What is a best case timeline for an actual manned Mars mission? If there’s political will behind it, the tech is there — 10 years. 10 years. The mid 2030s? Yes, I think if we put our effort to it, we’ll see it in our lifetime. Could even be in 10 years. We’re going back to the moon, for the first time in more than 50 years — Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Liftoff. And this time, we’re planning to do a lot more than just plant a flag. And it’s not just NASA that’s involved. Billionaires like Elon Musk have their own role and their own big plans for space travel. “Having factories on the moon, building A.I. satellites.” “We can use the moon as a rocket fuel depot to go to the rest of the solar system.” But is the United States really capable of colonizing outer space? “NASA’s return to the moon is delayed again. A new problem with the Artemis II rocket.” My guest this week thinks it’s our destiny. He’s an entrepreneur, pilot and astronaut. And he’s leading NASA into an ambitious new era. “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, Earth looks like a perfect world.” Jared Isaacman, welcome to Interesting Times. Great to be here. Thank you. It’s great to be here. Yes, so we asked for a secret test facility buried under the Rockies. And we’re not there. But we are in — We got close. We got close. We’re in the woods of Maryland behind several gates marked “Don’t pass — Ongoing testing.” And we’re under this. What is this? So we’re in this spacecraft magnetic test facility. This is where we calibrate spacecraft, satellites before they go up into orbit, where we need to take extremely precise measurements. Space weather would be a good example of it. So yes, it is rather incredible. And even though this facility has been around for some time, it still kind of points you towards the future in some ways, doesn’t it? But if this starts up, we both get catapulted into a parallel dimension, at some point in the podcast. You know, I was about to just go in and make a joke on that, but I’ll refrain and just say, we’ll probably be just safely exited out of the room before that happens. That’s the safer answer. We’ll see how it goes. Keep the humor to a minimum these days on the subject. Well, we’ll get to yeah, we’ll get to some of those questions at the end. But Goddard is also home to NASA’s newest telescope, right? Which has not yet been launched Correct. Tell me about that. Sure so, Nancy Grace Roman telescope is in the clean room here. Now, this is a really exciting mission, because if everybody knows Hubble, everybody knows the James Webb Space Telescope as well. then people are about to know the Nancy Grace Roman telescope. And the reason why is it has nearly 100 times the field of view of Hubble and upwards of 1,000 times the scan rate. So that’s pretty exciting when you think about how much science that instrument is going to be able to do compared to the assets we already have up there. O.K. well, that’s something to look forward to. Let’s talk about you for a minute before we go back to NASA. You’re a billionaire. An entrepreneur. Sorry, you looked slightly pained when I said that. But you are. You ran a financial tech company, an aviation defense contractor. And you’re also an astronaut. I think you’re the first private citizen to do a spacewalk. Is that right? So I’ve, I’ve been to space twice. So on a Falcon 9 Dragon spacecraft, the exact same way that NASA astronauts send our astronauts to and from space. The first mission was in September 2021, so led the first all-civilian mission to orbit. And then, also, in September of 2024, my crew and I, we went farther into space than anyone’s gone since the last time we walked on the moon. We’ve tested out a new form of communication using satellite laser links. We communicate over a beam of light between our spaceship and the Starlink constellations, all in the idea of trying to build towards an exciting future where lots of people are living and working in space. We’re going to the moon and Mars, and when you get there, you’re going to probably need to get outside the safety of your habitat and go explore and discover and repair and build things. And you’re going to need lots of spacesuits in order to do that. So, I’ve been very lucky — What is it like to be in space? 500 words or less. Well, I would just say everything initially feels different. Going into microgravity is, there’s no roller coaster here on Earth to… No chamber, we can put you in to feel what it’s like. There’s a fluid shift in your body, basically without gravity. The fluid in your body kind of gravitate towards up, towards your head. So at first everybody has this chipmunk thing where your cheeks all puff out, but that does other things to you too as well — where it can impact cognitive abilities, vision, something called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It’s a long way of saying everybody feels different and to give you the bookends, your best case scenario for your first call, three to five days in space is you feel like you’re hanging upside down in your bed endlessly. Like, that’s just the best case scenario for your first three to five days. The other end of the spectrum, which unfortunately impacts about 50 percent of people, is it’s like horrific motion sickness. And it has nothing to do with your susceptibility to motion sickness on Earth. I mean, you could be, a hardcore test pilot, air show pilot used to being upside down, doing flips and rolls — And you were. and you were a pilot right before on Earth? Yes. Still a pilot. Yes, still a pilot. Yeah. Yeah. I was in the lucky 50 percent that it feels like you’re hanging upside down from your bed — That’s good. But in both my missions, 50 percent of the crew did not feel well. And this has been the case since the beginning of our space program. But, you know what I’ll say is, it’s worth it. It’s worth it for one of the greatest views ever to see our planet from that perspective and to get a sense of the solar system around us, let alone the galaxy and the universe. I mean, we are a speck of sand in the grandest vastest desert imaginable. And it’s just such an exciting, extraordinary journey to think about because we’ve really only just begun. Did it change your perspective on Earth to see it — Like people talk about that sense of coming back to Earth and feeling differently about the planet. Did you have that? So what you’re referring to is the overview effect, the overview effect. And I’m sure maybe some of my astronaut colleagues won’t appreciate some of my comments on this, but I believe this was very, very real. In the 1960s. 70s, 80s, I can only imagine when Yuri Gagarin went into space and what he saw. I mean, just had to have just shocked him because we had really no idea what it would look like. I mean and same with the early Mercury and Gemini astronauts. We have high definition video coming off the International Space Station. I can tell you, sir, it looks just like what you imagine it looks like. But now. So does that mean you need to go to space to appreciate that we shouldn’t fight wars over lines that were drawn on a map a century ago or not, dump toxic waste in our oceans or something. You don’t need to go to space to know that. To me, what I found most impactful was when I saw the moon unexpectedly rise from around Earth, and it was like, how have we not gone back in so long? Like we took the first small step on what I think is the greatest adventure in human history. And then we stopped. Now, thankfully, we’re on the return. President Trump created the Artemis program during his first term. He just created an unbelievable national space policy said that, said, go back and build the base and stay and then press on to Mars. So we’re getting in the right direction. But when I was up there both times, I mean, I was certainly in awe of what I saw, but I mean, discouraged in a way that we began this adventure and then stopped. But now we’re back in motion again. O.K, let’s talk about that. So I’m going to try and go from the close by to the further out. Sure like the plan, the moon, then Mars, and then bigger questions. So tell me about the Artemis mission. What is Artemis going to do if all goes well? So I think the first thing to emphasize right now and not to take away from the mission that’s coming up, is the president created the Artemis program, and the Artemis program will live on. It is more than any one mission or one vehicle architecture. So you see on the pad at Launch Complex 39b, there is SLS out there. So that’s our Space Launch System. And when you look at it, you look at it and say, does that kind of look like space shuttle? It’s kind of not really, Yes Why? Because the solid rocket boosters have heritage from the space shuttle program. The center core draws influence from the external fuel tank from the shuttle. Heck, the engines that are on it are from the space shuttle. So this is where we begin. And that vehicle for Artemis Ii when it launches, it’s going to accelerate those four astronauts to near Earth escape velocities 25,000 miles an hour past the moon, back around safely to Earth. And we’re going to test out our vehicle for subsequent missions that will eventually lead to a landing. But I’ll tell you, because that program draws on such history, has contractors, hundreds of subcontractors, tens of thousands of people. It’s expensive. It’s not the vehicle that you are going to take to and from the moon a couple times a year as you build out a moon base, the way the president wants, the way the National Space policy calls for it. But it’s the way you initially get back. And we’re going to do that on Artemis Ii. We’re going to do it on Artemis 3 and 4 and 5 and maybe 6. Who knows? We’re going to get our astronauts back to the surface. We’re going to learn, and we are going to gradually roll in some of what you’re seeing today from some of our commercial providers, when vehicles are coming back and landing on ships and landing on land, because that’s what makes it more affordable. And that’s how we take frequent repeatable missions to and from the lunar environment and build out the moon base and actually go there to stay. So what does the moon base do? What is it for? So we have been operating on the International Space Station, now a continuous human presence for more than a quarter of a century. What an accomplishment. I mean, look, we are hoping our astronauts, who many of them are very trained scientists and engineers, will crack the code on the orbital economy at the International Space Station. Who knows? Cancer fighting drugs, biotech technology. Maybe we all 3D print a spare liver or kidney and put it in the fridge someday. Who knows? But what. I would say we’ll come back Yeah I want to come back to the orbital economy Yeah but I want to point out that is a very different environment in low-earth orbit than what we may stand to learn on the moon. So you have a lot of protection. Approximately 420 kilometers is the orbital altitude of the International Space Station. You get a lot of protection there from radiation. You get a lot of protection there from micrometeoroids and orbital debris, because at that altitude it starts to decay and burn up in the atmosphere quicker. So meaning we have kept astronauts alive in an incredibly harsh environment of space, but literally in the safest place you could have put them. The moon changes the game. You’re not an hour and a half away from being in the water. If something goes wrong, you’re days away from coming back to being in the water. If something goes wrong, there is no atmosphere or magnetosphere there to protect the astronauts from solar events like radiation. That could be really horrific. So the moon gives us an environment to build out, habitation that can keep our astronauts alive in a far more demanding environment gives us the opportunity to work with resources away from Earth for in-situ resource manufacturing and refining. We can make propellant out of ice, things that we’re going to need to do to get to Mars someday and bring our astronauts home from Mars. So it’s a next level proving ground. Does it have to be underground? Like, what does the moon base look like physically? O.K, so this is a good question because people ask me this and sometimes we have a habit of jumping to the dream state. This amazing dome, with all this vegetation being grown in it, inside it. It’s going to look like a junkyard for a while. I mean, just set expectations here. We are going to land lots of low-cost rovers and landers and set up antennas. Those rovers are going to burn out after maybe a single lunar night. And that’s O.K. Because we have to learn and we have to learn in an inexpensive way to get the data to inform our future architecture. So yeah for what. For the first maybe, I don’t 10 years, it’s going to look like a pretty cool futuristic junkyard with lots of landers and rovers around. But someday, someday that will evolve as the cost to put mass on the lunar surface goes down into some pretty cool infrastructure. So over those 10 years, just help me imagine it. It’s something where there would be a continuous human presence in that world. But it’s a few astronauts going back and forth constantly or that will evolve. So there’s the it will not start that way. Like, we will. And it’s certainly not in the early Artemis missions when we are using an architecture that is extremely expensive. But over time, yes, we will be able to undertake repeatable, Affordable missions to the moon. That’s what the president envisioned with his enduring presence. So there will be some crossover point where I can almost guarantee you that there will be astronauts living and working in the lunar environment continuously. So maybe five to seven years. Hypothetically, I would say let’s see what happens over the next decade. A lot is going to depend on industry. I mean, look, we haven’t been back to the moon in more than a half century. This is super hard. Sending astronauts to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit, 1.8 million pounds of thrust, sending them to the moon, 8.8 million pounds of thrust. That’s complicated and hard. We need industry to be able to do it for us inexpensively, routinely. And then, yes, we can have a continuous presence. I don’t think we’re going to put them under ground in it, so much as I wouldn’t be surprised if we use rovers to try and cover some of our infrastructure in lunar regolith What is lunar regolith? Basically, the materials, on the surface of the moon, on the surface of the moon. Taking that and using it to cover some of our infrastructure would be a good way to provide debris protection and radiation protection. Does NASA have enough money to do this? Yes. Under current. So the. As with other areas of the federal budget, the Trump administration proposed cuts to NASA. Congress is not doing those cuts. Are you happy overall with the money that NASA has to spend? I think, well, first of all, yes, I’m very happy with the resource available to us. But I just want to clarify, because it’s not as simple as did the president want to take cuts to NASA and did Congress work this out. The president created an incredible national space policy. And his one Big Beautiful Bill, you know the Working Families Tax Cut Act was one of the most significant financial plus-ups to NASA in decades. I mean, he put billions of dollars to invest in our exploration programs and the infrastructure required. For the moon plus enhancing our infrastructure for terrestrial infrastructure across our centers. So to be clear, the president loves space, created the Space Force, created the Artemis program, returned human spaceflight to the United States after a hiatus when we had to send our astronaut space through Russia after the shuttle was retired. That said, do I do. Do I have any fault that through the budgeting process, we were asked to take a closer look at how we spend things, get things more on track on budget? I don’t fault that at all. That’s a good forcing function to take a close look at how we operate. And all government agencies, we’re not good capital allocators. We could do better. And we are trying to do that right now. And if we can, within our resources, within our budget, $25 billion a year Yeah, we can do some pretty extraordinary science and discovery. But it seems it does seem like in the optimal scenario where you are establishing a permanent presence on the moon, you’re going to need a larger budget. And is it something where you feel like each technical success, the success of the Artemis mission that success generates support for more spending? Is that how you envision it? Well, I think that with every win we earn more trust from all our stakeholders, our workforce, the American public Congress, OMB, the president, for sure. Now, I will say again, I visited every one of our centers. I mean, we’ve been running 18 hour days for the last two months since my confirmation, getting our hand a handle on things. I don’t think we have a shortfall in resources. $25 billion is an awful lot of resources. It’s not going to get us to Mars, though, right? I’m not. I’m not trying to push you into demanding more money. I’m just trying to calibrate. Just to give you a sense, though, the Manhattan Project, adjusted for inflation, was $30 billion, and we really knew nothing about that at the time. We had to build factories across the country for enriching uranium, plutonium production reactors. I’m just saying that people have at times think that a billion is not a billion anymore. $25 billion, with some one Big, Beautiful Bill plus ups like we can do an awful lot. One of my recent interviews was with the head of an A.I. company. And the amount spent on data centers for A.I. is extraordinary. And so I just I have that in the back of my mind as perspective. So is it safe for astronauts to go to the moon? I ask, in part because you had some really critical words about NASA’s failures on a recent mission, the Starliner project. And I’m just wondering, just even in terms of public support for NASA, how essential is it that the safety of astronauts be paramount, versus how important is it for people to just live with the reality of risk and the possibility of death. So I do think that it’s impossible to undertake our mission and explore the worlds beyond ours without taking some risk. Now, I do think we have a responsibility to drive risk down to the greatest extent possible. In order to do that need to fully understand it. What am I dealing with right now. And that’s why we have tests. And qualification programs. We found something. We don’t like it. We can’t make it go to 0. How we mitigate it to the great extent? How do we get comfortable with it? That should be inherent in how we operate as a Space Agency. But I will say at some point or another do have to go. My comments reflect a culture that I’ve grown up in, between flying high performance aircraft, going to space twice, which is you debrief your successes and your failures, your shortcomings, your mistakes, you understand it, and then you communicate by it. And by doing that, it instills confidence with every other person in the room and everyone else who depends on those missions to be successful because you understood what you got wrong. If you don’t do that, if you pretend mistakes never happened at all, then you invite them to happen again. And I don’t know how we can ever get comfortable with that. So I did not use the press conference, to bash Boeing about building a bad spacecraft or how we let these qualifications look. This is hard. The Russians are still flying essentially the same spacecraft for more than a half century. Not a lot of countries have built a vehicle that can take humans to and from space successfully. It is hard. We played a role in why that spacecraft was built the way it was. But worse in my mind. And that’s where I chose to concentrate my energy on is that we did not own our shortcomings. We didn’t declare a mishap, a mishap, and we should have done it. And we didn’t have accountability when those bad decisions were made and we didn’t have the right leadership, that should have stepped in. At the time when it was clear that we were going off course to correct that course trajectory. And that’s what we called attention to. So really, I think it’s imperative that story was told before we step into sending our astronauts around the moon, before we start landing astronauts on the moon and building a moon base. Do you think that the Challenger disaster, which was my primary childhood encounter with the space program and then the Columbia disaster later. Do you think those created a kind of overhang of skepticism around the space program that needs to be overcome by Artemis? Look, I think the American public, the space loving public from around the world, should understand that we cannot undertake missions like this without accepting some risk. And there will be bad days, and that’s unfortunate. But it’s applicable to our people that undertake dangerous jobs every single day flying off aircraft carriers, diving under the sea, working in nuclear power plants. These things are not without risk. And certainly accelerating human beings on a controlled explosion into space where there’s no atmosphere, no breathable air. And the everything coming from the sun and the debris around you is trying to kill you. Yes, it’s a dangerous environment. And there are scenarios like the past catastrophic events where people say at times that made NASA too risk averse, and maybe so in some cases. And then there are situations like I saw with Starliner was what are we doing here. You are continuing to take risks that you don’t understand. And by failing to communicate and acknowledging where we got things wrong, you were inviting it to happen again. You were sending a message to the workforce that in this environment, failure is an option. And it’s not. And that needed to be fixed. All right. So let’s talk about the private side of space exploration. The role of private industry. You mentioned public private partnerships and government contractors. You have a pre-existing relationship with Elon Musk. And in fact, your accession to this job was delayed for a little while when Musk and the president had a falling out. I think people perceive that to be closer relationship than reality. Maybe Yeah, perceived. Let’s say there was a perceived delay or a perceived falling out, but regardless. Musk I guess I’ll say Elon because everyone says Elon. Elon has his own vision around the moon for SpaceX. He’s recently said that SpaceX is pivoting from trying to do a Mars mission soon to aiming at the moon. What is the overlap in the relationship? There are these separate track projects. Is there going to be a SpaceX moon base and a NASA moon base? How does NASA and SpaceX actually fit together? Well, I would just say I mean, since the 1960s, NASA doesn’t undertake these kind of world changing endeavors alone. We always have gone after it with industry. I think sometimes just because there’s new names now Blue Origin and SpaceX, that there’s this impression that this is like a whole new approach to go into space. No, I mean, the 1960s, it was Boeing and McDonnell Douglas and many of those names still exist today. And then we have new names. And some of those new names are SpaceX and Blue Origin and Stoke and Rocket Lab and all these. And they are I mean, just they are actually sending astronauts and rockets up themselves privately in a way that was not happening in 1968. Oh, for sure. I mean, that’s how I went to space twice with SpaceX. So, sure. Capabilities I would expect to evolve over a half century. We were the only game in town 60 years ago when we created this whole thing of space exploration. And we cracked the code at NASA on the near-impossible. We hand things off to industry where there’s clearly demand outside of one and outside of a single agency like NASA and let a market develop. This is good for us. It allows competitive forces to do their thing and make products capabilities better and at lower cost. So that’s fine. I’ll just tell you, this is a good thing for us. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are under contract to build the landers that will take American astronauts back to the surface of the moon. And if you can build those landers, they’re going to be able to use it to bring lots of cargo. I mean, maybe 100 tons of mass down to the Lunar surface. I mean, we’re going to be able to build out a base. Pretty quickly with those type of capabilities. We are in a race right now against a rival, the Chinese. Their path is very similar to the approach we took with Apollo. And look, we don’t have as much schedule available as we did in the 1960s in hindsight, where we had near infinite time to get to the moon compared to the Soviets. In this case, this could come down to a year or two. What I’ll say, though, is just we spent 4.5 percent of our discretionary budget in the 1960s to build out these extraordinary capabilities for the good of America, for humankind to go to the moon and back. Now, we’re at one-quarter percent ,And it’s in large part being supplemented by folks like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk willing to throw resources well in excess of what we’ve contracted them to do, to provide a capability that someday could enable us to go to Mars. But is your expectation going forward that Musk, Bezos, or anyone else who gets in the game, they will always be working in partnership with NASA in some way? Or is there a future where there is a kind of privatized, actual privatized space exploration where there are bases being built and other things being done, space stations and so on that are just separate from the US government? This is a new domain where it should be NASA’s job to take on the hardest engineering challenges, again, to attempt to achieve the near impossible. And we figure it out. We hand it off to industry and see if a market develops. Look, there was a time when the army flew our mail. So if you’re asking me initially, I think it’s going to be NASA astronauts that are stepping off the spaceship on the moon. I think it’s going to be NASA astronauts that are helping construct the initial lunar base and doing a lot of the initial scientific research. Is there a world thereafter where SpaceX and Blue origin and others are doing direct missions to the moon for commercial or even tourism reasons? Totally that would be a great day, because it would mean NASA’s cost to go into that environment would have decreased materially. But what we do then. We set our sights on Mars and we do things that industry is not capable of doing building nuclear power and propulsion spaceships, which is actually a component of President Trump’s national space policy. I don’t think even with all the resources in the world, Blue Origin or SpaceX or any of the others is going to be in a rush to launch a nuclear reactor into space. Who does that? NASA does that. And when we do that, we actually help industry make it possible to undertake a mission to Mars and explore the outer solar system. Let’s talk about what industry gets out of space besides government contracts Yeah, as far as I know right now, Elon Musk doesn’t want to launch nuclear reactors into space. He does seem to want to launch data centers for artificial intelligence into space. What is the potential advantage of having data centers in space? Is there one? I would just say, in terms of what is a space or an orbital economy, it has been grossly overstated. So we have created a economy here on Earth that manufactures and builds things that we launch into space. But in terms of actually extracting more value out of the unique environment of microgravity than we put into it, we have not developed anything in 60 years other than launch observation and communications, and those are largely funded by government customers. Now, over time, it’s expanded. So companies that are doing Earth observation almost as a service for whether it’s environmental, agriculture or intelligence purposes, they have customers now all around the world. That’s good. That’s winning. Launch is obviously the healthiest with demand from everywhere that it’s ever been in the history of the program and comms. That’s a huge success story with Starlink. That might be the only example of a true profitable program that takes advantage of the unique environment of space that consumers are paying for and creating value in excess of what it costs to do it. Amazing success story. Honestly, we don’t have anything else from it. All the experimentation we’ve done at Space Station, cancer fighting drugs again 3D printing. Biotech well, but make it concrete. Since to a layperson, what is the potential benefit say, doing medical research in space just literally why is there potential there. Sure so there’s actually a way to almost densify cancer treating compounds through crystal formulations that you could not do on Earth. So gravity is really helpful almost all the time for us unless you fall out of a tree. But there are certain things that you would want to manufacture in a microgravity environment. You think we’ve been experimenting with it on the International Space Station I can tell you, with all this industry that’s waiting around for the silver bullet that changes everything we crack the code on a cancer treating cancer drug that has to be formulated in space. You’re going to be seeing missions launch like crazy. We’re going to have lots of commercial space stations up there. We hope for that day. It hasn’t come yet. So again, launch observation and communication, there’s real broad based demand for people who can generate a profit in those markets. Beyond that, we’re not there. Maybe these AI data centers can do it. What would be. Again, as with the cancer drugs, what does space do for a data center? Why would you put a data center in space? O.K, so besides not having to do permitting in a US state it is energy. So you mentioned before that hey, people are throwing crazy money at building AI data centers. You brought this up in context of Manhattan Project and our space budget. And one, it’s because they believe that if you lose in this may never catch up. So who’s going to be really the first to ultimately crack the code on AI. And as a result, they’re willing to spend to build massive data centers and procure GPUs. But what does it requires power. And we are at a massive deficit on that. I mean, even our last major industrial nuclear power plant took like 15 years and $15 billion for a single gigawatt. Don’t hold me to it. But I think that’s directionally right. That’s not going to work right now. So I think what SpaceX and others are considering is, well, we do have a pretty incredible fusion reactor up there now. That’s a good source of power. That’s not the end of the argument. Just putting something up with solar arrays doesn’t solve the problem. Heat rejection is a major issue in the vacuum of space. But you theoretically can draw more energy from the sun in space than on Earth. Is that I mean, you draw more energy in space than you can on Earth. Look, this is not conclusive. There’s energy conversion issues and then are you beaming, beaming things back down to Earth? Are you doing on orbit processing? Are there better locations that you could potentially than pure, just low Earth orbit, or more creative orbits that might make this project more feasible? I don’t know. Look, I think Elon Musk is probably the greatest engineer and entrepreneur for the last I don’t half century. Easy he’s obviously feels pretty strongly about his views. And I want it to work. I want it to work for SpaceX and all the other companies trying to figure out the orbital economy Yeah, I mean, my core theory about space exploration has always been that you need some kind of commercial imperative woven in. Like if you look at the Age of Discovery right here on Earth, right. It’s not just people sailing into the unknown for the sake of human ambition. As important as that is, it’s also about colonization and settlement, but it’s also about people looking for ways to make money. And it seems like SpaceX needs that to draw human energy upward on the scale that certainly your vision has in mind. Are there resources on the moon that people would ever extract? Can you imagine that happening? So I think, by the way, you just said a good statement there on the scale that we all imagine. That’s so key. I mean, do I think that the taxpayers world governments will always make some investments in space for just the pursuit of breakthrough discoveries that benefit everyone? Sure but is that enough to fund three or four space stations and a Mars outpost and a Lunar outpost. I don’t think so. So, yeah. You’re right. We need that economic driver, to remove or reduce the dependencies on the taxpayers to actually have the future that we all imagine in space. Someday there will be breakthroughs. We don’t know what they are yet, but we are too early on in this journey right now to think we have it all figured out. Geez but so. But you would be in the world where there’s a moon base. You would be essentially looking for things on the moon. Sure I don’t know anything on the moon right now. That’s going to be easier and more affordable to mine manufacture and then bring back to Earth than what we could make here on Earth. And that includes helium 3. It’s not like it’s in abundance on the moon. Now that people believe could be the key to a more efficient fusion reaction. Fusion reactors are inevitable, I have no doubt. So helium 3 will play a role in it. It has a role potentially in quantum computing certainly does have in various nuclear detectors. But the point is, I don’t have anything immediate to point to and say this will make economic sense in the moon other than this is directionally correct, but I am hopeful and I would guarantee we will find things in space that will have enormous economic value. Hell, I mean, at some point in time or another, we’re going to be mining asteroids like that’s definitive. Like, I don’t know if the hole that asteroids worth 10 quadruple trillions of dollars. But yes, there’s real value there. Tell me again, what is one thing you would mine from an asteroid? I know there’s lots of possibilities, but just for a layman who’s trying to picture a world where the dream of riches is propelling companies and people into space. What’s a concrete example? Platinum. O.K, good. That’s a good example. Perfect so the platinum mines in the asteroid belt Yeah, look, I don’t want to. Everything is thrown off by an abundance of supply. The moment you figure out how to capture even a single. But for sure you are talking about rare minerals that are going to be in far greater quantity than you would have on Earth. And I don’t think that to me, is just inevitable. I couldn’t predict what lifetime it’s happening in that we are actually capturing mining, right. And then down massing those minerals back to Earth. Or maybe it’s even manufacturing in space, but at least that you can reasonably predict is inevitable. And at some point politics enters into this. So you mentioned the we’re in a new mini space race with China to see if we can get back to the moon before they get there. But we’re not in a world where we’re going to be fighting China for territorial control of the moon anytime soon, right. Oh, look, I. Our job at NASA is really to think things through on the peaceful exploration of science and discovery. And I don’t think that there is anything on the moon right now that’s worth taking up arms over right now. Look, there is interesting real estate that we care about. That’s up there. They care about where there could be ice to work with. Is that something you go to war with over the moon? I don’t think so. But it’s certainly not lost on us that the high ground has always been of strategic and even tactical significance since the beginning of humankind. Thankfully, we have a Space Force. Space Force. A Department of War to be out on the Hill looking out for us as we undertake our mission. And again, the pursuit of peaceful science and discovery, and China, for example, they blur those lines, they don’t really separate their version of NASA from their military focus in space. So that’s something we’re keenly aware of. O.K yeah, but the war can wait for the asteroid Yeah we don’t. The asteroid mining wars of 2174. At least with. I mean, we have to be real that when you take the people out of the equation. Is space a military domain? Absolutely right. But at least when the people have been involved, even going back to the Apollo-Soyuz program, those relationships in space, what they’re doing there from a scientific perspective transcended politics and geopolitics on Earth. I would hope that would continue. How do we get to Mars? So getting to the moon will certainly help us get to Mars. During my hearings, people were like, how can you talk about parallel tracking moon to Mars. That makes no sense. We have no budget for it. Of course it does, said simply. If you can send a lander to the moon when you see American astronauts step foot off a lander onto the Lunar surface. We have the capability to send lots of mass to Mars. Period now there’s a whole habitability thing. Keeping them alive on a couple of days to the moon is very different than keeping people alive six to nine months going to Mars. It’s very different to land on one sixth gravity versus one third gravity without an atmosphere versus with an atmosphere. And then how do you bring them home. That’s the real hard part. This is where nuclear power and propulsion comes in. Obviously a huge proponent of it. I’ve written op eds on the subject. We will get America underway before the end of the president’s term. With nuclear power, propulsion and space. It will be an extraordinary demonstration. Kind of exciting to talk about it in the months ahead. That’s a game changer for the speed of getting to Mars or our ability to get back or both. It’s a game changer, in my opinion, for our ability to come home. It is not necessarily a faster way to get there. So when you think of nuclear electric propulsion, I don’t want you to think of airplanes. I want you to think to trains like, well, is that the way I want to go across the country. Maybe not me personally, but if I need to move a lot of coal or steel or iron, yeah, that’s the way to do it. NEP allows us to move lots of mass across really across our solar system. And the farther you get away from the sun, the more relevant it is. So will NEP increase reliability for moving lots of mass and potentially even people to Mars. Absolutely when you get to Mars now have an energy source on the surface, which you can use to make the propellant on Mars to bring your astronauts home. It’s imperative. The alternative is you’re literally setting up endless football fields of solar panels that are going to get covered in dust and debris, and then you’re going to have to rely on the robots to go out and clean them. Like, we’re starting to ask for a lot more miracles here versus can a nuclear reactor or lots of nuclear reactors embedded in some of these landers give us the power source to make propellant on Mars and bring them back. Yes could you go do you know uncrewed missions in the outer solar system, past where the sun passed the point of the sun’s utility. Learn something and actually come home without having to refuel? Yes, that’s pretty exciting technology. So what’s the timeline for that tech? We are going to do a demonstration by the end of 2028. We are going to send something on under nuclear power and propulsion. And then what’s, I know this is prediction is impossible, but what is a best case timeline for an actual manned Mars mission? If things go well, I think we would have to put a concerted effort into well, first of all, everything. Everything there’s political will behind it. The tech is there 10 years, 10 years, 10 years, mid 2030s. So something that we could see. Yes certainly, I would think in our lifetime we’re going to see it happen to your point. What’s the will, how many resources are we able to really focus all of our best and brightest, all of our energy and resources on that important objective? Is commercials capabilities mature enough? Have we evolved our nuclear capabilities? But yes, I think if we put our effort to it, we’ll see it in our lifetime. Could even be in 10 years. How important is the human element in these missions? Because we keep gesturing to I think one of the assumptions that a lot of people working in artificial intelligence make is that AI revolutionizes spaceflight. But in part because it lets you send artificial intelligence deep into space where human beings can’t go. We obviously already do that with robots. But how Yeah how important is it that it’s actual human beings who are making these leaps? They’re both important for some overlap on missions and some just very different. So look, if our sensor capabilities now are so, so good, so much better than they ever were even a decade ago, that when you send a probe to let’s say, the outer solar system or we have a mission we’re talking about to Venus, potentially, it’s going to gather so much information so quickly that by the time you send the data back to Earth through transmission delays, allow it to be analyzed, send your next command back go investigate this or send me more information on that. You will have wasted an incredible opportunity. So you’re going to have to take advantage of all of that, all of that data you’re gathering for literally on mission or on orbit processing, determine what you just found or learned or what problem you encountered. Fix it, move on, and then send your status report back home. This is inevitable, especially now when you talk about crewed missions. Going to Mars, you have 20 minute plus transmission delays. You’re going to have to rely on A.I. in that crewed environment for just on orbit decision making problem troubleshooting. But I do think the human is important on missions that they’re capable of undertaking. Let’s take Mars. Look, I think there’s been three or four public announcements, one point or another that it’s like, hey, we’ve looked at this data, we’ve analyzed it from this sample. There’s a good chance that there was microbial life here, maybe at some point in time or another. I feel like that has been underplayed in the news because we have so many other things to cover. But yes, this has been going on for decades. This isn’t one single news release on this. It’s been going on for decades. And I think there’s plenty of scientists at NASA that are brilliant that would say, look, I’m 99 percent sure that at some point there was microbial life. So short of like, literally having a camera that sees something squirming around and beaming that back home, which we’ve never seen to be extremely clear on this subject, no one is going to believe tentacles just outside. I’m just saying look, even under a microscope, you see something moving. I think people will be like, O.K, that’s real, but short of that, and again, we have not seen that. I think the only way you’re going to have that consequential discovery is astronauts are going to go there or they’re going to bring those samples back, or maybe a robotic mission will bring them back, and then we’re going to put them under a lab here, and somebody’s going to come out and say conclusively, hey, this is 100 percent right. So, so this is why you need a human in the loop on some of these things. Not to mention it’s just inherent in who we are. It’s our destiny. We’re curious. We want to go out and learn and discover. That’s how we evolve. And is it consequential life on Mars. In part because it suggests that we could live on Mars. I think it just answers the question that maybe that we’re not alone. How many of your friends you’ve ever look up at the stars and have the conversation like, do you think there’s life out there? And I bet most people would say that oh, I mean, we got two trillion galaxies in every galaxy who knows how many stars in it. So, sure, the odds suggest that there should be something out there. Well, does that change from. Surely it must be somewhere to if you find samples that supported on Mars and signatures on Europa Clipper to what if it’s everywhere, right. I mean that that’s the light switch moment that could happen when you start finding no evidence of life on some of our closest neighbors within our solar system, which is one star across the broader Milky Way Galaxy, which is part of two trillion others. So there’s a dark interpretation, though, of that, which is you realize life is everywhere, and yet we haven’t heard from other civilizations. We have no evidence of advanced civilizations anywhere else in our galaxy. And there are civilizations, many civilizations advanced have no evidence of life. Direct evidence of life, no direct evidence. And there’s a lot of smart people who’ve looked at that and said, well, maybe that means that there is what the term I think it’s from the economist Robin Hanson, that there’s a great filter, that basically it’s so hard to become a multi-planetary species that even though life is everywhere, every species gets stuck somewhere around where we are achieving some things and then never getting off our initial planet. Does that worry you? That possibility that there’s just some limit that we’re going to hit in terms of our ability to get off Earth. No, I mean, I think this great adventure that we are on again, we are it is our destiny to venture out and explore and discover. And moon is a next stop. Mars we’re going to have an outpost, and we will continue to evolve our capabilities until we have the ability to explore other star systems beyond our solar system. I acknowledge that there are a lot of factors in humankind’s limited history relative to the age of Earth that yes, we could have destroyed ourselves before we ever had the opportunity. So the idea that we don’t have any evidence of intelligent life out there that’s been able to reach out or communicate with US does not have me discouraged at all. Look, we’re only 100 plus years into our Industrial Revolution here, where we even remotely have the capability to detect something, let alone our ability to communicate out there. And by the way, space is pretty big now. I think that space is big, but it has been around. It’s big, but it’s also pretty old. And a universe where that was teeming with life would presumably have generated some other industrial level civilizations. A million years ago, 10 million years ago. No, no, I mean, we could have sent probes and no, we have no idea. And that, I mean, for all we the most advanced planet, life that’s out there could be a water planet filled with dolphins that can’t construct a rocket or something we don’t like. So it could be right. But that is back to. That’s a kind of human exceptionalism where you say the universe could be teeming with life, but our particular kind of life is sufficiently unique that you don’t get lots and lots of intergalactic civilization. I think if you think about the scale of the universe right now with how many we said it before, you got two trillion galaxies plus that are out there. Every galaxy has got who knows how many stars in it. How many of them have potentially habitable planets? we can’t put a ceiling on anything and we can’t. We couldn’t possibly appreciate what could be more evolved than us, other than look, there are things we know based on our understanding of physics today. There is a cosmic speed limit. So if you can’t travel faster than light, look, what are the odds that you would have an advanced species be able to arrive in a star system to a planet at a time when that life would have reached a point that we would consider intelligent life. It’s like at this stage, it’s near impossible to imagine that we have literally just dipped our toe in the grandest sea of all, and we haven’t even begun to understand what’s in front of us yet. But you think human beings can become a multi-planetary species? I00 percent. I was speaking to our associate administrator yesterday, Amit, and I was like you imagine people at a time. You’re going back many thousands years ago that were hollowing out a log to make their way across essentially a pond and probably thinking, man, I sure have it better than the guys before who had to swim it. I was like, when it comes to in our present day at NASA and our capabilities to even explore our solar system, let alone everything around us, we’re just hollowing out a log We’re hollowing out the log to try and get across the river. But somewhere out there, there is the equivalent the oar or the sail, in this metaphor. And it seems like you could say, well, that’s going to be when we figure out how to terraform Mars, or that’s when we figure out we have a telescope that tells us that there’s a habitable world, that’s X number of light years away, and we figure out a way to send human beings. I’ll just be in cryosleep right to be science fictiony about it. But when you’re imagining that beyond your everyday duties as NASA, as NASA administrator, what are you imagining? Human beings primarily colonizing the solar system. Are you imagining us going into deep space? What is the sail or the oar that you’re looking for? No, it’s a good question. Look, there are a lot of things we are doing in parallel right now. Sure, we need to build programs like Habitable Worlds Observatory, which is actually work that’s being done here at Goddard Space Flight Center so that we can look out and try and identify exoplanets that have biosignatures start building the picture, have situational awareness on the star systems around us. That’s a good effort. But for the human track, what do we need right now to continue this journey, make meaningful progress? What is the sail and the oars? Rapid reusability I mean, the moment we stop throwing away our spacecraft and we can do the equivalency of air to air refueling in orbit, changes the game on the affordability to move lots of mass. Whether it’s to and from the moon or Mars. That’s a huge step. Nuclear power and propulsion. One, you need to be able to efficiently move a lot of mass there. And then when you actually get the nuclear power propulsion to the surface, that’s going to be your critical energy to power all the things you want to do there. But I want to point out that’s just the start of the journey. A lot of people would say like, well, NEP, has negligible improvements over solar under these circumstances or whatever Yeah and I can tell you too, if you go back to World War II, that there was a lot of disadvantages on a jet fighter relative to a piston airplane at the time. But that equation changed an awful lot the 80 years since. And we will get better. We will get better at our power conversion. We will run at higher temperatures, which will decrease a lot of our cooling radiation requirements. We won’t need radiators the size of football fields. So just getting in that motion, that rep of moving things back and forth, our capabilities will evolve. We’ll have our outposts on Mars. So we’ll learn to live away from Earth. We’ll know if we can live for extended periods of time. And sub-1G environments. And we’ll take that to inform our next decision. Which is why, again, it’s important to have the continuous situation awareness building that our telescopes give us. I’m not necessarily in the camp of like, should we be colonizing Mars. That’s not for me. I honestly that let the other great brilliant dreamers do those things. Do I think we should have an outpost there? Should we get really good at moving mass materials and people to and from Mars? Totally and then we need the platinum mines to draw, to draw the colonists. Look, we have to. I’m not picking on any one particular mineral, because who knows what changes in the future. I made you I made you pick one. You just. We do need an economic driver for sure. O.K, last question. Just in the last 10 minutes, you said repeatedly we don’t have any evidence of any civilizations beyond Earth, let alone advanced civilizations. We’re conducting this interview 18 hours after President Trump, who you’ve praised repeatedly in this conversation, said that he was planning to declassify material related to UFOs. What gets called UAPs now. He described it as something a very complex and interesting topic. Does NASA have anything to declassify that would be of interest to viewers of this program? I’m not aware of anything that we would have at NASA to declassify, other than to say that I’m as interested in the president’s message as probably any other space enthusiast out there. Now, I will save. Having I spent 10 years leading a defense contracting company. We operated fighter jets all across the country simulating bad guy capabilities. Say, look, there are a lot of as you would expect, exquisite capabilities that we have as a nation for national security purposes that we have developed. All we have to do is look to the history books. SR-71 was a pretty wild capability in the 1960s. Nobody would have imagined that F-117 was pretty wild. So do I think that there are probably capabilities we have as a nation that we developed and our adversaries that can do some pretty impressive things? Sure so I wouldn’t be surprised if that were. So that puts you in the camp that says a lot of the UAP, UFO encounters and also vapors around it are covers for human technologies? Yes, I would say generally speaking, I think there are some that I’m aware of that were very easily explainable by not even phenomenon like this was a weather balloon at great range that reflected I know those conclusively. I also know conclusively some of them were related to test programs that were out there. I mean, look, people misidentified a lot of what was flying in the 1960s and 80s in the middle of the desert with lights on at night. Looks strange. Turned out it was B-2. Turned out it was F-117. So I’m not surprised that could potentially fall in it. I would also ask people again, this is a good, kind of Occam’s razor thing. If there was intelligent life that visited us from another world, where would you be interested in going to observe us? I mean Times Square seems like a good spot. The Las Vegas Strip seems like a good spot. I mean, there’s got to be interesting areas. Why would you always pick our naval bases? Why would you pick off the Coast of Virginia or San Diego or Hawaii? That probably signals it’s more of a national security interest. I would say that makes sense, although I will say that there have been a number of UFO reports related to nuclear facilities, and you could imagine some reasons why a extraterrestrial species would be interested in our nuclear capacities. I could also imagine that or even these capacities here or again. There’s a lot of other people that are interested in our strategic deterrent as well. I joke a little bit that I say that in my 60 days at NASA, I’ve certainly seen things that I can’t explain, but they relate entirely to programs to build things that I have no idea why we’re doing. But not aliens. All right. On that refreshingly concrete answer. Jared Isaacman, thank you so much for joining me. No, thank you. Great questions. I really appreciate it.
