Inside Artemis II and the next space race

JARED ISAACMAN: We are in a great race right now. This is not like the 1960s. Success and failure are going to be measured in months, not years. And if you ask us to keep doing things the way we have for decades, when we did not have a geopolitical competitor capable of rivaling us in the high ground of space, then we are going to lose. Or we can acknowledge our shortcomings, that we’ve spread ourselves very thin over the years, and now it’s time to reconcentrate our resources back on the mission that taxpayers have entrusted us to do, which is get back to the moon, build the base, realize its potential, and master the skills so you can get to Mars in the near future.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. Just days after Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific after traveling to the moon and back, I was eager to talk with him about NASA’s plans to build a lunar base, land on Mars, and beyond. Jared shared freely about the role of private space orgs like SpaceX and Blue Origin, about how looming budget cuts could impact NASA, and about the high-stakes space race underway with China. Plus, Jared’s unlikely path from tech entrepreneur to NASA chief, and more. It’s a busy flight plan, so let’s get to liftoff. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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Jared, thanks for joining us.

ISAACMAN: It’s great to be here. I love the subject. I love talking about space, especially right after a great moon mission.

Copy LinkWhat Artemis II taught Jared Isaacman

SAFIAN: I wanted to start by congratulating you on the successful Artemis II flight, a 10-day voyage farther than any humans had gone before, a stepping stone for returning to the moon. You’re still new to NASA, only a few months in. Do you still bask in the euphoria, or for you personally, is it just, all right, onto the next thing?

ISAACMAN: We’ve been incredibly busy for four months, so I don’t feel very new. We’re all running really hard right now, so there are a lot of 18- and 20-hour days because Artemis II, for as much of a great success as it was as a mission, was just the opening act in America’s return to the moon. We are in another race right now, so our goal is to get American astronauts back to the surface of the moon and build the moon base so they can stay. So we’re staying really busy.

To answer your question, yes, I was completely in awe at launch and captivated throughout the entirety of the mission itself and the recovery operation on the boat because we haven’t done this in 53 years. So we’re doing a lot of new things, a lot of skills we haven’t exercised in a while, not to mention just the overwhelming cool factor of sending humans farther into space than ever before.

SAFIAN: I did an episode with the CEO of Intuitive Machines after their private landing of Odysseus on the moon, and he talked about how so many things on the mission didn’t go as planned at every stage, which they had sort of planned for. During Artemis II, are you clued in if it’s time to go to Plan B? How much does that happen?

ISAACMAN: Of course. I am in every one of the meetings. I would say I’m a very in-the-weeds and active administrator here. So throughout the entire flight readiness review and preflight readiness review process leading up to the mission, we were tracking the issues we actually had when we put Artemis and the SLS rocket out to the pad. We had some hydrogen leak issues. We had helium flow issues in the upper stage. We actually had to bring the rocket back into the Vehicle Assembly Building and fix those problems. So I was very aware of the issues before launch.

On orbit, I was in Johnson Space Center Mission Control the whole time, so I had very close access to information. We also convene a senior leaders meeting every day just to discuss what we’re learning, because you’re always learning.

I mean, that’s why we’re undertaking these missions: to learn what we have right, learn what we could do better, roll that into the subsequent mission like Artemis III, and continue to improve until we get our astronauts back to the surface. So yes, there was a lot of learning throughout this mission, just as we would have expected.

SAFIAN: Are there any particularly meaningful moments for you, particular lessons gleaned, or unexpected things that were revealed?

ISAACMAN: I would say the biggest takeaway from my perspective is this: There absolutely were things that did not perform as expected, and that’s good. We want to learn them and get them out of the way before you’re actually landing on the moon. I will say that if we all could have sat around a table before launch and said, “What do you think we’re going to be discussing in terms of issues before we commit to the translunar injection burn?” that’s when the astronauts are not hours away from being in the water, but days away. That’s an incredibly important decision.

What we wound up talking about was substantially less severe than what we would have guessed. Of course, one of the wastewater vent lines was having issues throughout the entirety of the mission. I’ve said it many times: a toilet in the history of human spaceflight is almost a bonus capability.

I will say probably the highest-blood-pressure moment of any human spaceflight mission is reentry. That’s where there are no Plan Bs. The heat shield has to work. The parachutes have to come out and help decelerate the vehicle before it gets into the water. So you’ve got a lot of off-ramps on ascent when you’re sending the rocket into space. You have a launch escape system. When you’re on orbit, you have lots of time to talk about issues like water valves or wastewater lines. But once Orion is committed to the translunar injection, we send it out there. It was on a free-return trajectory, meaning that spacecraft and those four astronauts were coming right back around the moon, and they were going to slam into Earth’s atmosphere to decelerate the vehicle, take all its energy out, and that has to work. There’s no Plan B there.

Copy LinkWhy NASA is sprinting to the moon

SAFIAN: This past week, I know you were on Capitol Hill getting grilled about NASA’s budget. What part of that is your mission? Is that your personal version of a mission where you’re like, “I’m on reentry. I don’t know what’s going to happen”?

ISAACMAN: I would just say that this is absolutely part of the job. And if it’s, are my responsibilities dynamic, am I going from the launch control center to the recovery ship to talking on Capitol Hill? Absolutely. I enjoy it, to be very honest. Part of what I love doing in life, not just here at NASA, is being able to bring together a lot of people with differing views and get aligned so we can achieve incredibly challenging things, which is what we do here at NASA. Big, bold endeavors, ambitious objectives, the near impossible, as I like to say many times, and getting Capitol Hill aligned on how to do it. And of course, it’s a conversation about the budget.

But what I wanted to point out is, we are in a great race right now. This is not like the 1960s. Success and failure are going to be measured in months, not years. And if you perpetuate the status quo, if you ask us to keep doing things the way we have for decades, when we did not have a geopolitical competitor capable of rivaling us in the high ground of space, then we are going to lose. Or we can acknowledge our shortcomings, that we’ve spread ourselves very thin over the years, and now it’s time to reconcentrate our resources back on the mission that taxpayers have entrusted us to do, which is get back to the moon, build the base, realize its potential, and master the skills so you can get to Mars in the near future.

SAFIAN: And this race you’re talking about, just so we’re clear, you’re talking about competing with China, right? You’ve said nuclear power propulsion is essential for America to dominate the future space race. All of that is sort of around staying ahead of China.

ISAACMAN: In a way, competition is a good thing because it constantly forces us to think about what comes next. In that respect, programs like nuclear power and propulsion are very important because there is a race on right now to return to the moon and build a base. I want to point out, if you think of the surface area of the moon, it’s essentially the size of Africa, but where the United States and our international partners, and where the Chinese want to be, is in a portion of the moon, the South Pole, that’s essentially the size of, call it Washington, D.C., maybe a little bit bigger. And that’s because there is water ice there that we need to interact with for in situ resource manufacturing, to master the skills to make propellant. And you want to do this on the moon before you are required to do it on the surface of Mars. So it’s got the water ice, but it also has the crater ridgelines where you have access to essentially what we call the eternal light, where you can get some solar power.

Where nuclear power and propulsion comes in: President Trump’s national space policy is don’t just return to the moon for the footsteps and the flag. Build the base, build the enduring presence, master those skills, and make investments in the next giant leap capabilities. That’s where nuclear power and propulsion comes in because it is a very efficient way to move mass. Think train locomotives, not airplanes. It’s a very efficient way to move mass, whether it’s to the moon or Mars. But also, the components and capability, the reactor design, are going to be very similar to what you will use for surface power on the moon, as well as on Mars. And you’re going to need that power to make propellant on the surface.

And then the last piece I’d say is simply this: if you want to explore the outer solar system, the farther away you get from the sun, the less effective it is as a source of solar power. That’s where you’re going to need nuclear power and propulsion to explore the outer solar system.

Copy LinkHow Isaacman believes his outsider path fits NASA’s moment

SAFIAN: You’re an entrepreneur and a pilot. Before NASA, you founded a payments company called Shift4. You self-funded experimental flights to Earth’s orbit on SpaceX rockets. So you’ve been to space yourself. It’s not necessarily a typical path for a NASA leader. There was some controversy around your appointment. How do you look at what your role is?

ISAACMAN: First of all, I would just say I’ve lived an incredibly fortunate life, and I’ve lived the American dream. And I do think I have a debt to the nation, and that’s why I’m so honored to be able to serve under President Trump at NASA and repay my debt to the nation.

To your point, I left school at 16 to start a payments company. It became a multibillion-dollar company on the New York Stock Exchange. I started an aerospace company in 2011. It became the world’s largest private Air Force to train the Department of War. I’ve been to space twice, the first all-civilian mission to orbit and then a developmental mission where we built a new space suit and went farther into space than anyone since Apollo. Now, thankfully, the Artemis II mission eclipsed that in about 13 minutes, which was great. So I bring, I would say, an interesting collection of experience from an entrepreneur’s perspective, but with direct aerospace and certainly direct commercial space experience.

And I think that’s important right now at NASA. Again, this is not the time to be perpetuating the status quo. We absolutely won the first space race, and we pivoted there a little bit to spread thin, to do lots of little things, to try and please everyone, with a lot of externally imposed obligations and a lot of self-inflicted distractions. As a result, when you try to please everyone, you essentially please no one because you’re not able to actually undertake the kind of mission that made the headlines we all saw this past weekend.

So in this competition, I’m here to bring this expertise that, again, some of it is certainly very directly applicable to NASA and commercial spaceflight. Some of it’s entrepreneurial. And I team up with the best and brightest here at the agency, who show up to work every day wanting to change the world in air and space and get things back on track.

And that’s what we’re doing. That’s why you saw the opening act with Artemis II. You’ll see the follow-up next year, Artemis III, when we test out Orion with the lander and get really comfortable with interoperability. And then in 2028, you’ll see it again when astronauts are walking on the moon.

SAFIAN: Jared describes things in such a pragmatic, matter-of-fact way, but the goals are things that until recently would have sounded like science fiction. So how do private outfits like SpaceX and Blue Origin fit into NASA’s plan? And how much of NASA’s motivation is about the quest to find extraterrestrial life? We’ll get to that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman talked about the recent Artemis II mission and the US’s space race against China. Now he talks about NASA’s relationship to SpaceX and Blue Origin, recent signs of microbial life on Mars, and why space exploration is a worthy priority despite other earthbound needs. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkBalancing urgency with the realities of spaceflight

Entrepreneurs are often impatient, and I can hear in you this urgency to sort of, let’s get things moving at a pace that maybe we haven’t had. At the same time, nothing is assured in the realm of space travel, right? Will the space suits be ready in time for Artemis IV in 2028? Blue Origin’s flight on Sunday, which was meant to deliver landers to support Artemis, didn’t come off as planned. This sort of struggle between the long timelines where so much has to go right, and then the urgency of, “We’ve got to get it done. We’ve got to move forward now” — how do you think about balancing that? I know a lot of people, not just in the space world but leaders in general, have to balance this sort of near-term urgency and long-term goals. How do they work their way through it?

ISAACMAN: It’s a good question. I’d point out the urgency that I am trying to help bring to this agency is not based on my entrepreneurial or business experience. It’s actually just dusting off the playbook that NASA used in the 1960s to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969: getting back to a lot of littles and an iterative, evolutionary process to achieve extraordinary outcomes.

What I mean by that is there was the Mercury program before there was Gemini. There was Gemini before there was Apollo. And there were a lot of Apollo missions before Apollo 11. So when people say, “This is a dramatic shakeup. We want to launch rockets in a year instead of three and a half years,” I remind people that throughout all of NASA’s designed rockets, from Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, through the space shuttle, we launched on a cadence, on average, of every three to three and a half months, not every three and a half years.

So we are just going back to the basics, what worked for NASA and how we were able to change the world on July 20, 1969. If we do it again, it’s how we’ll start changing the world again. And you saw the first proof point of this with how we undertook the Artemis II mission.

Copy LinkWhere private space companies complement NASA’s mission

SAFIAN: One of the obvious differences from those days is the role of private space organizations: Blue Origin, SpaceX, and others. I mentioned Intuitive Machines. How much do you think about private space organizations of all kinds as collaborators, as competitors, or both? What is that relationship with NASA? What should it be?

ISAACMAN: That question comes up quite a bit. And I often remind people, when we did undertake and achieve the near impossible in the 1960s, we did not go at it alone. You had Boeing. You had McDonnell Douglas designing the Gemini spacecraft. You had Grumman build the lunar lander that took our astronauts to the surface of the moon. And many of those companies are still contributing to the Artemis program today. And yes, there are new ones as well. There’s SpaceX and Blue Origin, but they are not meant to replace the function of NASA. This is complementary.

So what I would say is NASA is at our best when we are doing what others think is impossible, what no agency or country is capable of achieving, what no company is capable of closing a business case to invest against. That’s what NASA should be doing.

And when we figure it out, and when that capability is realized to the extent that NASA can be more than one customer, then you hand it off to industry and let competitive dynamics improve the capability, like going from a chemical-propulsion launch that expended the hardware to what we see SpaceX and Blue Origin do today nearly routinely, catching the rocket itself and then reusing it. That’s how you get a better capability at lower cost. And what should NASA do? Recalibrate again to what industry is not capable of doing.

That’s why nuclear power and propulsion are so important, for building the moon base, for sending astronauts to Mars and bringing them back, and again, for exploring the outer solar system. I don’t think companies right now, when you have such immense energy demand here on Earth to fuel this AI revolution, should be spending time building nuclear reactors for a handful of one-offs in space when they could be trying to meet terrestrial demand. That’s exactly what NASA should be doing right now. And again, maybe 10 years into the future, we crack the code on this next logical form of efficient propulsion in space. You hand that off to industry and see where they take it.

SAFIAN: Because when I talk to private space companies, they talk about a future ecosystem, a whole space economy, and things going on on the moon that aren’t just NASA’s lunar base, but a lunar base for them as well. Do you see NASA’s role as helping to seed this ecosystem, or are they on their track and you’re on your track and they may not be entirely aligned?

ISAACMAN: No, I would say they’re extremely aligned. I would almost argue they might be entirely dependent on the initiatives that NASA has underway right now. We all dream, and I especially dream, of an orbital economy and even a lunar economy, because I’m very convinced that if we want our children to grow up in this sci-fi future with lots of space stations, a space hotel, and outposts on the moon and Mars someday, it cannot be perpetually funded by taxpayers. We need whatever that product, service, or capability is so that we can extract more value out of it than what we have to put into it in space or on the moon itself. Now, NASA can’t force that into existence. I can’t guarantee the economics make sense for a space hotel or for mining regolith on the moon. But what I can do is try to do everything possible to ignite that economy.

So in low-Earth orbit, we’re making available what we call these private astronaut missions to the International Space Station. PAM 5, 6, and 7 we’ve put out to industry. We’ve given companies the opportunity to monetize those seats to try to generate revenue and stimulate further demand within low-Earth orbit.

When it comes to the moon, we went from a handful of bespoke landers a year as part of the CLPS program — you talked about speaking to the Intuitive Machines CEO, and they’re certainly one of the players interested in that space — to now putting out a demand signal where we want a lander on the moon on a near-monthly cadence starting in 2027 to help build the moon base in phases. Phase one, experimentation. Phase two, semipermanent habitation. Phase three, we evolve into our near-permanent presence. So we’ve put a demand signal out for lots of landers, lots of rovers, for power, communication, surface improvement, mobility, and logistics. But all that said and done, three or four years from now, is there a market for somebody other than NASA to pay for a lander to go to the moon or a rover to be on the moon?

I don’t know if that’s the case, but we’re doing everything we can to try to stimulate that market.

Copy LinkWhy the search for microbial life could reshape our worldview

SAFIAN: This week, NASA’s Mars rover discovered chemicals that could indicate microbial life. You’ve said that the chances of alien existence, I hope I’m quoting this right, are pretty high, that it’s at the heart of what your team does. Does that emphasis differ from prior NASA administrators? In other words, looking for traces of life versus advancing broad scientific knowledge, or is this just a continuation?

ISAACMAN: I would suspect — and I certainly don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth — that almost every NASA administrator would say fundamental to what we do here at the agency is trying to answer the question, “Are we alone?” To go out and unlock the secrets of the universe.

Now, to make sure that the quote you’re referencing is in proper context, what I did say is that if NASA were able to undertake a mission to retrieve those samples that are sitting on the surface of Mars, that our rovers were able to capture, and bring them back to Earth, I would put it at greater than a 90% chance that we will be able to prove that at one point or another, there was microbial life on Mars. Now, I do believe you have to bring those samples back, and seeing is believing sometimes, for the whole scientific community to align around this point.

And that’s very interesting, right? Because we have missions now going to Europa. That’s already underway. We have a nuclear-powered octocopter that’s going to fly to Saturn’s moon Titan in 2028 that’s also searching for biosignatures. And what I love about this is, when you sit with your buddy and you’re outside and you look up at the night sky and you look at all those stars and you know there are 2 trillion galaxies out there, usually somebody comes to the position that, just based on the probabilities alone, surely there must be life out there somewhere. And I think it would be interesting if you did bring the samples back from Mars and could prove there was microbial life there, and you have missions going to Europa, and you have missions going to Titan, which is all within our solar system, let alone all the other star systems in our galaxy or the 2 trillion other galaxies, it could change that kind of late-night analysis to: What if it’s everywhere?

And I think that’s very inherent in what we do here at NASA. Now, this doesn’t mean you have the green men with the big heads walking around. This doesn’t mean it’s intelligent life or anything we imagine. But microbial life — there is probably, again, a greater than 90% chance that we would prove that if we brought those samples back from Mars.

Copy LinkMaking the case for space when earthbound needs feel urgent

SAFIAN: I did a stage event with a debate around where we should be investing our money in the world, and someone was arguing that we should be investing more in understanding and exploring the oceans versus space. So what makes space exploration a particularly worthy priority, with so many things going on on Earth these days? The Trump administration’s push for a budget cut for NASA could sound like a recognition that other things are more important.

ISAACMAN: The first thing I would say is that obviously I’m biased, as the NASA administrator and as an astronaut, that I think space is a great priority because we have literally only just begun. We have barely dipped our toe in the grandest ocean of all. This is humankind’s greatest adventure, and we’ve just begun. So I think it’s almost an obligation to go out there and see what we may find because, look, knowledge is power — things that could change the trajectory of humankind, whether it’s from an economic perspective because we’re mining asteroids or extracting helium-3, or simply diversifying humanity’s existence from one planet to many so that we don’t go the way of the dinosaurs someday. I can give you a million reasons why I think this is a worthwhile endeavor.

But I would also say that, thanks to what we can do at NASA in space, we can understand our oceans better. We have satellites up there, and that’s their job, to understand our oceans, not to mention our soil and our atmosphere, because we do presently only inhabit one planet and we should certainly try to understand as much about it as we can.

Now, I think for the president of the United States, Donald Trump, he loves space. He created the Space Force. He created the Artemis program in his first term. He created the Artemis Accords, of which I just signed the 63rd nation to our principles on peaceful exploration of space, the Kingdom of Jordan, onto it. And it’s under his leadership right now and his national space policy that we’re going back to the moon to stay and investing in the next giant leap.

I think the president’s budget request is telling us, NASA, that over the years you don’t always spend your resources very efficiently or effectively. That’s documented across numerous inspector general reports and GAO reports. And before you come and ask for more, I want to see more science and discovery out of the dollars you have. And I’ll tell you, the president’s budget request is greater than every other space agency in the world’s science budget combined. We have the tools, the resources, and the mandate to undertake extraordinary things here at NASA.

Copy LinkWhat is really at stake in the next era of space exploration

SAFIAN: What’s at stake right now, do you feel, not just for NASA but for space exploration at large?

ISAACMAN: I would just say it’s an extremely important domain. And I can talk to you about all that we stand to gain, again, from a scientific perspective and an economic perspective, as we continue to venture out and explore the great unknown. But I will also tell you it’s an incredibly important domain from a national security perspective.

I think literally from the beginning of humankind, the high ground has had tactical and strategic significance. I don’t think it’s lost on anyone that we have satellites up there that can do observation and communication. When I say we, I’m referring, of course, to the Space Force that owns this responsibility. But so do our adversaries, and they continue to try to challenge us in this important domain, and that can be very concerning. That’s why I am very grateful for the Space Force Guardians to be out on the hill looking out for us as we continue to venture out for peaceful purposes.

But our geopolitical rivals don’t necessarily draw the distinction between the peaceful side of space that we are responsible for at NASA and how they’ve militarized it.

SAFIAN: For me personally, part of the appeal of space travel is just the inspiration that it provides even here on Earth for things that we can maybe do that we didn’t think we could.

ISAACMAN: I couldn’t agree with you more because also inherent in everything we do at NASA, and every dollar we spend, from putting astronauts in space around the moon, to the X-planes that we fly, to the imagery we bring back from the James Webb Space Telescope or the video footage from our rovers on Mars, all of that is meant to be, beyond its scientific purpose, inspirational — to get more kids to want to dress up as astronauts for Halloween, to grow up and, again, contribute to what I think is the greatest adventure in human history.

SAFIAN: Well, thank you so much for coming on and chatting about this.

ISAACMAN: Thank you very much.

SAFIAN: Jared does embrace the adventure of space and his passion about sparking an orbital economy and eventually a lunar economy. It’s an intriguing proposition. I find myself thinking about all the quote-unquote moonshots that terrestrial businesses take on. They may not all be rocket science, but that doesn’t mean they don’t require bravery at every step of the way. And like at NASA, leaders need to be clear-eyed about what truly puts goals in jeopardy versus setbacks that are the equivalent of Artemis’ faulty bathroom. Looking to the stars can feel almost naive with so much opportunity and so much pain and suffering on our own planet, but space remains a meaningful source of inspiration and curiosity for all sorts of projects. And anything that drives us to dream bigger, it’s hard not to cheer that on. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.