Jared Isaacman's Plan to Rebuild NASA

It took sixty-five years to get from Orville and Wilbur's first powered flight to Neil Armstrong's first step on the Moon. It has now been fifty-seven years since that step, and for most of that stretch NASA has moved slower than the pace that produced it in the first place (00:23). That gap between what the agency once did and what it has done lately is the real subject of this conversation with NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, a pilot and commercial astronaut who took over the agency last year and has spent his tenure trying to close it.

Isaacman's diagnosis is blunt. NASA, he argues, did not run out of money. It ran out of discipline. Programs got spread across congressional districts and international partners to keep everyone content, and the Orion capsule that resulted cannot even be inserted into low lunar orbit the way Apollo's command module could (02:30). The Mars Sample Return mission, meant to bring Martian rock back to Earth, was allowed to balloon past the cost of an aircraft carrier before it was canceled (02:56). The current moon rocket, the Space Launch System, converts less of its launch mass into usable payload than the Saturn V did sixty years ago (03:51). Isaacman's summary of the underlying problem is direct.

"NASA does not have a top line problem. Like, we are bad capital allocators and have been for a long time." — Jared Isaacman [28:10]

The agency's total budget is $25 billion (28:10), and roughly a third of it goes to science missions, split from the directorates covering human spaceflight and nuclear-propulsion research (33:05). Isaacman's fix is not more funding. It is refusing to spread that funding thin. "We are not going to try and make everyone happy," he told the audience, "we are not gonna spread every penny across every district or partner with every nation just to try and make everyone happy" (04:45).

The near-term proof of that focus is the Artemis schedule. Artemis III is set to launch on the SLS rocket into low Earth orbit in the summer of 2027, where it will rendezvous with uncrewed lander test vehicles from Blue Origin and SpaceX, a live test of whether three separate, enormously powerful rocket systems can work together (06:42). What NASA learns from that rendezvous feeds into Artemis IV in 2028, when American astronauts are meant to land on the lunar surface again, this time to stay rather than visit (07:10). Around that crewed return, Isaacman describes a nearly monthly cadence of robotic missions building toward a permanent outpost: rovers, habitation modules, power systems, and equipment to extract resources from lunar soil, all treated as rehearsal for Mars (07:43).

The target for that outpost is the lunar south pole, chosen because its permanently shadowed craters hold water ice, a resource that could support fuel and life support for future missions, and because the environment there is, in Isaacman's words, harsher than Mars itself (20:15). He frames the choice as strategic rather than sentimental.

"The lunar south pole, where the water ice is, is gonna be the technological proving ground for where we inevitably go next, which is Mars." — Jared Isaacman [08:04]

The Nuclear Turn

The most concrete technical bet in the whole conversation is nuclear power. In 2028, NASA plans to launch SR-1 Freedom, a 100 kilowatt fission reactor, the first in what Isaacman calls a coming fleet of nuclear-powered spacecraft (08:28). The mission will pass Mars and release a probe called Skyfall, which carries three helicopters modeled on the Ingenuity aircraft that already flew on Mars, equipped with ground-penetrating radar to scout for subsurface ice and future landing sites (08:28). A separate nuclear-powered mission, Dragonfly, is scheduled to journey to Saturn's moon Titan in 2028, running on a tiny fraction of the power of a household appliance (10:48). Europa Clipper, already in flight, arrives at Jupiter's icy moon Europa in 2030 (11:13).

The mechanism is simpler than it sounds. Spacecraft like SpaceX's Starlink satellites already use solar power to ionize a gas, usually krypton or xenon, and fire it out the back of an engine for thrust, a method that is extremely fuel-efficient but produces very little force (26:53). That approach works near the sun. Past Jupiter, solar power fades, so a nuclear reactor supplies the heat instead, run as hot as the materials can withstand and converted to electricity that drives the same kind of thruster (27:33). Isaacman argues this is the technology that gets a spacecraft to and from Mars without needing to manufacture rocket fuel on the Martian surface, a notoriously hard engineering problem, because a nuclear-powered transfer vehicle only needs to be refueled with more krypton or xenon once it returns (25:07).

A Race With Real Parking Spots

Underneath the technical roadmap is a geopolitical clock. Isaacman says China intends to put astronauts on the Moon by 2030, with robotic missions targeting the Shackleton Crater at the lunar south pole as early as next year (14:49). Because only a handful of craters near the pole combine water ice with reliable sunlight for power, the competition is literally over territory.

"There are only so many good parking spots in that neighborhood, and they intend to occupy them." — Jared Isaacman [14:49]

China is also partnering with Russia on a nuclear-powered lunar base of its own (15:11), and Isaacman is candid that China, unlike the Soviet Union during the first space race, has both the launch architecture and the political will to actually pull off a landing (15:11). What worries him is not the technology gap so much as the optics of losing. In his prepared remarks, he imagined a future broadcast in which the flag on a descending astronaut's spacesuit is not American, and no explanation of budgets or bureaucracy would matter: "there will be no footnote explaining that we spent more, no disclaimer that our architecture was complicated... the world will just see who got there" (14:13).

Not every part of the agency's portfolio is about the race itself. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, carries a nearly 300 megapixel wide-field instrument that will search for evidence of dark energy and dark matter, the unexplained forces and mass that shape the universe's expansion (11:13). NASA is also standing up a new federal training institution, the United States Space Academy, created by presidential commission to prepare future astronauts, engineers, and mission planners the way earlier generations trained for aviation and the space race (13:22). And the agency's aeronautics division, the original "A" in NASA, is testing the X-59 aircraft for quiet supersonic flight, an early step in rebuilding a fleet of experimental planes that Isaacman says had been neglected for years (12:34).

What ties these threads together is less a single mission than a change in posture: pick fewer priorities, defend them against the pull toward compromise, and let the outcome, not the process, be the record. Isaacman closed his remarks with a line that only makes sense against that backdrop, a rejection of the idea that effort and paperwork are their own kind of achievement.

"We chose to go, and we went." — Jared Isaacman [16:48]

Whether NASA can hold that posture through the next several administrations, several billion dollars of nuclear hardware, and a Chinese lander already aimed at the same handful of craters is the open question the rest of this decade will answer.