsource our expertise anymore and we will not dilute ourselves into believing that more time, more money and flying less will somehow make our work safer or more achievable. We are here for the mission and to deliver the outcomes the world expects of the most accomplished space agency in history.

And what I am describing this is this is not some long overdue disruption. It's not entrepreneurial thinking or tech tech industry pixie dust or or some new management philosophy. It's about our own history. It's a playbook this agency knows really well. The same playbook that went from Apollo 7 splashdown to Apollo 11 in just 9 months. And as extraordinary as those achievements were, they should not represent the upper limits of what NASA is capable of, but the standard that we should continuously aspire to exceed. Which is why we are bringing that intensity, that discipline, that engineering ownership back to NASA because great nations do not remain great by being caretakers of history, but by continuously making history.

So soon you're going to hear from NASA's associate administrator and uh chief engineer, Amit Rashia, and leader of the Artemis program, Jeremy Parsons. And they're going to tell you what we've gotten right. They're going to tell you what we've gotten wrong and the extremely hard work ahead on America's return to the moon. Because confronting our shortcomings and doing something about them is how confidence is earned. It's how cultures are changed and it's how the might of a great space agency is once again unleashed. Ahmed and Jeremy will talk to you about the Artemis 3 hardware being assembled right here at Kennedy Space Center. what's on track, the absolutely outstanding performance of the workforce that has cut the assembly and integration schedule in half, and the work ahead toward a year-end tanking test and a summer 2027 Artemis 3 launch. And when Artemis 3 does fly next year, we will have exercised those big rocket muscles that we will have strengthened and in the process bring together the three three of the world's most powerful rockets alongside the Orion spacecraft and the two human landing systems in development to test the interoperability and capabilities we're going to need before the next mission.

They will talk to you about Artemis 4 and the optionality we are preserving to give both of our lunar landing partners the greatest opportunity for readiness in advance of astronauts landing on the moon in 2028. And we have no intention of surrendering a viable path to the surface before the data and schedule compels us to do so. You will learn how the moonbased missions, especially Blue Origin's new Glenn rocket and Mark1 landers, share important commonality with the transfer stages and crude landers that will follow. These missions will do far more than lay the first kind of figurative brick of America's moon base. Every mission is going to provide invaluable engineering data, reduce risk, and build confidence in the crude landings ahead. And when American astronauts do take their first steps on the lunar surface in 2028, a rover and the first elements of an enduring human presence on the moon will already be waiting for them.

So like the space race of the 1960s, we are hardly in a position to set it and forget it with respect to our planning. We will never stop listening to data and adapt as circumstances require just as we did during Apollo and just or just as we did during Gemini and just as we did during Apollo. Now that means simplifying and dramatically reducing the mass of our lunar space suits means improving our upper stage performance to get Orion closer to the moon and modifying Orion to accommodate different lander requirements. Now, in this incredibly demanding and dangerous business of putting astronauts on the moon, NASA must own the near impossible rather than shifting the burden to our partners. That is how we get we give Artemis 4 the greatest possible chance of safely and successfully returning Americans to lunar surface in 2028.

And to be really clear, there are serious engineering challenges ahead. Getting Orion to low lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unressed for far too long. Advancing two very different landing systems requires demonstrating capabilities ranging from complex launch campaigns, large-scale cryogenic prop transfer to the to the aggregation of stages in orbit. These are not trivial matters to solve and no amount of of my enthusiasm or schedule pressure changes the laws of physics. What we are undertaking is ambitious. It's extraordinarily difficult and years of decisions both within and beyond the walls of this agency have cost us time and resources that we never had to spare. But the agency we are reinvigorating and the extraordinary vehicles our industry partners are building are worth every bit of that effort.

This will not be a repeat of the flags and foot footprints. These vehicles are being designed to dramatically reduce the cost of delivering mass to orbit and to the moon to support longer surface operations, enable more frequent astronaut missions, and transform what will begin as a small scientific outpost into something that may one day resemble a city on the lunar surface. This mountain of effort is our opportunity to potentially spark a lunar economy, to unleash scientific discovery, to learn to live and work beyond our home planet, and mature the technologies we will need for the day when NASA astronauts embark on humanity's next giant leap to Mars.

Now, we will never compromise on testing and qualifying the hardware that our astronauts and frankly America's space program depends upon. And we will never launch until we are ready. But we will not accept that great achievements simply require more time and more money. Nor will NASA sit idly by and watch one of the most consequential moments of this new century past our overseas competitors. We are rebuilding the workforce and core competencies that eroded over decades. We are restoring our ability to design, build, test, and fly hardware our missions and industry partners depend upon. We are deploying talent from across NASA centers and throughout the supply chain to attack the critical path. Every vendor and partner should understand that when a schedule is broken, NASA personnel will be knocking on the door and not to observe, not to write a paper or convene a committee, but to roll up their sleeves and solve problems. This is what extreme ownership looks like and the capabilities we are rebuilding today will serve America long after the first astronauts return from the moon.

This is a very energized NASA and the updates you hear today are only a small part of that story. I am beyond proud of how the team has responded since our ignition event earlier this year. And you can see it here at Kennedy in the in the vehicle assembly uh building in our machine shops that are running around the clock across our centers and throughout our industry partners because there is of course much much to do. And that brings us to where all of this began when the men and women of this agency were in the home stretch of a great race with extraordinary challenges still ahead. We find ourselves at a similar moment under very different circumstances with perhaps even more at stake. And just as the Apollo generation rose to the occasion, so too will the young engineers that are working late at night right now on Orion, the welders that are helping to modify Centaur and the mobile launcher, the technicians that are in the machine shops, the flight controllers preparing for Artemis 3, and the intern getting that first glimpse of what it means to be part of NASA. The work they do from here, the obstacles they overcome, the culture they create, and the agency they reinvigorate will make possible the dreams of tomorrow.

And my hope is when the history books look back on this time, the politics over which rocket and landers carried us to the moon, how long it took and at what cost will be a footnote compared to all that followed. That when the time came, the Aremis [clears throat] generation chose to go and we went. And [snorts] thank you. And I'll turn over to associate administrator and chief engineer Amish Shhatria.

to do is we'll have SLS out at the launchpad. We would have conducted a wet dress rehearsal, and we're going to do everything we can to ensure that that vehicle is ready to go as quickly as we can after that first Blue Origin launch. The Blue Moon test lander can loiter for up to a month in orbit, but end of the day, we want to minimize that risk. And so, we want to get the crew on orbit and meet up as soon as we can thereafter. Once in orbit, the Blue Origin team will make sure the vehicle is healthy and ready to support our rendezvous and docked operations with Orion. And just to give you a little bit of a feel, the Blue Moon lander is going to allow Orion to dock, the crew to ingress, and carries many of the same systems the lunar lander will around the moon. Some of those systems, some of the things that we really get to buy down for me first and foremost is what we call our ECLSS systems, our environmental control and life support systems. Those are tricky to build. That was one of our big objectives in Artemis 2. But we're also going to be testing out our reaction control systems, our tanks, our valves, our thrusters, the articulating solar arrays, active thermal control systems and radiators. The lunar crew module primary structure. It's the first build of it. It's going to be the exact same for Artemis 3 and tons of other things including our software, flight computers, and avionics systems. Building, testing, and flying these in Artemis 3 will help us understand and learn as much as we can from Blue's operations during this flight. It's similar to how we've started to take an evolvable approach between Artemis 1, 2, and now three, and it sets us up for a lunar landing in four. The next vehicle in the sequence is going to be the SLS. So, we launch Orion into what is what we call an elliptical orbit at 16 by 975 nautical miles. And over the first day, Orion is going to transition from that higher altitude down to about 300 nautical miles. And that's really about getting thermal stability. Orion was built as a deep space vehicle and so we're going to have to really manage the thermal environments which are higher in a low earth orbit. The crew is going to spend the first two days checking out the Orion spacecraft and setting up for proximity operations. During that time, Orion will maneuver down to a 237 nautical mile rendezvous orbit and that's where we intend to meet the Blue Origin lander. On flight day three, Orion performs the first major test of the mission. This one's going to be a big one. It's the rendezvous and docking with the Blue Moon test lander. This is where we learn how both Orion and Blue systems operate together, their guidance systems, laser navigation control, communications, all together in real world conditions. Over the next two days, the crew will conduct operations docked with Blue Moon. They're going to open up the hatch. They're going to enter the lander. They're going to evaluate the environmental controls, the life support systems. We'll confirm that the spacecraft can maintain the right atmosphere of pressure. And we're also going to test emergency scenarios, dual vehicle control, and we're going to put our mission control teams through their paces. On around flight day six, after those operations are complete, Starship launches from Florida. And so, Orion will then undock from Blue Moon and adjust its orbit to a 206 nautical mile rendezvous orbit with Starship on flight day 8. The Starship Artemis 3 has a docking system that's built onto the nose cone, and it's letting us conduct on-orbit testing with a second very different lander. And if you've seen some of the Starship images, a very large vehicle. So, we want to learn how to control attitude together, how we're going to fly these vehicles together, and how we're going to operate. The demonstration with Starship is shorter, about 2 hours. The crew will not enter the Starship during the mission, but it gives us critical data and allows us to really understand the forces of docking, how we're going to push, how we're going to work together. Once Starship operations are complete, Orion and the crew have the remaining days available for additional test objectives before needing to come home. There is literally every hour already planned out in the timeline. We are packing it with science, with mission objectives, but three of the big ones that I really want to hit on is we have our Orion crew survival suit evaluations. So, we didn't get those completed during Artemis 2. And they're really important for contingency scenarios when you're in a lunar flight. If we lose pressure in the cabin, things like that. This is a really big one. We want to get on this mission. We're also going to conduct docking sensor tests, acoustic and thermal measurements, and we're going to perform human factors assessments inside Orion as well as a wide range of science and technology demonstrations. End of the day, the mission, the full 14 days is packed the entire time with science, with objectives that are really each buying us down risk.

To go into some of the science, we're including a series of studies focused on human health and biological science, testing concepts for future missions on the moon and a host of Earth and Sun observations. Our human research program is going to conduct four studies that build upon the Artemis 2 experiments. And they're going to conduct a proof of concept study for how crew could perform health related assessments in situations where mission control isn't available. Those are going to be critical lessons learned as we build out our moon base and have our lunar aspirations. We're going to perform Earth and Sun observations that will take place to continue training crew in critical observation skills and it leverages the distinct orbital characteristics of where we're going to be in this mission. Everything we do on Artemis 3 is designed to reduce risk for our future lunar landing missions. And then when combined with the Mark 1 landings, with the additional Starship launches, with our uncrewed demonstrations, make us very comfortable with the risk level we're going to go take on Artemis 4. Big picture though, we're providing the choreography of a multi-launch campaign. We're teaching these teams how to work together, how to make critical real-time mission decisions, all in an environment that is low Earth orbit, where if something goes wrong, we can come home much more quickly. Let's see. All right, so let's talk about some of the fun stuff, which is the crew and hardware progress. So, since being assigned to the Artemis 3 mission on June 9th, Randy, Luca, Frank, and Andre have already completed more than 350 hours of classroom instruction. They participated in 22 integrated simulations with the flight control team. Our flight control team in Houston has already conducted 55 mission simulations, preparing mission control to safely and successfully execute our missions. At KSC, the launch team is already training heavily to keep the muscle memory alive. They've already performed 100 hours in simulations with cryo and countdown sims as you can see in the video behind you. We're also really well advanced with our rocket hardware. I want to focus on some of our integrated EGS exploration ground systems and space launch system teams for a second. They have demonstrated just absolutely amazing endurance efforts and creativity. The minute the vision for Artemis 3 was announced, our teams began accelerating booster deliveries. And actually we had I think a call that evening of the ignition event to get boosters delivered earlier and laying out plans to expedite operations. To that end, stacking was completed at the end of September. That's a pretty big deal when you think it's just 5 months after we just landed Artemis 2. And then for some additional perspective, we were able to cut the time it took to prepare the booster segments for stacking in half and booster stacking operations were completed in 20% of the time or were cut by 20%. The team has been doing this by a number of different things. NASA's on the floor. They are leading. They're bringing decision velocity. They're incorporating lessons learned. We're improving our requirements, simplifying, and we're getting creative on how to perform work in parallel. Meanwhile, as you heard earlier, we're getting ready to integrate the core stage with the boosters. And so, we have some pretty cool images of that coming through. And then, there you go, which again, just for perspective, that is the absolute coolest lift I've ever seen in my life. 220 ft long, you got two cranes, you're going vertical in the historic vertical assembly vehicle assembly building. It's pretty exciting. And I was getting images and pictures all day yesterday from everyone on the team. They can't be more excited about what we're doing. When we talk about kind of the engines there at the bottom, just so you know, if we go to this next photo, we have the L3Harris facility in Canoga Park, California, and we're actually building up a large inventory of engines ready to go for this next vehicle as well. Because we have kept the team proficient and immediately rolled into Artemis 3, we've seen the team able to leverage lessons learned. We're taking fewer non-conformances and we're resolving issues much more quickly. This isn't because we're cutting corners or doing things less safely. We're exercising muscle memory. And rather than building it again 3 years in between, losing workforce, we immediately rolled into the next one. The mobile launcher was back in the vehicle assembly building 17 days after launch. You can compare that to between Artemis 1 and 2. It is a world of difference. With this, we plan to keep that muscle memory going. We want to roll out for a tanking test with the boosters and core stage in the coming months. And this is about testing out critical systems, but also about keeping our team performing the reps and staying ready. This configuration is what we're going to call a short stack configuration. We will not have the spacer Orion on top. It's just going to be the core stage and the boosters. But more importantly, it allows us to test new hardware where we previously saw liquid hydrogen leaks. And so I'll start kind of showing some of this photo because this is just kind of an example of how we've been implementing some of this. After Artemis 2, we knew we needed to change out what we call the quick disconnect because we had leaks of hydrogen on Artemis 1 and 2. The reason why we hadn't done it was it was going to cost tens of millions of dollars and about multiple years. So, let's see, in April timeframe, right around maybe late March, when we had kind of the last wet dress rehearsal and saw some of these leaks again, we kicked off a team internal to NASA. They decided to bring the work in-house. They leveraged our unique experience where we redesigned it, fabricated it, and we already have it in testing less than 5 months for an absolute fraction of the cost. And so this is what we can do and must do more of going forward, both for the taxpayer and what our cadence is going to demand of us in the space race. NASA needs to be expected to do this kind of work and we have some of the best technical knowledge in the industry to do it. It's an example of how we're taking the handcuffs off of some of our engineers and allowing them to lead. Next up is probably my favorite example of something that we have done recently, which is the spacer that's going to fly in Artemis 3 in place of the upper stage. So when we pivoted to a low earth orbit mission, the SLS team quickly came back and said we don't need the upper stage for that, core stage has plenty of performance to drop us in the orbit we need. So rather than waste that critical hardware and the cost of that upper stage, the ICPS, we developed the idea of a spacer to keep the interfaces the same. As you see in this footage, our Marshall and SLS teams moved at a speed that has absolutely blown my mind. They finished the design. They got the material. They fabricated it all in-house. This is since ignition. The hardware is done and will be largely delivered to KSC in the next couple of months. There was no contracting, no unnecessary overhead. We had these capabilities. We unleashed them to go do it, and it's some of the fastest work I've ever seen. As for the spacecraft, the Orion crew and service module are fully mated and going through integrated testing in the operations and checkout building just down the road. We got more than 95% of the Orion hardware integration complete. Our remaining work is finishing out some of the crew systems and doing critical environmental testing. Given how successful Artemis 2 was with our optical comm capabilities, getting imagery back, we actually decided in the March timeframe to add two Starlink terminals to the vehicle to improve the imagery quality and the downlinks. So again, this is another example where we were able to change on a dime. We quickly implemented the hardware and we actually have those two terminals going on this week being installed. Our goal is to increase parallel production, reduce timelines, and make Orions available sooner. And to that goal, we also have approved more than 250 components to be removed from the Artemis 2 spacecraft and reused for future flights. This is going to help us to accelerate our readiness and decrease our dependency on long lead vendors and supply chain. That's how we set the stage for our moon-based ambitions. So, let's see. Let's talk about the lander test articles. So work with our lander partners Blue Origin and SpaceX is progressing really well for both Artemis 3 and 4. I think Blue Origin's New Glenn team has amazed the world with their progress for return to flight after the incident in May. We're working closely with them. We have over 100 NASA team engaged throughout return to flight, engaged with the FAA, lander production, and I have seen Blue Origin mobilize an absolute army working around the clock to get them back to flight. This picture here is of their next booster headed to their integration facility. And so Blue Origin is shooting for pad operations to start back up in November with a first return to flight launch of New Glenn soon thereafter. Their design for the Artemis 3 lander test article is in good shape. We have gone through design reviews. We've been participating with them and they have parts coming together from across the United States and I will tell you I see that team fighting for every single day figuring out how to shave hours off. The test article crew cabin is currently being built with pressure testing and full integration of the Mark I test lander slated for early 2027. But NASA is not just standing by. We're working closely with them to embed some of our best people to help on software, to help on welding, to help on thruster development, and they're using NASA facilities in a lot of these instances. So, to give me a minute to stop talking, we have a hype vid, we have a video from Blue Origin, including the return to flight efforts, Mark 1 work that will inform Mark 2 and hardware progress for the Artemis missions. So, why don't we cue that video?

Unfortunately, we can't play the audio from this video, but I can tell you it is very hypey music that they are playing. You're not missing any words, though. I'm being told from the field that it's actually more ethereal hype.

And I love again some of the work we're doing and what we're seeing from our leadership too, right, is they are absolutely walking the walk. Every time we run into a supplier issue, a priority issue across the industry, Administrator Eisman, Amit are immediately on the phone. They're immediately putting pressure. We're immediately going out and helping to make things happen. And it's really been an absolute impressive undertaking. So, let's see. Let's move on to SpaceX. And so, as many of you know, SpaceX launched their first orbital flight with Starship Flight 14 in late September. And that was using their version 3 Starship. It had important upgrades from their previous version. And really, I mean, was a pretty phenomenal flight. All in all, the SpaceX and NASA teams have conducted a data review of the flight. They're making excellent progress towards flight 15, which I think will absolutely be awesome to see because it could likely be a return to launch site and a catch of both the booster and Starship. Both vehicles have already been cryoproofed. Improvements are being worked to address lessons learned from flight 14. As you know, SpaceX takes a test, learn, improve approach, and so we're seeing lots of hardware, lots of quick changes, and an absolute blistering pace of production. As an example, SpaceX identified the root cause of multiple Raptor engine relight failures at boost back and landing. They implemented several quick fixes for flights 13 and 14 to improve their chances to reach more test objectives. And then they already have permanent hardware improvements coming for flight 15 when they start flying an improved version of the Raptor. These sorts of changes in this timeline would be unthinkable in standard industry history. And so, you know, again, as we expect to see SpaceX's next Starship flight, probably in the November timeframe, we also expect to see these timelines between flights get smaller and smaller. Each one of those flights is going to be critical lessons building confidence, reducing risk towards our lunar ambitions. The image that will come up here is of the Starship production line. And I think that picture says a thousand words of just what the future holds and what we will be able to achieve together. SpaceX is making progress also here at the Kennedy Space Center building out the pad for Starship with eyes towards the first launch of Starship from Cape in the coming months. The entire skyline of KSC you can see is also changing as they finish the new gigabay and they build out the infrastructure needed for Starship operations in Florida. The SpaceX test lander article will have a passive docking system as we mentioned on its nose cone which will be integrated several weeks before flight. But they're already making great progress on that. The design is done as well as the arrow cover to protect it and we're looking at concurrent fit check testing of that next month at NASA Marshall. So while I'm personally excited about Artemis 3, I am also extremely eager to see the upcoming propellant transfer demonstration missions. So this is going to be a first-of-its-kind SpaceX mission where they're going to launch two Starships in quick succession. One from Boca Chica, one from the Kennedy Space Center, and they're going to prove out how propellant transfer works on orbit to a depot that will then again, this is all risk mitigation and building us up towards our eventual lunar campaigns. The hardware and concepts I've already laid eyes on with them. We went through it in detail. They're very mature and SpaceX is targeting this demonstration for early 2027. So in the next video we'll take a look at the progress they're making across the board to support Artemis 3 and beyond. I can tell you that this music is a lot more hypey. It has a faster pace. Yes, I'm using the word hypey. More hype, more better. Yes, absolutely. Oh. Oh, that was definitely new. That was definitely new. That's pretty awesome.

All right, so that's kind of the progress on Artemis 3, what we're doing there. I'm going to go into Artemis 4 progress so you can understand where we're at on our lunar mission because we are not slowing down with Artemis 3 and we have teams working both things in great parallel activities. We have a NASA leadership team that is out on the field every day working with vendors to drive outcomes just like they are for Artemis 3 for everything on Artemis 4. On Orion, our crew and service modules are both at KSC. They're undergoing installations and testing. And in this image, you can actually see our mission specialist Andre Douglas from Artemis 3 stepping inside the Artemis 4 spacecraft. Engineers have also completed bonding tiles on the Artemis 4 heat shield and gap filling is in work. As you can see there, we're coming quite far along on the SLS side where final processing inspections of the RS-25 engines are ongoing at Stennis Space Center as well as preparations and testing of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks at the Michoud assembly facility in New Orleans. What you see here is an image of our Artemis 4 LH2 tank. And so again, we are starting to stack up hardware and get it out the door, which again will allow us to improve that muscle memory and get more flights off. Our teams in Michoud and KSC are working day and night ensuring core stage 4 is ready for flight by early 2028 with core stage 5 ready later that year. As you know, our team has been focused on what we can do to accelerate our lunar landing and return American astronauts to the moon. Amit as well as the administrator spoke about stepping back, looking at our architecture, really trying to understand what we can do to reduce risk, and so that's been a major focus of the last several months. It's been a deliberate effort including where we could simplify, deciding where we could simplify our requirements, streamline designs, and improve mission probabilities of success. These efforts give us options which we did not previously have in some instances. I'm going to give you a couple of examples of that and then kind of take you through our thought processes. First up is the sortie suit which I believe some of you may have heard about at this point. NASA and Axiom are advancing both our baseline suit as well as what we now call a tailored configuration, the sortie suit for moonwalking, to use during our earliest early Artemis missions. What you see here is a rendering of the sortie suit. In our original requirements, we were building a design to an eventual end state that far exceeded what we would need in these early missions. The time durations we're going to be on the moon, the amount of hardware we can bring with us, and simply put, the complexity of those initial asks added risk in testing, added risk to the design of the landers. And the sortie suit directly addresses those issues. We are able to cut the suit mass in half from about 500, a little over 500 lb to about 250 lb. And when you think about what has to be delivered to the lunar surface, that is a really big deal. This is all about building in design margin for our landers, creating evolvable capabilities that are intended to grow with our mission. The design of the sortie suit leverages our existing production capabilities, our infrastructure, our supply chain efficiencies with Axiom using many of the certified components of the baseline suit as well as already decided and designed interfaces with our landers. The sortie suit is intended for short, targeted, science-driven spacewalks near the lander, but it also allows for quicker turnaround between EVAs during the early Artemis missions and can be worn by astronauts as they land on and ascend from the lunar surface in a lunar lander. Similar to Apollo, we've set a minimum surface EVA duration for the sortie configuration suit of at least 2 hours. We anticipate we'll be able to operate longer, but every minute of our first surface EVAs will allow us to reduce the unknowns and take out any unnecessary conservatism while maintaining our safety controls. Over subsequent missions, the EVAs will become longer in duration, longer transverses into more aggressive terrain and thermal environments. But if history has taught us anything, evolving our designs rather than jumping to an end state is going to be the right way to move ahead quickly. We'll be able to use the sortie suit configuration for missions that are short duration and then bring on the baseline suit for longer missions with moon base that require construction, longer duration surface days, and mission plans that reuse suits across multiple crew visits. This is all about proactively addressing early Artemis mission challenges and not going straight to the end state with lunar surface EVAs. Instead, we're taking an achievable iterative approach. We continue to plan to do the demonstration of the baseline space suit on the space station in 2027 because we're keeping these two lines moving in parallel. This represents a significant risk reduction activity for Artemis 4 because more than 50% of your life support system components are the same. It's going to be able to give us good test information. And then Axiom and NASA are working together to complete development, training, and the MBL to ensure that our teams are well prepared for future lunar excursion activities. We're using a similar approach with the SLS rocket. So as we stepped back and we looked at what was needed to reduce our risk, improve design margins, and give ourselves some flexibility, we are now carrying two configurations of the SLS upper stage. The first is the ICPS which is currently available and as you know we don't have to fly on Artemis 3. So we got it in the barn ready to go. We are also going to add in a stretched Centaur upper stage by keeping Artemis 3 in LEO. Again, the ICPS is available and ready to fly. But when we switched from the EUS to the Centaur, we did so very deliberately. We simply did not have confidence that EUS could meet our timelines or the cost and schedule growth that we were seeing was acceptable. The Centaur is a vehicle that is in production, that NASA and ULA know well, and one that is capable of achieving our missions. I have personally visited Decatur and I will tell you the factory that I've seen there is able to sustain the build rate that we're looking for and to get us hardware quickly and it has great flight heritage. So, when we talk about the Stretched Centaur, what we're doing there is we're adding 50% increased propellant capacity compared to the standard Vulcan Centaur 5. This lets us get more mass to trans-lunar injection orbit and when combined with a kick stage that's under final study could allow us to get Orion to what we call a low lunar orbit. That may not sound like a big deal, but when you're talking about every study we have ever done since 2014, something that came out inevitably was the closer we can get Orion to the moon, the more design margin we have, the more risk reduction, the more mission availability, and the more overall options become available to us. The team has been looking at this for months and again, we quickly turned on the Stretched Centaur and we're in the final stages of making a decision on a kick stage as well. We're doing this by leveraging the absolute best that NASA and industry has to offer and really leaning into hardware that exists in many instances. Here's a look at a couple of the images of Centaur. The first is a rendering of the extended Centaur with Orion in space and as you can see there, absolutely beautiful. And then the second is from some of our wind tunnel testing that's actually being conducted out at Ames. So again, we put this into effect less than 60 days ago. They have already machined accurate models that are undergoing wind testing so we can understand how this vehicle flies, how we need to change our guidance and navigation control, and just again rapidly moving to get this ready. Overall, this increased TLI capability enables the SLS rocket to deliver NASA's Orion spacecraft to lunar orbit more effectively. It provides greater flexibility, more performance, and no rocket guy has ever said, "I want less performance." So with the Stretched Centaur stage, we also will be able to get increased loiter duration times for our landers, which is really about increasing our opportunities for mission availability. You know, our lunar windows are short. We need to be able to have as many opportunities as possible to ensure that we can achieve the mission successfully. This also supports broader national space policy objectives, maintains strong demand among Vulcan customers, and it creates dual-use value beyond the Artemis program. So let's see what makes Stretched Centaur different from the EUS and other development activities that have taken longer. So first and foremost, this is a production line that is in service. It is already humming. They are pumping out vehicles. We are leveraging known capabilities. But I would also say NASA is not sitting back and just saying let's deliver it. We are embedding NASA people at the production facility. We are using our test facilities to help move this along quickly. We've put in materials, welding experts from across the agency on the floor making things happen. The team is already well underway in having our weld schedules ready. They have material in hand or in work and they're moving with a great sense of purpose associated with this space race. The sortie suit configuration and the Stretched Centaur are just two of the efforts that we are doing to accelerate our return to the moon that I think are really important for everyone to know because they're going to be very visible, but we're doing it across the board. This chart gives you an idea where we are with some of those efforts. So again, I don't need you to necessarily read this. What I will say kind of across the board is we're looking at some of the key 2026 accomplishments on sortie, on Centaur, mobile launcher, and SLS. What we are instituting across the board in both these and in the charts that follow are spiral developments. We are putting key people in charge. We're giving them the authority but then we're holding them to regular deliveries. Build a little, iterate, build, iterate to where we get to where we're going very quickly. And what I will say is in terms of hardware development, in terms of what we're seeing, the teams are really stepping up in performance. The sortie suit. I think if you go to the next slide, the sortie suit. Oh, so this is SLS and mobile launcher modification. So kind of what this shows you is from our SLS hardware perspective, every single quarter we have hardware being built and delivered from across the board. So from our boosters to the core stage to our spacecraft adapters, we have deliveries on every single month. Similar for the mobile launcher. For the sortie suit, what you're going to see is by the end of this year we'll already have our pressure garment built and delivered and then we're going directly into our life support systems directly thereafter. And so the team has set an ambitious schedule. They are a blended team between Axiom and NASA and we are actually kind of sequestering them in some of the Axiom facilities and really seeing a lot of progress. By instituting some of these initiatives, we are preserving options, we strengthen readiness, and increase flexibility for our early missions. The technologies we are developing are complex. Things are going to change. We are going to need to be able to adapt as those things change if we want to beat China to the moon, if we want to build out our moon base, and if we want margin to evolve. Artemis is going to drive. There is no question about that. We are changing our time. We are not changing our timelines. We're changing how we do things. We're leaning into our best and brightest. We're giving them ownership and we're simplifying overly complex requirements and establishing approaches that will help us achieve our goals.

All right, I'm almost home, I promise. Stay with me. I'm going to jump into the Artemis 4 concepts of operations just to give you kind of a feel for exactly what we're undertaking here. As part of our risk reduction efforts, we worked closely with both SpaceX and Blue Origin starting late last year to propose accelerated concepts of operations. This is to really prioritize our lunar landings in 2028. Very similar story with our initial lunar landing concepts as what I was just talking about on the sortie and Centaur. And so we are looking to simplify, remove difficult requirements. We've been already removing what we call the NRHO orbit for docking with Orion, which is a costly orbit that requires quite a bit from a propellant perspective. And by removing that requirement on our lander partners and giving them some additional options, we can increase our mission availability as well as reduce the number of launches required for SpaceX. In this graphic here, we show the full concept of operations for an accelerated lunar landing mission that I'm going to walk you through here briefly. The Starship propellant aggregation still takes place in low Earth orbit before the crew launch in Orion on SLS, allowing for additional refueling and flexibility in crew launch timing. This accelerated approach has the Starship lander docking with Orion in what is now a high Earth orbit before performing the trans-lunar injection burn or what we call kind of a push of Orion to low lunar orbit. So that is instead of meeting up around the moon, we're going to actually use the Starship to push us out there. Our teams found that if we modified Orion to be able to be pushed, we could drastically simplify the number of launches and really improve the probability of success of the mission. Those mods on Orion have already been greenlit. They're well underway. The design is complete and the fabrication is in process right now already on the European service module. You can see in this next slide some of the upcoming milestones that we have on this mission. Just because there were so many different milestones, we're heavily focused on the next year, but it is absolutely jam-packed. It's one milestone after another as Starship ramps up flight rate, perfects reusability, brings on additional launchpads, and conducts our prop aggregation demo. Just like with Falcon 9, every flight of Starship teaches us about the system. It increases reliability and confidence, and gets us closer to the moon. The crew cabin build that you saw in the earlier video is well underway. I have laid eyes on it and how it is coming together. I will tell you I would be much more excited to stay in this vehicle than an Apollo style mission for our crews. It's going to be really, really awesome. The team is targeting the first uncrewed demo mission to the lunar surface at the end of 2027 and then from there we're looking at the back half of 2028 for our first lunar landing on Blue Origin. Which is, we're going to go to the next graphic to talk about their accelerated mission concept. Blue plans to use three Mark 1 transfer vehicles or similar to Mark 1-like vehicles as tugboat style transfer vehicles to take the Mark 2 crew lander to lunar orbit. Blue will meet up with Orion to receive the crew in what we call a special elliptical polar lunar orbit. So easier than NRHO, but it still allows access to the South Pole landing sites. We did this because we could get closer to the surface requiring less tanker type launches, less transfer stages. Blue would first individually launch these three Mark 1-like vehicles or transfer stages before the launch of the Mark 2 lander aggregating in low Earth orbit. Then two of the transfer stages will boost the Mark 2 and remaining transfer stage to the elliptical Earth orbit. That remaining transfer stage will then fire the trans-lunar injection burn to take itself and the Mark 1 to an elliptical polar orbit. SLS would then launch Orion and its crew. The Blue lander and Orion would meet up in that elliptical polar orbit before the remaining transfer stage would bring the crewed Mark 2 to a low lunar orbit. The Mark 1 will take over from there, performing the landing and short surface stay, ultimately launching the crew back to Orion for the trip back to Earth. Blue Origin already has a tremendous amount of hardware in production and testing for initial crewed landing mission. If you go to the next graphic, kind of gives you a similar feel on the Blue Origin side of just what's coming up. As we mentioned, New Glenn's return to flight is on the horizon. And then in early 2027, Blue plans to bring up their vertical integration facility for its upgraded New Glenn rocket. That is the version of the New Glenn or the 9x4, which will serve as the launch vehicle for the Mark 2 crewed lander and supporting stages. Next year, we will also see the first launch of the uncrewed Mark 1 cargo lander. And so you saw some of those images in the earlier video, but every single one of these Mark 1 missions is using many of the similar systems, similar engines, reaction control, and they're going to give us valuable test and information to reduce our risk for a lunar landing. Outside Cleveland, NASA Glenn teams are preparing at the Armstrong test facility for a three-engine BE-7 test campaign. That was also shown quickly in the video, but this is really going to tell us how three of those engines can operate together. And moving quite along on that. After the Artemis 3 mission, we expect to see the first demonstration of the transfer stages and Mark 2 aggregation as part of the uncrewed demo mission. The uncrewed demonstrations for us are going to provide critical operations to reduce risk for initial surface mission. It's going to allow us to learn how do these, you know, how do we start and restock cryogenic engines on the moon rather than hypergolic. We're going to understand kind of the conditions of the regolith at the South Pole, plume conditions and surface interaction, thermal performance of the landers, and really is going to be a critical stepping stone to the eventual lunar landing. If all goes according to plan, we'll also have a lunar terrain vehicle on the lunar surface by the time the first Artemis astronauts arrive near the South Pole, giving us additional options as the moon base begins to take shape. NASA and we intend to wait as long as possible to make a decision about which provider is ultimately going to provide the first American astronauts back to the moon in 2028. And so this is again really trying to go along with them in the development cycle. And we have dedicated teams working hand-in-hand with both providers marching along the way doing everything we can to accelerate. Regardless of who goes first, both providers are planning for lunar landing missions in 2028. Our work doesn't stop when we return astronauts to the lunar surface. For the future of our American prosperity, leadership, inspiration, we intend to build a moon base to where we can learn, live, and work there. All to give us the skill sets we need to go further.

All right, last couple of bits, just closing. I hope you guys recognize and see what I see in this team. They are fighting for every hour. They are fighting for every day. And they have embraced this mission and are excited about the increased launch cadence. I know I am. We finalized modifying our contracts with the human landing system providers. And we have moved at a pace I have not seen since SLS, which to me is just awesome. We're using our resources. We're uncuffing many of our people to go out there, get things done, and solve problems in a way that we hadn't before. This is an incredibly difficult challenge, but I know if there is any team that can do it, it is the one that we have for Artemis. And we're working with our partners to bring every ounce of expertise, every ounce of industry all to bear to accomplish the near impossible. So, with that, thank you for your time. Thank you for listening and thank you to our team that's out there doing just amazing work.

You want to go?

Yeah, Bill. I mean, they didn't have during Apollo, they didn't have uncrewed capability to start the machines, right? So that we're just going to use the uncrewed flights to bang away at Raptor restart and those things we're going to need to do it.

Do you want? Yeah, I can. I mean, I think Marcia, we're always going to debate it. I mean, part of the moonbase approach has been recognizing that we don't really understand the environment and we have overhead remote sensing and those assets, right? We know kind of at those resolutions what's there, but you know, we've only taken a few measurements in the last year or so in terms of what that environment looks like, the thermal environment, multipathing. I mean, the regolith down there is very interesting. And so, the approach that the Moonbase program is taking is, hey, let's just start getting down there, flying sensors. We're going to come up with common sensor packages that are going to ride along the first few moonbase missions. This is the, you know, kind of learn phase of the program. And I think based on that, we'll be able to tell, you know, what looks great from an overhead perspective might not be great from the thermal perspective given the local relief. And so that's kind of really critical. So we're going to make sure we entertain a wide swath of possibility, but we need data. So we need to get that first.

Yeah, I mean I think it's extremely important that we always understand the risks we are taking. Clearly, there was risk on the pad, you know, at that point on a test that had no intention of going into space. But, you know, it was certainly well investigated, communicated, those lessons were learned and carried on. I mean it's an area right now that we spend an awful lot of time and, you know, we have an hour or so to talk in front of you, but if you want to know the discussions that go on on the flammability testing or the exploration atmosphere testing that's underway. We actually just wrapped up, I want to say, another human spaceflight program test at Johnson Space Center on exploration atmosphere so that we can denitrogenate our astronauts before they walk on the moon, but do so in a way that doesn't create a highly flammable environment. So, if we want to go specific to, you know, the matters of Apollo 1, those lessons have been captured and well understood around the agency, but it's not lost on us. The risk exists far beyond that and it's why we have flight readiness reviews, why we have pre-flight readiness reviews that go into it, it's why we discuss things, but those type of consequences that can happen in extremely dangerous work of human exploration shouldn't be confused with things like moving with urgency or purpose, you know, to get to your outcome. As I said in my remarks before, you know, the idea of taking longer, costing more and flying less somehow leading to better or safer outcomes I think is a misunderstanding that's been left uncorrected for far too long. I don't know if you want to layer anything.

Yeah, sure. I mean, there wasn't anything in the, I mean I guess you'd potentially have to go back to Constellation where it was intended to drop off Orion in low lunar orbit. So there's obviously inherent performance issues with getting Orion there. Now even the exploration upper stage which might have been useful for, you know, co-manifesting payload to, you know, the moon for building out a gateway did not help you get Orion into low lunar orbit. So that was unaddressed for a period of time. The way it was addressed was, well, let's shift that burden onto the landers themselves. Now here we are with, you know, 27 some odd months to go looking at what we can do within the agency, but we're also, as I said, always listening to the data, looking at what's happening around us, what progress are our landing partners making, where are they struggling, what can we do to be helpful, you know, in that regard because there are direct benefits. You saw two different concepts, but every one of their lives gets easier if we can get Orion closer to the moon. Substantially certainly helps out Blue Origin on their side. So we could choose to continue on our track and say maybe they'll show up and meet our timelines or not. Or we can say, well, let's start turning those knobs and do so. So meaning it was not part of any of the recent history as far as I know, unless going all the way back to maybe the early Constellation concepts to get Orion close to the moon, but we have the time to be able to do so now. I don't know if anything you want to, I don't have to comment.

Yeah. And at some point you do have to do something, right? So Amit was very clear earlier. Look, as the shuttle program was reaching its conclusion, it was imperative to maintain capability, right? And we leveraged a lot of the manufacturers that were already producing capability and assembled it into a program that maybe got, you know, some minor, you know, tweaks over time as different administrations came in. But if you zoom out on a whole, looking at it, for as glorious as it is and a great mission that it undertook with Artemis 2, there are certain, like it does not trade well from an efficiency or performance perspective relative to Saturn V. There are things that are shortcomings in it. So we can continue to allow it to perpetuate or we can make use of the time, the resources, the machine shops that exist across all of our centers. What can we do ourselves? What can we do as builders to take on the tough problems to shift some of that near impossible burden back to the agency that's being counted on to do so and give our landers the highest probability for success in '28, and that's what we're doing.

Well, I mean it starts, fortunately that's a once in a century type of an event. So we're fortunate in that regard, but there are much smaller meteor strikes that will happen on the lunar surface with greater frequency. We got some additional data from that from the great crew of Artemis 2 and some of the observations they relayed back during their mission. So we are giving a lot of thought to that for the moon base. So these are short duration initial Artemis stays that are going to be on the lunar surface when you start talking about, you know, Artemis 4, Artemis 5. But in parallel we are building a moon base and this is why we're not building one rover for the moon. We're building lots of rovers and we're going to learn and we're going to gradually scale up capabilities because I guarantee you we're going to need surface infrastructure. It's not, it's why we're not locking in the design for habitation modules today, right? We're doing our science of survival, lots of uncrewed robotic landers, lots of demos, see what we like to build up to it because yes, there are going to be environmental factors we're going to need to consider that could be hazardous and be able to address them. And we will do it in a logical, iterative way to get to the right outcome there. Next question will come from in the room, you in the back in yellow.

Yeah, I'll just comment on the 90 days behind schedule and I don't know if, I think Jeremy already relayed that in the coming months, like I think they've been very open about targeting the end of the year and I also want to echo Jeremy's words because I had a chance to go out and tour some of the pad rebuild. I mean they are moving with purpose, like there is a fire in the Blue Origin team like we haven't ever seen before and you hear that actually around the whole of government. So whether they hit December or they wind up in January, they're breaking everyone's records. Like I mean in terms of, or certainly they're defying a lot of expectations. Now in terms of the schedule for Artemis 3, generally when I put together an email for, you know, 55,000 people, the expectation is it'll probably be made public. And I think the way the workforce may have, would interpret my words would probably be different than the general media. When you're talking about a mission that did not exist, you know, six months ago earlier this year where you have to assemble a lot of hardware and the time span between Artemis 1 and 2 was several years, to say, 'Look, team, you're working extremely hard and right now with all of the factors that have to come together with two different landers and all the hardware and testing we do, we're broken 90 days to schedule with opportunities to improve.' That's a confidence inspiring message and I would encourage the media to take the same. Now, does that mean we'll be able to fully pull in those 90 days? There's a lot of areas in what was disclosed from that memo that will get pulled in and then there's going to be more new ones that are going to pop up. And that's kind of the nature of this line of work. But I would take that as a confidence inspiring message as you should take from a lot of the pictures and the videos that you're seeing here today for a mission that didn't exist not that long ago that we're moving with real speed and purpose right now.

Yeah. I mean all of the public commentary, the companywide updates that I have seen coming out of SpaceX for really more than a year now since I'd say approximately like the summer of 2025 has been extremely focused on the moon. So I think if you, you know, kind of appreciating how SpaceX operates, of which by the way just general trends, right, from where we were in 2025 to where we're seeing with the V3 performance right now to the pace of progress between launches, it is trending really well, but they look to solve their greatest challenges first. To Jeremy's point, they've been putting astronauts in, you know, to and from space many, many times now and doing it safely, keeping crew rated vehicles operational in space as they stay attached to the space station for a long time with short notice responses to put people back in those vehicles when we had our medical emergency earlier this year or had to pull forward a mission when we sent up Crew 11's replacement. Like they've demonstrated those muscles and they do all the time. What they're solving right now is the hardware design, it's reusability, their thermal protection system, bringing it back, the reliability of their propulsion system. That's step one. And if along the way they can deploy satellites, great. We want our partners to be as economically viable as they possibly can on something as demanding as like a, you know, full and rapid reusable launch vehicle. And that no doubt when they get to that progress point where they're feeling very good with those steps, then they move into prop transfer. If you can't sort out prop transfer, it didn't make sense to expend a lot of your best engineering resources on habitation modules for that matter. So they're progressing in the order that we would expect, have seen no indication that, you know, returning astronauts to the moon and building a moon base isn't one of their greatest priorities. In fact, I think they've incorporated most of the recent hype videos of late. So, thankful for their efforts and following along closely.

And if I may, Jeremy, to build upon this because I think it's just so important to emphasize for you to understand how your NASA is operating right now, not just for solving, you know, some of the supply chain challenges within Artemis 3, but as a space agency. I'm going to talk about this mission room concept and it's somewhat unfair because we only labeled it as such in the last week, but this is how we've been operating for most of the year right now. When there is a problem that is appearing, first we've embedded a lot of our workforce across supply chain just to have visibility into where the issues are. You know, second, so this is just how do you know there is something that's wrong. We've made every one of our primes and any of the critical subs provide daily updates as to what's on schedule and what's not on schedule. When something is broken, then we deploy resources to do so. Thanks to a lot of the insourcing effort that we've done now, when we need to send people from Glenn or we need to send people from Marshall, for example, on Centaur 5, we needed resistance welders. We can take people that now are civil servants at Marshall and send them over somewhere without going through a contracting process between two vendors to be able to deploy those resources. For sure within the Blue Origin test lander, there was a massive dome that needed to be transported from across the country that was 23 days or so approximately broken to schedule. C-17 helps solve that. Our mission room gets on the phone with our various interagency partners and say we need transport to do this. There's DSS rating issues that have always existed. That's why during the Apollo era, Apollo had a DX rating on that to ensure some priority. Well, we work the phones and those type of things now to be able to potentially solve issues and bring it back. COPV tanks, this also is applicable to the space suits in development. There were certain tanks there that were, you know, very, very broken to schedule that we can advocate for higher DPAS ratings and pull it to the front of the line. That's happening every day right now.

And I fully agree with you. We will look into how we can make available more live streams as hardware is coming together because I do think it's very inspirational for those that are interested on the sidelines. And even I would say too, just to continue on this optionality front, I don't know if it was mentioned, we, the designs for

We are putting taxpayer money on it, but we are doing so in the most efficient, responsible way we possibly can. In that regard, it's meant to be a confidence update. I don't think you heard from anyone that said it's all, you know, easy road downhill from here. It was throughout my remarks of what a monumental effort is ahead. I think Amit said it really well: as Artemis 2 had splashed down, the extremely hard work is ahead from there. Right. I mean, we are very eyes wide open to what needs to be done, and what needs to be done is to get ready to launch Artemis 3, and in parallel we need to launch a lot of moon-based missions. They are linked, as you should have heard from the presentations today. Those Mark 1s, a lot of commonality with the Blue Origin lander. We need more assets in cislunar space, we need more observation capabilities, we need to understand the environment we intend to send our astronauts to. It's a very demanding environment. We will get that from those moon-based landings, and we will learn an awful lot from Artemis 3 and every step along the way. What we take and we learn, we will roll into the next mission. That is the right way to do something really, really hard ahead. So you should, I would hope a lot of people would get a takeaway from this: like this is an achievable path we are on right now, like this makes sense, it's been thought about long before this year, as Amit was alluding to, but we now have, you know, we have the mandate, we have the resources, the support from our stakeholders to be able to execute, and that's what we intend to do. Next question will come from in the room, front row in the white.