Jared Isaacman: NASA's Moon Base by 2028, Optimus Robots on the Moon, and 15 Years to Mars | Ep #274

2028 is an aggressive timeline for landing on the Moon. What are the steps to getting there? When do humanoid robots enter that equation? Can you give us a few details?

The most expensive part of doing that is not the nuclear fuel. It's not the modifications needed for the lunar surface. We all enjoyed the headlines from Artemis 2, but it reminded us of what's possible and got us all excited. We don't want to wait several years between the next episode, right?

I'd be curious to hear your timelines for deploying humanoid robots with your NASA hat on.

Any area where you're going to have human involvement eventually, it would be crazy not to make a force multiplier and put humanoid robots there to do some of the work.

This is, I think, the question on the minds of many people I've spoken with: Are we alone?

In my mind, I would think—

Now, we've just flown humans around the Moon for the first time since 1972. We've announced plans to land American astronauts on the lunar south pole in 2028. Two competing moon landers are being built right now, and there are plans to run NASA, a $25 billion agency, more like a startup than a bureaucracy.

The man driving it all flew to space twice as a private mission commander before even taking the job. I've known most of the NASA administrators over the last 40 years. In my humble opinion, our guest today is the greatest of them all.

I want to welcome everybody to Moonshots, your number-one podcast in all things AI and exponential tech, your front-row seat to the singularity.

Today, my Moonshot mates and I are going to be diving deep into humanity's future in space with our extraordinary guest, Jared Isaacman, the 15th administrator of NASA. Let me take a moment to properly introduce Jared. He didn't come up through the regular route of being a member of the astronaut corps or a government agency. He's a builder.

He founded his first company, Shift for Payments, at the age of 16 in his parents' garage and then built it into a payments company processing hundreds of billions of dollars annually. He's a jet pilot who's flown in air shows and set around-the-world speed records.

Then he did something epic, purchasing two private Falcon 9 Dragon missions. He commanded Inspiration4 in 2021, the first all-civilian orbital mission. Then, in 2024, he commanded Polaris Dawn, where he performed the first-ever commercial spacewalk, stepping out of a Dragon capsule into the vacuum of space.

During his stint at NASA, he laid out 5 key objectives: get America back to the Moon, build a permanent Moon base, begin using nuclear power in space, ignite a real orbital economy, and reinvigorate the science that lets us look for life among the stars. Jared, welcome to Moonshots and the Moonshot mates. We've known each other for 17 years, and I couldn't be more proud to have you on the show.

Well, Peter, thanks for having me on the show. It's an absolute pleasure to reconnect. I'm going to challenge you a little bit on that. I appreciate the generous introduction. It's super early right now.

I know it is. But hey, I have plenty of time to screw things up. I'll tell you right now, we are—we are all, everybody at NASA, from leadership down to the engineers and technicians, having a great time right now. We're moving very quickly.

There isn't a person who shows up to work every day at NASA who's not excited about changing the world in air and space, and everybody is just really enthusiastic about getting after it. You said something very nice: that 17 years ago, in Baikonur, I got you started on this mission. Is that actually true?

That is—no, I mean, look, since kindergarten, I wanted to be an astronaut, like a lot of kids who just look up at the night sky and imagine the possibilities. I just never thought it was even close to possible or achievable.

That's why I became a pilot, and I started undertaking some mini-adventures, like flying around the world and setting those speed records. Somehow, along the way, you found me and invited me to Baikonur, and it was during that trip that I thought, "Well, maybe it is a possibility."

So you absolutely helped steer me down this path. Just so you know, it's only been a matter of days since I came back from my second visit to Baikonur. I have to tell you, it was very different from the first trip. I didn't have any Russian delegations coming out to meet with me when you and I were on that journey.

Yeah, that was the mission where Richard Garriott was flying into space. I had actually brought Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin to that mission, too. We watched the mission from a bunker about half a kilometer from the launchpad and then went outside to watch it. It was epic. It was like the thunder of God before you.

Yeah.

They don't—they—I always describe it as being like a solid par 3 away from the launchpad when we were there. They have moved us back a little bit as of this current launch, but still, I walked Anil Menon right up to the ladder of the Soyuz and was involved in a bilateral discussion with our counterparts in Russia 100 yards away—a building right next to that fully fueled vehicle. So it's a little different.

Wait, was that first one the one where you said, "If anything goes wrong with this launch—"

Yeah.

"What happens?" So Sergey was there. We had 2 or 3 Soviet-era Russians there, with incredible outfits, in the bunker. When we walked outside, Sergey asked the question in Russian, "So what happens if something goes wrong?" The response, which he translated, was, "Enjoy. It will be the last thing you ever experience."

Well, there was plenty of risk before we ever got there. We all had to go on a Soviet Tu-154 airliner. This is the same plane that I think took out a lot of the Polish political leadership a few decades ago. So the entire Google leadership team, not to mention whoever else you invited on board, had some serious concentration risk on that old Soviet plane just getting to Baikonur.

It was like Eric was saying, "Do not let the media know that we're here."

Boy, I tell you, it's so cool to have somebody that fearless running a government agency. That's got to be rare, but you've got the DNA for it. That's really cool.

Jared, let me kick it off. On this podcast, we talk a lot about AI, exponentials, and robotics, and I have to imagine that, living at this moment in the singularity, it's got a chance to really accelerate NASA's timeline across the Moon, Mars, and everything else.

We talk a lot about large language models and the small embedded language models that are going into robots and everything. Can you imagine a time when NASA basically allows full autonomy on all of its robots and probes, and these robots and probes, whether they're in Titan or Mars or moving out to Europa, are on their own investigating what's interesting and deciding what experiments to run independently of scientists back on Earth?

100%. We still, no matter what, want to get the data back. It's just that if you have a limited window of opportunity to do so, do you let the on-mission AI make the determination of what is the most interesting data in the least amount of time I have available and send it home before, perhaps, destruction?

There's already a mission designed for that, which is DAVINCI, going to Venus. In that pressure environment, that mission will not live long. So we're designing it from the get-go to have on-mission AI, and it will determine what actions it needs to take based on the data it's able to collect as quickly as it possibly can, use that to inform its mission direction, and then send home what's most useful to the scientific community.

That's probably the first and best example, but it's just the beginning of where we should be going with this technology.

The timelines with everything AI are compressing and compressing and compressing. So now we're talking a lot on the pod about speedrunning Star Trek and you getting to that destination in some bounded time frame.

But 2 questions for you. 1, AI back here on the ground: How is it accelerating the rate at which you design new ships and new missions? And 2, humanoids out in space doing a lot of what an astronaut like you would have done historically? Now you can take a lot more risk if you're launching a humanoid robot than an astronaut.

Yeah. Good question. Maybe, if I can reframe it just a little bit, to say: What are we doing with AI right now, and how is that informing NASA's mission?

I'll tell you, we are structurally very disadvantaged relative to any of the hyperscalers. We're a government agency. If you think about even NASA's budget, what you said at the beginning, of $25 billion a year, the hyperscalers are investing many times NASA's budget into just hardware procurement right now.

How do you even be smart, knowing you're at somewhat of a disadvantage at NASA, to get the most out of the capability, further our mission, and ensure America's competitiveness in the high ground of space?

I'll tell you, President Trump and OSTP Director Kratzios have come up with a really good idea: the Genesis Mission.

I don't know how familiar you are with it, but—

Okay. So you're all on track, and everybody in government is kind of kicking into this, but the audience may not be familiar with it. So if you want to hit that.

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it's recognizing that even the whole of government is disadvantaged, and the worst thing possible is for every government agency to throw what little dollars it can at the problem and hope for good outcomes. Instead, it's kind of collecting and consolidating resources into the Department of Energy, which, by the way, for a very long time has had some pretty substantial computing power available to it. Obviously, even that gets quickly outdated, but they've always had the budget for investments in compute, consolidating your AI strategy, leveraging some data that's very unique to government agencies based on the work that's being done, and having a whole-of-government approach to leveraging the potential of AI.

At NASA, we submitted 2 overarching themes to leverage the Genesis Mission. Number 1 is: What have we missed, and what are we likely to miss? That's just my way of describing it. We have collected so much data over the decades from various NASA missions. What have we overlooked in it?

There weren't just headlines made that long ago by a teenager in Texas who leveraged AI, went through some archival NASA data, and found new galaxies. That's not something we should generally want to overlook. We've since extended an internship offer to him, and I think he may start next year.

That problem—or maybe you call it a problem or an opportunity—is only going to get worse. When you think about the constellations of satellites that are going up, even for Earth observation and space weather, let alone new missions like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will launch August 30 on a Falcon Heavy, you're going to be gathering so much data. It has 100 times the field of view of Hubble and a 1,000 times faster scan rate.

There are so many new missions that will be going up. How do we leverage AI to go through this immense amount of data that we have, looking for scientific breakthroughs we might have overlooked or could likely overlook? That kind of goes to the heart of NASA's mission of unlocking the secrets of the universe.

The 2nd category is extending our reach. That kind of goes to your advanced spacecraft design, and I'm concentrating that into propulsion. Whether you have on-orbit or on-mission robotics, and whether that's actually necessary or not, what I care about is recognizing and overcoming the tyranny of distance in space.

Right now, we've barely even scratched the surface in our Solar System, let alone the next-closest star system. Industry is doing a fantastic job of maturing chemical propulsion, from rapid reusability to the evolving performance that they get out of even Merlin, let alone Raptor, which is very early in its design cycle.

How do we leverage AI and go well beyond that, and try to unlock a little bit more of the energy potential from matter, which is almost immeasurable in chemical propulsion, to 0.1% with fission or 0.5% with fusion, until we ultimately get to the desired destination of antimatter annihilation? That maybe actually gives us the real potential to start thinking beyond what's in the reach of our Solar System. Those are 2 overarching themes. Alex, over to you, pal.

Alex

Amazing. Well, Jared, I would say NASA has a storied history of human spaceflight on the one hand and, on the other hand, sending lots of non-humanoid robots throughout the Solar System. I'd be curious to hear your timelines and what you perceive as the future, in the context of Artemis in the near term or other planets in the Solar System, for deploying humanoid robots with your NASA hat on throughout the Solar System.

What role, and in what timeline, do you perceive humanoid robots playing, to the extent that friend of the pod Elon has characterized Optimus as the ultimate von Neumann probe for the Solar System? What role do you see humanoids playing in constructing Artemis and other facilities elsewhere?

Well, I think any place where we believe there's a realistic probability of building an eventual human outpost, the Moon for sure, it would be crazy not to use humanoid robots as a force multiplier and put them there to do some of the work.

We've been blessed with having this proving ground 3 to 4 days away from Earth. We're absolutely going to build a base there and make the most of it. Any area where you're going to have human involvement eventually, it would be crazy not to put humanoid robots there to do some of the work.

When you think about having human beings on the Moon base and asking what their job is going to be, it's like—as little as possible. Really, it's still incredibly dangerous. The moment they walk outside, it's incredibly dangerous to be there in the first place. Leveraging robotics for everything from infrastructure build-out to logistics is imperative.

You want there to be no alternative but to put an astronaut outside the habitat for an EVA. The same would be applicable for Mars, which is the next logical destination, the next stepping-stone on this grand journey that we're undertaking.

But there are plenty of places where we wouldn't even need to require a humanoid robot. Think about exciting missions to seek out signs of life or ancient life that could have existed in our Solar System. Take Europa Clipper, or I'm very optimistic that we might be able to commission a mission to Enceladus at some point in time, or Dragonfly, for example, going to Saturn's moon Titan.

We just need to build the best probe or discovery instrument for that mission to get us the data that we're excited for. It doesn't necessarily have to take on any sort of humanoid form. You like that, Selene? I bet. Dave, back to you, pal.

Dave

Yeah, I love that split focus of, “Hey, we have reams of proprietary data. Let's AI it,” and then trans-solar—nobody in the commercial world is going to work on fusion or antimatter annihilation to get to other solar systems. I totally get the big budgets, but that's just incredibly cool.

At the same time, orbital data centers have stolen the spotlight recently. What's NASA's position on orbital data centers? It's going to create a huge amount of launch capacity, so maybe assembling things for trans-solar missions in space is part of the stepping-stone there. What's NASA's position on orbital data centers?

First, just to hit that point, even unlocking fission forms of propulsion, I would still argue, would be a major distraction for a lot of commercial industry right now, when there is so much potential elsewhere—not to mention all the terrestrial applications for fission power. When we're trying to win an AI race, which I think is, by the way, extremely healthy for NASA, the worst thing for NASA as the world's most accomplished space agency is trying to do what the rest of industry is doing.

I don't think that is a good thing for recruiting the best talent, retaining it, or workforce development. Right now, I see NASA—this is our opportunity to have the Hyman Rickover nuclear Navy tradition and start working again on the near impossible, what others are not focused on, that have no obvious business use cases, where NASA will not be one customer of many.

We can truly have those kinds of pioneering breakthroughs for the benefit of all humankind, enabling capabilities for surface power on the Moon, Mars surface power at some point, and the ability to undertake realistic exploration missions in the outer Solar System. Even fission power, by the way, is a huge step in the right direction for NASA, outside of where industry should rightfully be trying to raise capital and put its attention.

In terms of orbital data centers, if Elon and SpaceX are betting on this right now, there is no reason to believe this will not come into existence.

Dave

Never, ever, ever bet against Elon.

100% right. I never bet against an extremely well-capitalized Elon. People ask, in my position as NASA administrator, what I think of, for example, if SpaceX does an IPO. First of all, I'm thrilled with any of our partners that are essential to undertaking and achieving our mission.

The number-one national space policy objective is to return American astronauts to the lunar surface and build the Moon base out. We can't do it without them, so the fact that they're extremely well capitalized right now is a fantastic thing, not to mention the engineering talent that's in there. I think, without question, the greatest entrepreneur and engineer in recent history is at the helm.

I think that's all very good. No doubt it will come into existence. What I care about, beyond the potential of space-based data centers and harnessing our free fusion reactor that's out there, is the prospect of an expanded space economy.

Because I will tell you, I'm a little more measured in this, maybe just having started my company in 1999, when you started to see the final days before the dot-com bubble. At times, we get enamored by the potential of things, as it was with the internet then and how it may be today, in some respects, with commercial space. Launch, observation, and communications are the only things we know for sure.

People say that all the time: “It’s your obligation for NASA to go to the moon and establish a lunar economy.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” I can’t guarantee that we can get more value out of the lunar regolith than all the cost that goes into getting there, extracting what you need, and then bringing it back to Earth or manufacturing there. There’s no guarantee on all that.

Our job is to go out and try and change the world in air and space. If, along the way, you can have pioneering breakthroughs in commercial space, fantastic. I don’t believe we will all live in that exciting future we imagined as kids if it’s entirely funded by taxpayers.

So to see perhaps another leg beyond launch, observation, and communications—say, orbital data centers—is a thing where the math closes, the economic potential there is real, and it will help fund a lot of the things we are all excited about in space, like maybe lots of commercial space stations or the infrastructure we want to see on the moon. Fantastic. We should all be really excited about it.

Amazing. So, over to you, pal.

Selene

I have a quick anecdote. I used to be the head of innovation at Yahoo, running their incubator in San Francisco, and we had NASA speakers come and speak because I wanted these developers to understand what real innovation looked like.

We once had this 70-plus-year-old fellow who worked on the Apollo program. You have to imagine 300 tight-jean, white-sneaker, gelled-hair, MacBook developers all sitting in this room. During the Q&A, I asked, “What’s the biggest difference in the space industry between when you were launching on the Apollo program and today?” He said, “Huh?” Then he goes, “Maybe it’s computers.”

Because back then, all information was transmitted via carbon-copy paper. The pink sheet went here; the green sheet went there. You could see these 300 developers look up, and I could see their brains exploding one by one as they looked at the implications of this. Totally incredible.

You’ve kind of looked at this unbelievable transformation of NASA, where you have launch capacity, capital, and technical expertise all locked up, and those are now becoming abundant. As those become abundant, how do you steer NASA? What does it enable? What does it provide for the private sector to take it to the next level?

Yeah. Again, I use this as an opportunity to hit on another point, too, because I would have loved for that NASA scientist or engineer from the Apollo era to go beyond just “computer.” I think there’s something else that’s very different, which is focus, and that’s going to be even more important. As launch costs continue to come down materially, and as commercial industry and private capital become willing to fund what’s available, the question is how well do we wield it and use it?

Who’s a great example of this focus? It’s Elon and SpaceX, right? This is a person—and it’s not just at SpaceX; he did Tesla, too—who has no problem executing the Cortés model of burning the ships. You could have the greatest rocket with an unbelievable economic model to support it and endless demand, and he says, “Nope. Obsolete. Time to focus on the next thing.” He shut down Falcon 1, and he’s going to shut down Falcon 9.

Makes great video, doesn’t it? [laughter]

And you think about that during the Apollo era—and I mention this from time to time to members of Congress to help them, too—is that if you go back to, I think it’s, the 1965 NASA Authorization Act, it’s 5 pages and it’s got some standard template language, but more or less it says, “Beat the Russians to the moon.” X dollars that go to Apollo, X dollars that go to Gemini, right? Outside of that, all this flexibility, but essentially the focus was on 1 or 2 incredibly important things to the nation.

You see, again, SpaceX is very good at doing that. Tesla’s like, “Okay, this generation of vehicle—its time has come. I’m now focusing on doing 1 or 2 things extremely well.” That has changed considerably at NASA from the space race, where, for a very long time—and I do believe this is kind of absent global competition—NASA has been asked to do everything for everyone and try and make as many people as happy as you possibly can. As a result, you generally make no one happy.

In as many congressional districts as possible.

Yeah. I mean, even now I think about it. Forgive the kind of Department of Defense example, but we were talking about procurement of next-generation aircraft and such. I was like, “Isn’t it so fascinating that, right now, at a time when the F-47 has been unveiled as our sixth-generation fighter, we will still advocate for production of fourth-generation, fifth-generation, and sixth-generation fighters?”

As a result, probably what you want to buy from the sixth generation is several times more expensive than it needs to be, and you’ll get a lot less of them because you’re diving in so many different directions. You would never see that happen with some of the entrepreneurs we’re talking about and their companies. They’d be like, “Why would I be doing that? It’s 50 years old. It’s literally half a century old. I’m going to focus everything I can on doing what I’m supposed to be doing today really well.”

What President Trump has been able to give us with our national space policy—and what actually being in a second space race, with global competition, has enabled us to do—is say, “We can’t do everything for everyone anymore. We’re going to go back and dust off the playbook from the ’60s and start focusing on doing a couple of things that are extremely hard very well.”

To your question, having lower launch costs available and private capital willing to make investments alongside the government, so it’s not 4.5% of the discretionary budget anymore, hopefully helps us get back to some of those headlines that were made in the 1960s, but on a different level today.

Well, when you have all of the capability, the biggest constraint for NASA has always been the rate-limiting step, right? When do you see fleets of humanoid robots out there doing things, and when do you envision the moon becoming almost a platform that a broader ecosystem can build off of?

Well, look, I think in terms of rate, the biggest driver there is going to be the breakthroughs in rapid reusability. Starship is obviously the first example of a vehicle where we don’t throw away the upper stage. Building multiple factories to mass-produce that hardware and multiple launch pads will be important. Of course, Blue Origin’s New Glenn vehicle has already proven reusability with the first stage. I think Stoke is trying to do a reusable first and second stage, and I’m sure Rocket Lab with Neutron is going to get there.

All of that is critical to bringing down the cost to accelerate mass to orbit, in which case it doesn’t matter if you’re using it for commercial space stations, for commercial purposes, scientific missions, or transporting lots of mass efficiently to the surface of the moon.

That’s key to everything in NASA. We’re going to be able to get far more of our dollars doing the near-impossible task than simply paying for the cost to get there. A great example, I said, is that we’re thinking about repurposing something the taxpayers already paid for, which is the engineering development units of the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers. They’re just sitting there at JPL. That’s probably, I don’t know, 500 million all in that’s just sitting there.

No question, I’m like, “Well, we were all talking—why don’t we just put it on the moon? It’ll be a great rover, and it can survive in the permanently shadowed regions.” The most expensive part of doing that is not the nuclear fuel. It’s not the modifications needed for the lunar surface. It’s getting it there, and that’s getting it there in the most mature and competitive launch environment that we’ve had in the history of the space program.

So the next breakthroughs that come thereafter with full rapid reusability are going to enable everything we want to do, not least of which is on the lunar surface. Once you have armies of humanoid robots on the lunar surface that are actually going to start building out the infrastructure, you’ll start to go from what NASA’s vision of a phase-one moon base is—a lot of broken-down stuff everywhere as we learn the science of survival, which I refer to almost as a junkyard in the early days—to that more utopian dome of a city that probably some of us envision. That’s what’s going to bridge the gap between those 2 worlds.

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Let’s talk about the Moon for a second. Jared, 2028 is an aggressive timeline for landing on the Moon. Thank you for that. It’s super great to have aggressive timelines once again.

Once we land on the Moon, give me a step-by-step, if you would, for getting a lunar base there. Getting a permanent lunar base, where humanity is existing off the planet Earth beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time ever, is huge. What are the steps to getting there? When do humanoid robots enter that equation? Can you give us a few details?

Sure. I think it’s imperative that we do a lot of littles at first, which I think is fully akin to the space race in the 1960s. We had Mercury before Gemini, Gemini before Apollo, and lots of Apollo missions before we landed on the Moon.

In this world that we’ve been in, absent competition for some time, where focus is a problem and we’re distributing money everywhere to make everybody happy, we’re kind of forgetting all of those interim steps to getting to the exciting outcome. We just design a dream state.

A dream state is a service sometimes, and it’s usually very late and much more expensive than we want. None of us want that. We all enjoyed the headlines of Artemis 2, even though we had done very similar things a half-century earlier. It reminded us of what’s possible and got us all excited.

We don’t want to wait several years in between the next episode, right?

I think getting back to doing a lot of littles up front and learning what does and doesn’t work to inform the next phase worked very well for NASA in the 1960s. We’re bringing it back.

What I described as Phase 1—and this is before the astronauts ever get there in 2028—is that we’re going to be dropping landers and rovers on a near-monthly basis. We’re going to take advantage of the commercial market that exists today, the CLPS program that started years ago. We’re going to start printing these things off, and we’ll learn from every one of them in that incredibly harsh environment on the lunar south pole.

If we’re going there and we’re going to build a base, we’d better at least do it near the water ice, or what are we doing there? We’re going to learn how to survive in that environment, and we’re going to do it before we lock in the dream state.

I don’t want to hear about how we’re locking in lunar comms, the surface or orbital architecture, what our power source is going to be, or what the interface is going to be between the rover and some future-state nuclear reactor. Let’s start landing stuff now and learning in this environment, and we’ll use it to roll into a subsequent design.

Phase 1 is going to leave a lot of debris everywhere—a lot of dead rovers and landers—but we’re going to learn from it, and then we’ll roll into Phase 2.

I think once Starships are launching with frequency and they’ve worked out orbital propellant transfer, and once Blue Origin has its on-orbit aggregation strategy down, then, when you’re moving mass very efficiently to the surface, that’s when you roll in the humanoid robots. Again, you want the fewest reasons possible to ever put an astronaut in a suit outside the base unless there’s no other alternative. Humanoid robots are going to give you that.

Best guess: under or over when we see the first humanoid robot walking on the Moon?

In my mind, I would think that on the uncrewed lander demonstrations, which both Blue Origin and SpaceX need to do in advance of the lunar landing that’s already contractual, I’d kind of be shocked if somebody didn’t smuggle one on board.

We’re not waiting that long, right? You’re talking about the next 4 to 6 years as a window for these to start showing up and building that infrastructure.

Boots on the Moon—except they’re Optimus. Figure boots on the Moon circa 2028 or 2029. That’s great. Alex, over to you, pal.

Alex

Yeah. Pulling on this lunar theme, Jared, 20 years ago you were a civilian pilot with ambition, and in some sense you bought your way into space. There are many civilian pilots out there right now, some of whom have written to me, who would absolutely love a path to the Moon.

A path to be basically a civilian settler corps—including, apparently, Peter, who would love to be a civilian settler or reserve astronaut—with a way to the Moon. Does NASA, do you have any plans, or have you contemplated setting up a civilian settler corps to enable those trained civilian pilots who want to move to the Moon or spend time on the Moon to travel there and move to the Moon or to Mars? Or do you perceive that pathway as being purely commercial and not flowing through NASA?

There’s a lot there. Let me just first say that having an aviation background is hardly a requirement anymore. There are certainly advantages that come with it, but if you think about what a crew of astronauts should look like going from Earth to the Moon or Mars, having 1 or 2 people with that background is important and helpful, for sure.

If you want, I think number one in this—and this also very much qualifies, Peter—is medical professionals. The technology to enable humans to go to Mars is going to happen far faster than having the countermeasures in place for how demanding it is physiologically to be in space, not to mention psychologically, especially when you get to extreme distances like Mars.

I just don’t ever see a world in our lifetime where you’re not going to have considerable investments in medical professionals supporting outposts on the Moon and certainly Mars someday.

Now, what does that mean? Again, what is NASA’s charter? I think we’re out there trying to unlock the secrets of the universe, and every step—the Moon, Mars, and thereafter—is just a step on that journey for crewed and uncrewed missions.

There will always be a need for NASA astronauts, and I’d be shocked if you didn’t see, at some point in time, NASA astronauts play a role in helping train and certify commercial or private crews going on those missions. It’s the same way that, as a pilot, whether it’s an FAA examiner or an FAA designee verifying that a pilot is safe to fly in national airspace, taking off and landing is inherently dangerous—well, several times more so once you start leaving our atmosphere.

There’ll be a role for NASA astronauts in this. Hopefully, as costs come down, again, through rapid reusability, and you have the ability to put hundreds or thousands of people in space through government programs, you’re going to require a lot more NASA astronauts.

But no doubt, there is going to be a time period where private and commercial operations will far outstrip that in terms of the number of people living and working in space, on the Moon, or elsewhere. I’d love to think that the expertise inherent with NASA will help set up those private and commercial astronauts for success.

Alex, we’re going to speed-run The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress without the rocks falling on Earth.

Alex

Rods from God, Peter. Rods from God.

Dave, over to you, pal.

Dave

Yeah. You mentioned a second ago that the south pole of the Moon is a particularly harsh environment. I’d love to drill in on that. Is it harsher in particular, or is it just that the Moon in general is as harsh as you’re referring to?

I think the Moon in general is rather harsh, but you’re talking about -400 degrees in some of the permanently shaded regions. We actually have survival problems at the south pole of the Moon that exceed those of Mars.

It’s certainly going to be, as I’ve said, the optimal proving ground that we’ve been gifted several days away from Earth for everything else that humankind should hope to achieve in space someday.

At least it’s close enough to come home if we run into some challenges.

Dave

So then, what does that mean for this race that’s on right now? Your launch costs are coming down like crazy, and that’s because of reusability. At the same time, the idea of having mass drivers on the Moon as a way to get more things into orbit is a really compelling idea, and that idea is moving at a pretty good clip, too.

There’s a view of the world where launch costs come down so much that, when you watch one of these launches, the amount of energy it takes to get a ton into orbit is just mind-boggling. Not being in the gravity well is really compelling. You can just railgun it right off the Moon instead.

So, actually manufacturing the first railguns on the Moon and then getting something significant manufactured there to launch is a pretty daunting challenge. How do you see the timelines of those two ways of getting things into space competing with each other?

Well, it's a really interesting question. Here's one where, again, you don't bet against Elon and his big engineering brain on the subject. How cool would it be to have a mass driver on the Moon? I'm all for it.

But it does beg the question: If Starship—and, broadly, rapid reusability—is such a game changer, where you're turning around these vehicles in a matter of hours and your cost is essentially the consumables, if you have to bring a lot of the materials necessary to assemble or build whatever it is you're looking to accelerate off the Moon with the mass driver to the Moon, could you not just bring it from the get-go?

You'd have to be highly confident that the costs to refine, extract, and manufacture from the regolith on the Moon—unless we're starting to get really going and retrieving asteroids and everything else—will be lower and more economical than essentially 3D-printing it on the Moon and using the mass driver to accelerate it. That would have to be lower and more economical than transporting the materials to the Moon in the first place through what should be an extremely economical form of bringing mass to the surface of the Moon.

People who are far smarter than me are thinking out the long-term picture on that. I just want to get us back to the Moon because we've been waiting damn long enough.

Yeah, we have, Salem.

Salem

There's a huge tension in geopolitics where going to space is really a humanity effort, and I love the way NASA's always positioned it that way. How do you take into account all the geopolitical tensions, with China, India, and Russia all trying to get to the Moon? Long term, do you see that resolving in some way, or does it just stay a tension and you figure out how to navigate it? Is competition better than collaboration for your budget, at least for all mankind?

Yeah, of course it is. Look, there's nothing wrong with having good, healthy competition. We're Americans. We like competition. It worked very well for us in the 1960s.

Now what happens? Peter and I go to Baikonur in 2008, and the same rocket we were competing against was helping—I mean, was really the beginning of the commercial space era in a lot of ways. Again, just days ago, I was able to take a close friend and NASA astronaut and welcome him to the launch of Soyuz. What an example of where competition fueled so much for the benefit of all in the early days, and now turns into a collaborative effort, without which you would not be able to sustain the International Space Station.

Especially in cases like Crew-11, where NASA had to recall our crew complement, you were still able to have continuity because there was an American who was up there, Chris Williams, via the Soyuz method. Look where competition starts can lead to really fine outcomes in the end.

Right now, China and the US, for sure, are both very committed to getting to the Moon. The Chinese and their roadmap—it will lead to success there. There's no doubt. They will absolutely do what the Soviets could not in the 1960s. We would certainly like to get there before them.

They're building a base; we're going to build a base. This is fine. This is all good. Certainly, we've shown that even having a space race can help, and that eventual collaboration, if it turns into collaborative means like we have on the International Space Station, can transcend a lot of the geopolitical strife that can happen here on Earth.

The Chinese goal is to be on the Moon by 2030. Do you think they hit it?

Yes, I do. I think they have a second-mover advantage in a lot of ways. They do not have any baggage. What do I mean by that? If you look at the way their civil space program is organized, they've recently merged that back again into their military efforts. It's all based on the Manhattan Project and the Apollo era.

They're building centers and recruiting the people they need to do one thing. Stennis is just doing propulsion, for example; Kennedy Space Center is just launching rockets; Marshall is doing a lot of the engineering; with Houston being the operations and training center. That's how they all began.

If you think about it, it's analogous to the Manhattan Project: What did we need Los Alamos for? What did we need Oak Ridge for? What happens absent competition is that all those centers that were built to serve a specific purpose, where you recruited talent to do a specific job, turn into doing anything other than maybe what they were doing in the first place, or at least add on a lot of other things that can distract from their original intended purpose.

Now what are we doing at NASA? We're going around and refocusing everybody back into that original direction. The Chinese do not have any of that baggage right now. They're literally starting from scratch and highly focused in their effort. They're drawing on a playbook that worked very well for us in the 1960s. I have no doubt they're going to achieve their goals.

And they have five-year plans, not annual budget cycles. When you look at the constraints that you're facing culturally at NASA, there used to be this huge mantra that “failure is not an option,” right? You're clearly operating from a mindset of nonstop experimentation and learning. What are the biggest hurdles you're facing in shifting the culture inside NASA to something like the new model of how we build organizations?

Well, I would just say that I don't think it's about accepting more risk. A lot of what you see, at least in my opinion, when you see some of the things that SpaceX has done and how they choose to operate, is very similar to how NASA operated in the 1960s.

We had the same 20-somethings burning themselves out—brilliant minds doing incredible things, making tough decisions, taking extreme ownership, and moving with urgency. People talk about how NASA doesn't blow up rockets. Go back to the late 1950s and early 1960s on YouTube, and you can see plenty of examples of our iterative design philosophy not working out initially, and then rolling what we learned into subsequent versions.

In a lot of ways, they've drawn on what worked well for NASA during that time period. They're far more efficient with their capital allocation than any government agency. There's no doubt about that. We're just going back. That's what we're trying to do: pivot a little more in the direction of where we started and focus our resources again on those near-impossible-type objectives.

Where I'd say there's sometimes resistance is that people generally hate change. That's just human behavior. Absent competition and with a policy of trying to make everyone happy for so long, trying to get people to stop doing what they're passionate about or what they've been working on for a long time—which could be awesome and very cool work—and saying, “We've got to get back to the Moon. We've got to build the Moon base. We can never give up the Moon again. We have to help industry to the extent possible, and rapid reusability is a true game-changing enabler for all the other things we want to do”—that can be a challenge.

Science is fantastic. I love Hubble. I love James Webb. I love all that we're working on. We just need to do more of it.

We can't get comfortable launching flagship missions every 10 years. We want to be doing it annually. Even now, I'll tell you, in meetings, when somebody brings up, “We're really excited about this. It's going to launch in 2035. We're really excited about this. It's going to launch in 2045,” I'm like, “I don't want my grandchildren to be excited about this mission. I want to be excited about it.”

Those are the things where culturally implementing some change can be a challenge, but we're getting there.

I love you for that. Let's talk about nuclear for one second. Thank you for reigniting nuclear as a propulsion system and an energy source. On the nuclear propulsion side, I will jokingly say: How long before we can make the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs? Or, more near term, how long before we can get to Mars in 90 days? What's your plan for nuclear propulsion?

The first plan is just to put a win up on the board, which is what SR-1 Freedom is. It's a lot of repurposed hardware, no doubt. It's funny—I think Politico put an article out today saying, “NASA administrator intends to spend $2.5 billion on his nuclear power and propulsion spaceship.” It was like, actually, the taxpayers spent that money over the last few years already. I'm just repurposing it into something that has real, practical value instead of sitting in a warehouse or in a lab for some time period.

So the power and propulsion element, or PPE, from the Gateway, we repurposed. That's basically the main spacecraft. All of its electric thrusters are already integrated into it. We have a nuclear reactor—at least components of it—that have been matured and funded by other services for decades at INL, which we're going to use as the baseline for the reactor.

So, look, this is what Nautilus was. Nautilus was a diesel boat, and it got repurposed as a nuclear submarine. A lot of people don't know it, but even Rickover said, “Hey, it was the 70% solution,” and it gave birth to the nuclear Navy. We're trying to do the exact same thing at NASA. So SR-1 Freedom is not going to knock your socks off out of the gate. It's not mass-optimized by any means, but it's a step in the right direction.

What comes thereafter will continue to be optimized until what I think is the ultimate goal: to be able to bring astronauts to Mars and back with the fewest miracles required. That may not always be the fastest way, but if it doesn't require cryogenic refueling as a step to getting boots on Mars, that's a win. I actually think that the first human mission to Mars will be—at least, if it was as NASA would do it—chemically augmented nuclear-electric propulsion, able to send astronauts to Mars and bring them back, not the fastest, but without requiring a lot of extra miracles along the way.

We've just got to keep going. This is the whole point of taking it out of the lab, getting into practical application, and budgeting it properly, because materials science matters. The hotter we can run the reactor, the more mass we can save because we don't need football-field-size radiators up there. The better we can do with power conversion, the more we challenge solar as the optimal pathway, at least inside of Jupiter. But there's no doubt: if you want to go into the outer solar system and at least delay the necessity of cryogenic refueling for crewed missions to Mars and back, we've got to be making investments in nuclear.

Love it, Jared. If you achieve that goal, it seems like the technical risk is a very doable challenge. It's out there, but doable. Then you have this kind of footrace between whether we're trying to put boots on Mars so that we can back up humanity on Mars someday, or whether it's more likely that we start putting humans in orbit, in O'Neill colonies in the asteroid belt, and using that material, which is surprisingly abundant.

You have these 2 science-fiction views of the world, or the future of humanity. One is that there are many, many space stations out there, and they're huge—they have 10,000 people on them. The other is, no, we've colonized Mars, and that's our backup copy of humanity. There's kind of an equal footrace between those 2 views of where we're going. Do you have a preference—Elon versus Bezos—in that regard?

Yeah, very much so. Very much so.

Yeah. Well, I mean, look, step 1, we need rapid reusability and on-orbit assembly, because whatever spacecraft are going to take humans to Mars—whether it's just the lucky few to support an outpost, versus necessarily a colony, or actually achievable missions—on-orbit assembly is everything. Rapid reusability is our step in that direction.

From my perspective, we crossed the oceans for a better life, and it's extremely unlikely in the near term that you're going to go to Mars and have a better life or live on a space station and have a better life. I think a lot of the initial motivation in our lifetimes will probably be much more akin to going to Antarctica for an extended scientific duration or campaign down there. But it's just a step. Again, we're trying to conquer the tyranny of distance that is inherent in our solar system, in our galaxy, and beyond.

We have to start somewhere, and we're lucky we've got a Moon that's nearby to help us learn. The next step is Mars. That is going to be another learning environment. Generally, I favor gravity for overcoming the physiological challenges of being in space. We've evolved to be born and live in a 1G space in a megaspace station, so that's not out of the realm of possibility, I guess.

I think a lot of the problems that we know we encounter when even keeping people on the space station for 6 months—well, even a sixth or a third of gravity is going to make a huge difference along the way. Presumably, we will have conquered artificial gravity and such in that effort, too. I love the saying, “If God had wanted humanity to become an interplanetary species, she would have given us a Moon,” and we have one.

Salem, over to you for asteroid mining.

Salem

Asteroid mining has been this promise. You and I have kind of tracked that, and you've invested and built companies around that. Do you think it's a real thing, or is it perpetually 20 years away? If it is, does NASA take an active role, or do you just enable the private sector to go down there?

Well, I think we can be helpful. Again, I think about our primary objective. If you want NASA's sole focus to be on stimulating the economic potential of microgravity, asteroids, or the lunar surface, put it under the Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce has a space office, and I do think, foundationally, our job is to go out and answer the questions: Are we alone? Unlock the secrets of the universe. World-changing, pioneering technological breakthroughs in air and space.

From my perspective, if we are investing in the capabilities necessary to undertake missions to the Moon, build a Moon base, and go to Mars, and along the way you can have demonstrations or work with industry that bring us closer to asteroid mining, we should do it. We actually have some methods that we're exploring to do that. The America COMPETES Act allows us to put prizes out there, and I'm very open to doing it.

I'm not trying to compete at all with the XPRIZE, but we could work or partner—potentially partner in that. I'll let the lawyers weigh in on that: go and do something cool with an asteroid, and we could put up $25 million. I don't know, hypothetically. But I would like to believe that by making investments in that, it's going to give us the Hall-effect thrusters that we need to reduce the cost for landers on the Moon or Mars someday. It always has to be in furtherance of our scientific and exploration objectives as a space agency.

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Jared, let's talk about getting to Mars. Elon is very aggressively committed to going to Mars. I was there with him when he was having the conversation, and he basically said, “We're going to shut down Falcon 9 because it's not going to get us to Mars, and we're going after Starship all-in”—burning the boats, as you said.

The question is, when he decides to make those missions, is the funding for that fully private, or do you imagine you're going to be able to step in and help fund those private missions? What's the timeline? When do you think we'll set boots on Mars—Optimus boots, and then human boots? What's your under/over on that?

Well, I think, again, I'm pretty excited about the TAM that SpaceX and others are pursuing right now with orbital data centers and such. I don't know if you saw this, but here's an interesting stat. It was actually on a Fox interview, and somebody started bringing up polling, and I was like, “Oh man, I'm way out of my depth on this one.” But they were like, “Did you know that 69% of the American public supports NASA returning to the Moon?” In contrast to 30-some-odd percent in 1967, at a comparable time period.

Anyway, on that note, I think that if SpaceX were to put all of its capital and focus on going to Mars, it would be a very different time frame from right now, when its stated intention is going to the Moon.

So when you ask the question of, “Look, we’re going back. Boots will be on the moon in 2028. We’re going to build the base and learn from that environment,” and SpaceX is pursuing this mega-TAM that allows them to make investments and capabilities for the good of all humankind, which is probably, again, why it’s a 69% approval rate versus in the 1960s, when it was 4.5% of the discretionary budget.

I’m sure that was a big factor in why we were in the 30% range for going to the moon, because we had a lot of other problems back here on Earth. So good companies like SpaceX that are pursuing these massive TAMs and all this economic potential in space allow them to make investments alongside NASA to do all these great things for humankind. That’s probably why you generally have greater public support for what we’re pursuing.

But the fact that the moon is step 1 for them right now, or at least their stated intent, is certainly going to change some of the timelines on Mars and absolutely would change the quantity of people we’re talking about on Mars. So we can make investments in nuclear power and propulsion. It’s part of the national space policy. It is the next giant leap, and potentially puts us on a pathway with the fewest miracles required to, I don’t know, put 4 people on Mars in the next 10 to 15 years.

That’s not, obviously, the Elon vision of millions of people someday in a self-sustaining city on Mars. But NASA can do some things governmentally through taxpayer funding, leveraging investments in nuclear over many decades, plus industry coming alongside it. SpaceX saying, “Forget the moon. We’re going all in,” like Elon was saying a couple of years ago, is much faster, for sure, because now you’re concentrating all that brilliant brainpower and their capital and resources toward achieving that objective.

So it seems like we’re on step 1, going to the moon. It’s going to happen in 2028. We’re going to learn a lot there. In parallel, we’re going to make investments in nuclear power and propulsion. SpaceX will unlock this, along with the rest of industry that’s pursuing all the economic potential in space. Hopefully, that will free up a lot more resources for the next stop on this journey, which is Mars. That’s a different timeframe. Again, I think you’re probably in that 15-year timeframe.

I guess the first mission to Mars is private? The first mission to Mars is NASA? I mean, when you say mission to Mars, I mean a landed astronaut mission.

I would bet on NASA. That’s just because I do think your first mission, if you want to bring back people to talk about it, is not going to be a one-way mission. As a result, I think your dependency on chemical propulsion has to be limited, because otherwise you’re going to need a lot of Optimus robots on Mars, and they’re going to be walking around dusting off all the solar panels without nuclear power for making propellant. Then it’s hard enough to do—

You know, it’s hard enough to fuel a launch pad here in 1G and under 1 atmosphere, let alone making the propellant on another planet, reloading a rocket, and bringing it back.

I love that view, because if you scratched and clawed your way to Mars with chemical propellant, you’d be exactly repeating the 1960s moon mission. We barely got there, but not in any kind of way we can build on—not in a sustainable, reusable kind of way. But if you do it with nuclear propulsion, then you actually have a pathway to doing it repeatedly, and not just going as a one-off. It’s such a cool vision.

It’s just initially, right? I mean, to me, there’s no doubt that Starship and everything it hopes to achieve is just a matter of when. There’s no if on that one. Step 1: get it going, put up a lot of depots in low Earth orbit, make the moon an efficient way to transport mass to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure, and master a lot of in-situ resource skills you’re going to need, because those are all necessary if you want to pull off Mars on a return trip without nuclear.

Even then, at a minimum, you’re still going to want nuclear surface power if you can. We’re testing that on the moon as well. Otherwise, again, you’ll need a lot of Optimus robots cleaning off football fields of solar panels.

But step 1 is to start that foundation. Imagine the space shuttle orbiter equivalent, obviously assembled on orbit—an assembly of these nuclear electric propulsion, chemically augmented NEP spaceships. Yes, it might be a 3-year round trip with 30 days of surface time, but it’s a start, and you get into a rotation until eventually the V6 Starships are rolling and you’ve got armies of Optimus robots and nuclear power on the surface of Mars.

Then you could just be extending what you’ve already proven you can do to the moon to Mars.

Dave, you want to continue?

Dave

Yeah. Well, okay. So you’ve seen For All Mankind, right? I’m sure.

I’ve got to admit, I was there a lot during the first couple of seasons, and I’ve been really busy of late and stuff.

Dave

Imagine that. Well, you know, the way it plays out in the TV world is that the United States and Russia at the time are cooperating in space because everybody’s just trying to build, create, and survive. Then something back on Earth creates tension, and they radio up and say, “Stop cooperating with the Russians.”

So here we are in a moon race with China. The competition is good. As you said, it’s going to get everybody there faster. Do you have a counterpart in China that you talk to, or does it all get tied up? We talked a lot on the podcast about Kimmy K3 coming out in a couple of weeks. That’s going to create all kinds of drama. Does that drama then come back to you?

6 days, Dave. 6 days.

Dave

6 days now. Oh, jeez.

Yeah. That’s a turning point.

Dave

Give us the inside baseball. How does it actually work? Can you talk to China, or do you have to go to the White House and call from the bat phone? How does it work?

I mean, foreign policy is established by the president and the secretary of state. A lot of that policy has already been established with the International Space Station and our cooperation with the Russians for a while. So I have—I would say regular sounds like a lot—it’s probably more quarterly, maybe a little bit more frequent than that, communication with my counterpart in Russia, Director General Bakanov. I was just with him during the Soyuz launch, because there are already established norms of operation, and there have been for more than a quarter of a century.

That certainly, again, has proven to transcend a lot of the political climate that happens here on Earth. Now, with the Chinese, the Wolf Amendment pretty much restricts NASA from establishing any sort of norms. There is some scientific data sharing outside of NASA with universities and such, but I would say we are very much squarely in the competitor lane.

We obviously watch what they do and have an appreciation for their approach. They very much watch what we do. I would just say, in terms of For All Mankind, I don’t think it’s a secret that space is the ultimate high ground at this point. I mean, that is a warfighting domain.

Yeah. So, in the horrifically unlikely event—the day we never want to see come—where things have devolved, I don’t think it’s going to be a shooting war on the surface of the moon between troops. I think there are a lot of things that would go down in space that have far more strategic implications back here on Earth to affect whatever warfighting means they’re trying to achieve before it would ever require boots on the moon duking it out on the surface.

I hope there is no scenario where that ever seems like a good idea.

What about the—just a quick follow-up on that. What about the more narrow case? You know, when the SpaceX IPO came out, it was very clear that it’s first come, first served in low Earth orbit. It’s been a long time since, on Earth, we’ve had land grabs where our Navy is finding new islands and we’re just going to claim them. That’s a long-past idea.

But now in space, low Earth orbit is first come, first served. The moon is first come, first served. So that seems like—is there any cooperation? When the White House is deciding what the rules are, do they call NASA and you all get together and say, “Look, these are the rules as we see them”? Or how does that part work?

Well, we’re not—I don’t think anyone is talking about new rules. We have the Outer Space Treaty, and in some respects, sure, that is first come, first served. If I need to put a lander in a certain spot and we value that spot for whatever reason, the first person to get it there has it.

But look, it’s a big moon. Even when you think about the south pole, it’s still rather large. We’re still, even in NASA’s Moon base plan vision of dozens of landers over the next few years during phase 1, going to have a lot of moon to go around.

I think even when we think about low Earth orbit and the orbital regimes that are available for data centers and communications, there’s a lot of opportunity there. Making sure we are sharing information in terms of the orbital trajectories is obviously vital. I know many in industry have spoken out and pointed out that if we fail to disclose information about where these orbital constellations are going to propagate, then that creates collision risk and problems that impact everybody.

That’s something, again, that I think everybody—even in times of conflict, when we have airliners flying around the world—we’re communicating with each other. There are transponders, and we are avoiding potential hazards in that respect at all costs. That needs to happen better in space.

You know, when you look at how you try and manage a government department, every time a new cycle comes through, you’re trying to negotiate and juggle budgeting, right? How do you make long-term commitments when the budgeting cycle goes up and down like a yo-yo with the political cycles? Is there a way of solving for that? I know previous projects have been really hampered by that lack of budgeting capability.

Yeah. How do you preserve the budget over the next 5 years to get the base built, and can we help you increase it?

Yeah. Yeah.

[Laughter] Hi. Can we donate?

You know, it’s an interesting thing. People have talked about how, when I came in, the continuity between administrations and the availability of funding through the budget cycle forced us into certain situations, like creating programs that are too big to fail. But in my opinion, they become too costly to succeed.

NASA gets $25 billion a year, right? That’s a lot of money. When people start saying we don’t have enough money to do the job, it’s like, really? Some of the most extraordinary companies in the world were founded for far less and have built some pretty impressive capabilities. If that’s not the right number, what is?

What I think is important is preserving flexibility between administrations. You talk about phase 1 of the Moon base. If I had come out and said, “All right, here’s the vision: It’s going to be glass, and it’s going to have this amazing closed-loop ecosystem in it and a Ferris wheel. We’re going to have big crop farms on the surface, and it’s only going to cost $100 billion, but we’ll be able to pay it off as a service to these 3 companies over time,” it’s going to get canceled. It’s going to be under assault constantly.

But what did we do with phase 1? We said, “Look, we’re going to do low-cost landers every month, and we’re going to start learning.” Now, when a new administration comes in and says, “You know what? Once a month is too much. We can dial it back to 8, and we still feel like we can get where we want to go,” that’s fine. Or you have somebody who says, “We’re going to go 15. We want to pick up the pace on this.” Great. That is much better.

The same is true with our nuclear program, going from SR1 to SR2. We’re not jumping right to the Battlestar Galactica here. We want to start with the Nautilus, and maybe we’ll do a nuclear mission to, I don’t know, Enceladus or Uranus. That’s another good one. Any of the outer Solar System missions would be nice, and we could start testing high-temperature materials and better power conversion. That’s a lot better than saying we’re going to build the Battlestar Galactica or something and then having it get canceled.

I think this is just smart capital allocation, guys. $25 billion is a lot of money every year— a lot of money. The entire Manhattan Project, over 4 years and adjusted for inflation, was $33 billion. We can do a lot every year with a reload of $25 billion. Just focus it on the needle-moving objectives and design the programs and the architecture in such a way that they’re not too big to fail and always on the chopping block. Do it in a logical, evolutionary way to get where you want to go.

Amen. I’d like to probe life in the universe and science.

Alex

I’m curious, Jared. You’ve made public comments in the past that you estimate a 90% probability of life, or former life, on the subsurface of Mars. I’d be very curious to hear what your mental model is of non-Earth-based life in the Solar System and the universe. Does it look more like panspermia? Does it look more like life is ubiquitous or life is rare? What is your mental model at this point?

First of all, I was discounting when I said 90%. If you talk to some of the brightest minds here at NASA, they would give you almost 100% certainty that, at one point, there was microbial life on Mars.

I think we’re in this “seeing is believing” situation. No one is willing to make the declarative statement based on—I want to say failed efforts, but there were some swing-and-misses in the past. People have said for sure it was there, and then they walk it back. I just don’t think the scientific community is going to reach that consensus unless you bring those samples back to Earth and get enough people looking under a microscope. That’s just anecdotal, not quite enough to say, “Okay, it was there.”

Now, if it turns out to be the case—and I think we’re very much talking, again, about very dead microbial life—I mean, for all intents and purposes, Mars is a vacuum. I think it would be extremely unlikely, a virtually nonexistent chance, that there’s anything still active there.

But if you can prove that there was microbial life there at one point, and then Europa Clipper starts sending back some interesting data, and you send Dragonfly to Titan, and you get a mission off to Enceladus—and this is all in our backyard, this is our star system, right?—let alone the billions of other stars out there, the trillions of other galaxies, and all of the exoplanets that would be in Goldilocks zones, it changes the dynamic a little bit from “Surely it must be out there somewhere” to “What if it’s everywhere?”

There is certainly an evolutionary nature to this and a technological filter that you have to break through, to some extent, to actually cross into intelligent life that can come and visit us. There’s a lot, again, with the tyranny of distance in space that makes that a substantial obstacle.

But I certainly believe that, as we undertake more missions like Dragonfly and Europa Clipper and get even more advances where nuclear power and propulsion might be able to take our probes there and back with greater ease, we might reach conclusions that at least answer the question we’ve been entrusted to solve: whether or not we’re alone.

You’re arguably the NASA administrator during the most extraordinary time of scientific missions as well. Dragonfly, looking for the chemistry of life on Titan, is pretty extraordinary. Can you imagine a time when you’re 10x-ing or 100x-ing the science missions out there with AI and robotics? I mean, the price of manufacturing is plummeting, allowing you to accept more risk and just really aggressively send out probes.

Hear, hear. I’m 100% with you, Peter. What we’re faced with, to some extent—and maybe this is a budgetary-cycle point—is that once big flagship programs have been greenlit, there’s a risk element to it, too, which is that they can’t fail. Therefore, I have to build in more and more redundancy. If it’s going to cost this much, then it better do even more than what I originally intended, and a $1 billion, by definition, flagship program becomes $3 billion. As a result, it takes a really long time to come to fruition.

But I think there’s another element to it, too: the fear of what comes next. That’s also a human-nature thing. You see, across people’s professional careers, they kind of entrench themselves and build moats and walls around whatever they do for job security, to some extent, and never want to engineer themselves out of a job.

There are some extraordinary companies out there where people can’t wait to engineer themselves out of a job because they believe whatever they work on next is 10x cooler. We need to do the same thing here. If I’m working on Dragonfly, I’m going to bang this thing out so fast because whatever I work on thereafter is going to be 10x that.

Given all of our teams—our Science Mission Directorate has a budget of $7 billion a year—do you believe, with what you know to be coming into existence between AI and additive manufacturing, that with $7 billion a year we couldn’t be cranking out 7 Dragonflies a year?

Hundreds. Hundreds. Hundreds.

Yeah. Right.

I’m totally with you. We have to move in that direction. That’s a cultural change, too, not to mention the technological enablement, but it’s just a matter of time.

Can I ask you a follow-up to that? Your access to AI—being a government agency, when Mythos came out and now, you know, Fable 5—did you get preferential access? Can you use your government position to get the latest, greatest stuff? That’s going to become an issue very soon. It was already an issue just a few weeks ago for the first time in history, but that’s the bellwether for the future. Do you get special access to frontier AI going forward?

Yeah. I really have no interest in wading into any of the policy discussions in terms of what has to be made available to the government in advance and whether it’s optional or not. I think Director Kratsios, OSTP, and all those who contribute to ensuring government agencies are armed with the best technology for the good of the nation and humankind are doing that well. Leave that over there.

I’ll just say that where we have some access, when you think about things like nuclear power and propulsion—again, giving birth to NASA’s nuclear Navy equivalency—you have a lot of data that would have come from a world that needs to be constantly doing analysis in that arena for a variety of programs. That could be an accelerant for some of NASA’s ambitions that wouldn’t be as applicable, I’d say, in the commercial or private sector, if that makes sense.

Alex, as we enter our final segment, let me give you the leadership here. Please take the lead.

Alex

Beautiful. I have to ask, Administrator. This is, I think, the question on the minds of many people I've spoken with who would just love to hear your perspective. A bit of context: the Department of War recently dropped its fourth release under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP encounters. The White House, the Department of War, and other Cabinet-level agencies have seen what I would argue is a sea change in terms of how they talk about UAPs and the possibility of nonhuman intelligence.

As we speak, I think, based on the headlines I was seeing right before we started this recording, Representative Berles is introducing an amendment to the NDAA to encode in statute a variety of UAP-oriented reporting requirements. So I have to ask you the biggest question, I think, and you maybe gestured at this earlier by speaking of NASA's ultimate mission as answering the big questions: Are we alone?

What is your position on the allegations regarding the possibility that there's been an 80-year-long legacy program? What is your position on the so-called Fermi paradox? NASA had a study group a couple of years ago that was publicly announced and held a press conference on UAP studies. If I could bundle this all up into one big question, what is your position on all of these allegations that there has been such a legacy program?

First of all, there is already statutory language that goes back to, I want to say, 2022, that created the arrow group within the Department of War, where it's mandatory public disclosure of any information related to UAPs. So I don't know if this is a matter of law anymore, because that got supercharged under President Trump and what we interpret as a direct order—the executive order he put out that said, “Release everything.” Within a week of that, I was in the situation room with the heads of almost every government agency, and we all went in there like, “Is there—what do...” [laughter] And what I'll tell you is there is a top-down push from the president and the homeland security adviser saying, if you have any data on this, I don't care what classification level it is, it has to be disclosed. And this is under the pursue effort. If you go through those four tranches, I'm telling you that we have released video footage, photographic evidence, and eyewitness accounts. Some of them are from FBI agents that took the footage on some of these. You're talking highly credible individuals on sightings that we can't explain. Now, I do want to be very clear here: “Can't explain right now” does not mean it's unexplainable. We are gathering data. The best example is to think about your doorbell cams. We have cameras on everything. You have drones that are up continuously right now in combat zones. There is absolutely—I can't tell you it's conclusive. You have a drone with an IR camera that catches something flying in the bottom corner, almost off-frame. Is it a missile because it's in a combat zone? Is it another drone, or is it something else? The president said, “Put it out.” It turned to basically citizen scientists. Put it out there. We want to combat the notion that this is not a subject that people want to be transparent about and that there's stigma associated. Put it out there. Some of it is pretty wild stuff when you look at it. Some of it I look at and say, “You know what? If I had a couple scientists and a few other videos, I'm pretty sure it's a balloon, or I'm pretty sure it's a bird, or I'm pretty sure it's an Iranian one-way attack drone,” but based on the angle I can't say that for sure. But there's other stuff that, honestly, we can't explain what it is, and the president is pushing it out. I will tell you, I have immense access and have been at a seat at the table since the get-go on this. I have no information, no knowledge. I take a lie detector test on any crashed spaceships or bodies or biological organisms on this, but for sure we're gathering a lot of data, and there is some unexplained anomalous phenomenon, and we are putting it out there as part of these disclosure efforts.

My position on this is that I don't want to comment as to the credibility of individuals. Look, ever since I was first nominated to this position, I get dozens of emails every day from some very bright and smart people giving their views and thoughts on things NASA should be doing or things NASA has done. Some of it I look at and say, “This is really insightful,” and some of it I say falls outside the bounds of what I think is perhaps credible.My position on this is that I don't want to comment as to the credibility of individuals. Look, ever since I was first nominated to this position, I get dozens of emails every day from some very bright and smart people giving their views and thoughts on things NASA should be doing or things NASA has done. Some of it I look at and say, “This is really insightful,” and some of it I say falls outside the bounds of what I think is perhaps credible.

Just because somebody worked for the government or had a clearance does not necessarily mean that their interpretation of what they saw is accurate. I saw the same videos that people were referencing, saying it was 100% an alien spaceship. They've been disclosed, by the way. We put these videos out, and you can look at them and determine whether or not you think that to be the case.

I think some of it is certainly unexplained based on what we know, and I think some of it, if you probably put enough people behind it, you'd say, “That was a weather balloon. That was an Iranian one-way attack drone,” or something of that nature.

Alex

What is your position, as a quick follow-up? There have been a number of House and Senate hearings where a number of whistleblowers have testified under oath that there has been an 80-plus-year-long U.S. government and contractor effort to collect and reverse-engineer UAPs. Again, in speaking with folks before this interview, this was the single biggest question they wanted me to ask you.

What is your position on these allegations that other government agencies, perhaps portions of NASA even, have been involved in such an effort? I take you at your word that you haven't seen anything firsthand, but nonetheless, there are a number of whistleblowers, and enough whistleblowers that Congress has already taken steps, as you mentioned, via what I think was the 2022 NDAA, which incorporated the AARO statutes. What is your position, speaking either as an individual or as Administrator of NASA, on all of these allegations?

My position on this is that I don't want to comment as to the credibility of individuals. Look, ever since I was first nominated to this position, I get dozens of emails every day from some very bright and smart people giving their views and thoughts on things NASA should be doing or things NASA has done. Some of it I look at and say, “This is really insightful,” and some of it I say falls outside the bounds of what I think is perhaps credible.

Just because somebody worked for the government or had a clearance does not necessarily mean that their interpretation of what they saw is accurate. I saw the same videos that people were referencing, saying it was 100% an alien spaceship. They've been disclosed, by the way. We put these videos out, and you can look at them and determine whether or not you think that to be the case.

I think some of it is certainly unexplained based on what we know, and I think some of it, if you probably put enough people behind it, you'd say, “That was a weather balloon. That was an Iranian one-way attack drone,” or something of that nature.

It would be great if we had alien spacecraft. That would definitely move the timeline forward by a couple of decades, if nothing else. I assume, Jared, you'd be quite excited if all of these allegations amounted to something nontrivial.

Yeah, it's what our job is here, right? Whether you're a space enthusiast or the head of NASA, don't you want to know if there is intelligent life out there? Isn't that, again, part of the greatest adventure in human history?

If there was some crashed, ET-level kind of technology that allowed you to exceed the cosmic speed limit, then we'd be doing everything we could to reverse-engineer it and get it going, because I want to know what's in other star systems out there. So, if it were true, we're terrible at reverse-engineering, because I don't think anyone would argue that what the B-2, the B-21, or the SR-71 was capable of doing is well within the realms of physics and our technological means at that time.

It's not something that would have been derived from aliens, and certainly not something that would have helped aliens get from another star system to Earth in that time period. But look, again, we're putting things out. It's very forward-leaning. I have not seen anything. There are no secret programs that I'm aware of related to biologics or crashed spacecraft.

When I've interviewed Elon on the subject, he said, “I would know.”

Shouldn't we have better photographs? We have great cameras. Why are they all so crappy? Selene, do you want to close us out with a question?

Selene

I would also just say, look, if I came all this distance from another world, I'd be very curious about Earth. Some of the best people-watching ever is in Times Square. It's on the Las Vegas Strip. Why are they showing up where we test our weapons?

They seem to show up where we keep our naval ships and where we test our advanced weapon systems. I'm not trying to be dismissive. Like I said, this is a subject that, if you are a true space enthusiast and you're excited about it, you should want to know. You should be excited about it. I'm not being dismissive of any of the claims. I'm just saying they tend to seem to show up where we keep our naval ships and where we test our advanced weapon systems.

Do you want to ask Emad's closing question here, Sim?

Sim

Which one? I can't remember.

Emad asked, “When we went to the Moon, the saying was, ‘To the Moon because it's hard.’” So, what's the new organizing goal that keeps everybody reinvigorated? You said before Apollo had a singular mission, and now we're sort of spread out. Is there one thread that pulls them all together?

Yeah. In the same way that going to the Moon was hard, all of the pioneering technology to get there had a direct benefit back here on Earth. The same, I think, is equally applicable.

To me, this is all setting up for the day that astronauts plant the Stars and Stripes on Mars. We are going to the Moon and building a Moon base first and foremost to master the skills to go to Mars. It's just as you said before, Peter: we've been given this gift of a Moon, 3 to 4 days away from us, to test out all of the capabilities—from the spacesuits to the ECLSS, habitation, and physiological countermeasures for being in the harsh reality of space, to in-situ resource utilization, propellant, and life-support systems to get to Mars.

Amazing. I hope everybody watching agrees with me that Jared is one of our most extraordinary administrators. Buddy, I have known many. I have never been more excited in my life for what NASA is going to be doing. Thank you for your commitment. Thank you for stepping into this role and really bringing all your entrepreneurial energy, your vision, your engineering, your science, and your passion to this. I'm so grateful.

Well, can I just reciprocate and say thank you for your endless, extreme optimism in every one of the subjects that you take interest in? Every one of the companies you create and where you choose to put your energies and resources are all for the betterment of humanity, and it's infectious. So, thank you, Peter.

Thank you, buddy. Thank you on behalf of the Moonshot Mates and everybody listening. Awesome. Can't wait to watch your success next year.

Thank you, Administrator.

Thanks, guys. Truly a blessing. Take care.