Jared Isaacman: What went wrong at NASA | The All-In Interview

Jared Isaacman was nominated by President Trump to become the 15th administrator of NASA in December. He passed out of the Senate committee in May and was set to be confirmed by the full Senate this week. However, on Friday, President Trump withdrew his nomination for Isaacman. We asked Jared to sit down with us for a conversation. We dive into everything. his experiences as a successful entrepreneur, fighter jet pilot, commander of the world's first all civilian space flight and the first civilian to conduct a spacewalk. What he saw in his six months studying NASA. How American government bureaucracy has eroded its performance and puts the nation at risk in the great space race underway with China. And what really happened? Was it a discovery about prior donations to Democratic candidates or an association with Elon Musk that lost him the nomination? Here's my conversation with Jared Isaacman. All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions in a minute. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What do you guys think? That was fun. That was great.

Jared, welcome. I, like many space enthusiasts, was thrilled for your nomination to lead NASA as the 15th administrator of the agency. Founded in 1958, the year after the Russians put Sputnik into orbit, NASA is perhaps, in my opinion, the U.S. government's most pioneering agency, having organized and led our exploration missions to the Moon, Mars, the outer solar system, and beyond, as well as the launch of important scientific missions to observe the Earth, our solar system, and the deep universe, and, of course, the installation and operation of the ISS.

You seemed really qualified for the job as a business manager, a successful entrepreneur, and a flight and space enthusiast. So, I'm really curious to hear your views on NASA, the space industry overall, the race with China, and, frankly, a little bit about what the heck just happened with your nomination. A lot of people have a lot of questions, and we'd love to hear your point of view on them. I thank you for joining me today, Jared.

I'm thrilled to be here to chat. As someone who's been a space enthusiast since kindergarten, whether it's through the lens of commercial space, the great space race from the 1960s, or NASA today, these are all subjects I get pretty charged up about. I'd love to chat about them.

What inspired you to get into space? You went to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and later became an entrepreneur, but were you always obsessed with space? Did you always dream of doing what you got to do last year, which was walk in space?

This is all my parents' fault. They skimped on a babysitter when I was a kid and just put me in front of the TV. I was watching movies like Top Gun, The Right Stuff, and Space Camp, the 1980s movie where, if you go to Space Camp, a robot is going to launch you into space. This was all stuff from my elementary school years.

I just showed Space Camp to my kids last week, by the way. It's funny that you say that. I had to buy it because it's not on any of the streaming services to show it to my kids. I've been to Space Camp to speak to the students a number of times, and I ask them, “All right, raise your hands if you've seen the movie Space Camp and know who Jinx is.” No one raises their hands, and that just goes to show I'm old.

So, were you always into it? Is that what you wanted to do—work in aeronautical engineering or as a pilot? What were you thinking of doing?

It's a somewhat interesting start to the story. I started my day job, which is Shift4—it's a pretty large fintech now—when I was 16, and I was just like most entrepreneurs, burning myself out, waking up on the keyboard. I said, “I need a hobby in life,” so I picked up my passion for flying.

I basically had parallel careers in aviation and business, and I started flying air shows in 2010 and 2011. I was flying with a bunch of really talented ex-military, even current military, pilots, and they were like, “You could fly in the Air National Guard or the reserves.” I found out, “Wow, that's amazing. You can fly fighter jets part-time and serve the country.” You need a college degree, and I never had one because I started my business at 16.

That's actually why I went back to school and went to Embry-Riddle, because it's an aviation school. I think it graduates more Air Force pilots every year than the Air Force Academy. Anyway, that's ultimately why I got my degree. My pursuits in parallel of business and aviation have existed really since I was a teenager.

You're running this business. Shift4, for those who are listening, is a payment-processing company that is a public company today with an $8.5 billion market cap. So, you've built an incredible business.

On the side, my understanding is that you've flown about 7,000 hours in fighter jets, and you've tried to beat the circumnavigation record a couple of times now. Were you going to work and then flying on the weekends? How did you balance running a company and trying to do that while balancing this podcast? I can tell you it's really hard to do that and anything else. How did you do it?

Again, I started my business at 16, and I started flying a couple of years after that. This was before you had a family and other responsibilities, so literally all I was doing was working and flying. I was mostly flying at night, which was great.

I did that around-the-world record flight. I didn't get it in 2008, but I broke it in 2009. We did it to raise funds for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which was cool. It was a great challenge. Later on, I started flying air shows, which was great, and we did a lot to raise money for Make-A-Wish there.

We took the air-show flying, which was maximum fun and super-adrenaline-fueled—we were doing loops and rolls to music, 10 feet off the ground, with 18 inches between our wings—and thought, “We probably should pivot this to something that keeps the fun factor up but has some commercial intent and also helps the country.”

We started a defense company called Draken. We ended up assembling the world's largest fleet of fighter jets, jets just like this behind me. We were professional bad guys for the Department of Defense and the Air Force. We would fly as aggressors, just like in Top Gun, replicating Russian, Chinese, and Iranian tactics.

I remember at Christmas parties in 2014 and 2015, speaking to the workforce: “I hope you all know, next to commercial space and what Elon's doing at SpaceX, this is the second-coolest company. We get to be professional bad guys all the time.” It was awesome.

So, again, I've had 2 awesome parallel careers. But running 2 companies is nothing compared to Elon. I think he has to be up to half a dozen CEO titles in parallel right now, not to mention trying to save the country and get it back on a good fiscal footing. My responsibilities pale in comparison.

When did you first meet Elon, and how did you meet him?

It's interesting, and I almost guarantee you he wouldn't remember it. I started my fintech in 1999. I actually think we were on the same old TV show, being interviewed, in the early 2000s, and that was probably the first handshake.

After we attempted the around-the-world record in 2008—I’m sorry, we didn't break it—Peter Diamandis reached out and asked if I wanted to go to Baikonur and see a Soyuz launch with some of the early commercial-space pioneers. I remember all the Google founders were on that Tu-154, the Russian transport. I was thinking, “Man, if this thing goes down, you're wiping out a lot of brainpower here,” because Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt were on it.

Coming back from that, I think there was a charity poker event or something at Elon's house. It was in the early days of Tesla. So, I think I met him again there, but really, we don't know each other that well. I've only spoken to him a couple dozen times, maybe, over the years, and almost entirely related to my commercial-space missions, Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn.

Oh, so you're not super close with him? I think there's this narrative that you and Elon have a secret, deep connection and that he's one of your best friends. That's kind of how your hearing went when I looked at some of the video clips of how some of the senators were treating you. They were like, “Oh, you're doing this all for Elon. He's your best friend.”

I think almost every one of the senators on both sides of the aisle made that assumption and asked a lot of questions about it. I said, “Look, Elon is one of the most accomplished, if not the most accomplished, entrepreneurs in modern history. Every one of his companies sets out to solve some of the greatest engineering problems for all humankind. Even his super-selfless service to the government, trying to get us back on sound fiscal footing—I admire a lot of what he does.”

But honestly, and I told the senators, my connection is that I paid his company to go to space twice.

And look, if there was more than just SpaceX out there offering the service and you had competition, I probably would have paid less. If anything, I’m very pro-competition in this regard. I don’t consider myself beholden to Elon at all. I want to see all of commercial space succeed. I’m a huge space enthusiast.

Let’s go through that. So, you met Elon. Did you get involved as an investor in SpaceX along the way? How did the Inspiration4 mission come to be?

In 2020, I heard that SpaceX was doing another one of its secondary rounds. I was connected through Citi, I think, and wound up speaking to the CFO at SpaceX. He said, “No, look, the funding round is closed, and we’re pretty selective about who we let in.”

I said, “Okay, great. Back in 2008, I actually got the first offer to pilot the first Dragon spacecraft, which is wild to think about. Even if I can’t be an investor, at some point or another, I’d love to have an opportunity.” He said, “Well, you can’t be an investor now, but we could talk about a human spaceflight mission.”

I had no idea I was going to have an opportunity to be the first. I assumed there were a lot of people in front of me. It was a privilege to be able to do that, be part of mission design, select a crew of inspiring individuals, and raise $250 million for St. Jude. It was a successful mission, and it helped open the door for a lot of other commercial missions to come. It was an awesome experience.

So, in 2021, you commanded Inspiration4, which was the first all-civilian spaceflight using the SpaceX Crew Dragon.

Yep.

And that was truly a momentous mission. It was so beautiful to watch. I remember it was also a tough year because it was a year after COVID, so it was great to see that happening.

I had assumed, and I think a lot of people had assumed, that you were a big investor in SpaceX or really tight with the company. But it just happened within a year and a half that you went from, “Hey, I’d love to put some money into SpaceX,” to, “Oh, I can participate and command Inspiration4 and get out there into space.” That’s a year and a half.

Literally, from that phone call in October, Inspiration4 was born. A week or two later, we did a ceremonial signing at the Crew-1 launch, which was wild, too. It speaks to the confidence of SpaceX that they were ready to sign up for the first commercial, the first civilian mission to orbit, before they had even returned operational capability for human spaceflight to NASA.

They did Demo-2, of course, with Bob and Doug, but Crew-1 had not flown when SpaceX said, “We’re going to get this done.” Then, 10 months later, we were in orbit, and it was an incredible experience. Obviously, we followed it up with a whole development program with Polaris and flew a second mission as well.

So, just going back, you said you were given an offer to pilot a Soyuz in 2008. Is that correct? When did that happen? How did that happen?

It was right after I came back from that around-the-world flight. Dr. Peter Diamandis reached out, and we met in the city. He said, “You seem to be thinking the way we think, in terms of a more exciting future in transportation and aerospace.”

Of course, his interests cover everything from human life extension to solving a lot of the world’s problems. It was through those connections and coming out to Baikonur that I got that offer. I still have the agreement. It was funny—I showed it to some of the SpaceX folks when we were talking about Inspiration4.

Amazing.

I just knocked on the door every now and then and got lucky in 2020. It was certainly through the approach of trying to be an investor, but it revisited old conversations and moved very quickly.

Kind of funny that a banker called you from Citi and that led to you—

Oh, I called the banker.

Oh, you called the banker.

I called the banker trying to get a recent contact. That was me saying, “Hook me up. I want to get in.”

That’s crazy. Okay, so then you said that was a successful mission. You had an obviously good relationship with SpaceX and the operations team there, I’m assuming, and you said, “Hey, I’d like to come back.” Was Polaris Dawn formed at that time, or did that come together later?

Just for the audience, last September you were the first private citizen in human history to perform a spacewalk, which was another incredible moment. I think it was inspiring for people who realized at that moment that perhaps you didn’t need to become an astronaut to be able to walk in space. It was really incredible. How did the continuation go from Inspiration4 to Polaris Dawn?

I loved it. Polaris Dawn was filled with so many incredible objectives that we crammed into 5 days, on top of about 40 science experiments. It was an awesome mission. I’d love to tell you about it.

When we came back from Inspiration4, I thought we had checked the box on every objective. We navigated the whole billionaire-in-space thing, which at the time, with some of the other missions that were going off, was attracting a lot of heat. We really focused on trying to do good in the world—that we can make progress in space and try to make Mother Earth a better place.

We focused on raising a lot of money for St. Jude. We did 3 days of science and research experiments, and it felt really good. We were a little short of our fundraising goal for St. Jude. We set out to raise over $200 million and wound up raising $250 million, but we were a little short.

We came back, and I thought, “We almost got everything done.” Then Elon sent a tweet right after splashdown—40 minutes after splashdown—and said, “Put me in for $50 million.” He had already put in $5 million, and we exceeded our goal. I thought, “We got everything done. We set the bar high. Maybe this is it.”

A couple of weeks later, I was invited to go to Starbase. This was the second time I went, in October 2021. We sat down with a number of people, including Elon, and talked about doing a developmental program where we could build and test things that hadn’t been done in a while.

I remember Elon saying, “We can build a suit. I know exactly how I would do it. Let’s go up really high. Let’s get past the Gemini 11 record, go farther into space than anyone’s gone since we last walked on the Moon, because it’s different, it’s hard, and we’re going to learn a lot. That’s what you need to do when you want to inspire people—not do the same things over and over again, but do things that are different and build up to an even grander objective.”

I said, “All right, I’m totally in.” We contemplated other missions, including a follow-on to Polaris Dawn and then the first crewed flight of Starship. But the nomination came in, and I had to put my fun space career on hold to serve the country and contribute to the world’s greatest space agency.

So, let’s get into that. How did the conversation lead to you becoming the nominee to administer NASA? Were you in conversations with Elon first? Is that how this began for you?

No. I think that’s another thing that almost every senator wanted to ask: “Weren’t you Elon’s guy in this?” I have no doubt that he helped the president win the election. He was in Air Force One and Marine One, and he was at Mar-a-Lago throughout the campaign. I’m sure he had input.

I was getting text messages from generals I had gotten to know when I helped build that defense company, Draken. That’s where we flew all the fighter jets. They were now in positions of influence and said, “Would you like to serve in the administration?” It wasn’t even just NASA. There were roles from Treasury to the Department of Defense to the Air Force.

I was honored to contribute in any way. I’ve been relatively apolitical, but if I’ve had one political position that I’ve been pounding the table on since I was exposed to the defense industry at Draken, it’s the competitiveness of the nation.

That’s because I saw that when we were replicating enemy tactics in fighter jets in 2015, the gap between our capabilities and the bad guys was wide. You felt very confident, and every year that gap started to shrink. It was like, “What is going on here? Why are we paralyzed? Why are we slowing down while the Chinese, especially, are moving wicked fast?” I’ve spoken out from time to time about where I think some of the problems are, including overconsolidation of the defense industry.

Anyway, I was absolutely honored to have a chance to serve. I’m sure Elon contributed to the process and was supportive of it, but it was a number of people. I got a call from Howard Lutnick, who was leading the transition team. He did a phone interview, and the next thing I knew, 40 hours later, I was at Mar-a-Lago. He said, “Hop on a plane. Come out here.”

I have a lot of friends who are serving in this administration, and your story sounds familiar. A lot of folks who were close to this whole group were sitting at Mar-a-Lago for several weeks and months after the election.

I've heard a lot of similar stories: folks got called saying, “Hey, would you like to consider something?” It was very open-ended. It was like, “We've gotten to know you. We trust you. You're reliable.” But most importantly, they were looking for folks who have experience and acumen in operating a business, understanding how to manage at scale, and really have a similar sort of belief system, I would say, to the folks stepping in to run this administration.

So, I do think what you're saying sounds like what I've heard and makes a lot of sense to me. So you then fly out to Mar-a-Lago. What was that like?

Oh man, that was so cool. It just happened so suddenly, and I put together a quick plan. At that point, I knew I was under consideration for NASA administrator, but in the days leading up to it, I was hearing everything from being at the Treasury Department in various roles to the Department of the Air Force. But I knew it was NASA, and I thought, “Well, I've got to come with a plan.” We put together a 1-page document for the president, and it was a great interview.

I had never really met him in person. I shook his hand once in passing 10-plus years earlier, and the president was incredibly knowledgeable. I was impressed. He knew a lot about the space program, which makes sense. He helped return commercial crew operational capability to the U.S. with Dragon, made a big push on the Artemis program, and created the Space Force.

He knew a lot about China. We talked a lot about their air force, actually, which I thought was interesting, as well as some of my defense experience. It was incredible. It was more than an hour long, and I came away from it feeling really good about the opportunity.

Who coached you on your 1-page document, and what did it say?

Nobody coached me on it. I've had an opportunity to interact with NASA over the last—I mean, my commercial space career will be 5 years old in a couple of months. During Polaris Dawn, when we were doing suit development, I spent a lot of time at NASA using its chambers and facilities. I had a lot of firsthand experience, certainly at Kennedy Space Center, so I had a good starting place.

I think it really just centered on this: In this kind of environment, budgets aren't getting bigger. We do have to do more with less. The agency is doing a lot of little things that other agencies, departments, and companies are capable of doing. That's not why the taxpayers fund NASA. NASA is funded to do the near-impossible that no one else can do, not things that companies should be doing for their own competitiveness.

NASA helps fund engine-efficiency programs for commercial jet-engine providers. It's like, don't they need to do that themselves, or else they lose to their competitors? Why are we funding this? Basically, the idea was to go in and stop a lot of the little things that aren't needle-movers and aren't why the agency exists, and concentrate on the needle-movers.

So that's leading in the high ground of space. Let's complete our lunar obligations, because that's a whole other story with China. At the same time, parallel the capabilities to get to Mars. Help commercial industry develop the rapid, reusable heavy-lift capability that allows us to go anywhere, and pivot from competing with industry to doing what no company would ever do, which is build nuclear spaceships.

There are a lot of advantages to it. Nuclear-electric propulsion, for sure. We don't have to worry as much about refueling. It's hyper-efficient transport of mass. It opens up beyond Mars, and frankly, it takes the pressure off in situ resource manufacturing. If you're going to do in situ resource manufacturing, you're going to need nuclear power. The farther we get away from the sun, the less reliant we are on solar.

There are a lot of reasons why that should not be a small program in the lab right now doing light bulbs, but should be a billion-dollar initiative: figuring out the space economy and increasing the rate of world-changing discovery. Those have been my priorities. It's what I briefed the president on and what I went through in the Senate hearing. It's what we would have tried to concentrate on if I got the job.

There's a lot in there we should unpack. I want to get your perspective on the arc of NASA. NASA is a storied institution, inspirational to many—to you and me alike. I still wear a NASA hat with pride often, but from an outsider's perspective, the agency feels like it's become a laggard. It feels like it's kind of lost a little bit of its luster. Why is that? Do I have that wrong? And if I don't, what has happened to the administration of the agency over the decades that's led to this moment?

Well, like you, I love NASA, and I was so excited to contribute. I was honored that the president nominated me. You've got the best and brightest who show up to work every day and want to win in the high ground of space, and I would have been thrilled to work alongside him. You're totally right. Everything about it—even just looking at the insignia, how damn inspiring it is.

But NASA's got problems, and that's not unique to them. It's going to be government-wide. Whatever I tell you that I think is wrong with NASA, I would guarantee is systemic across every government agency and department. The bureaucracy is super real. No one's going to be surprised about that. You have dozens of layers of leadership. Everybody's got a deputy.

There are things that we know in business, and that certainly Elon knows and instills in his companies across commercial space, like ownership. You push ownership down to the lowest levels. You empower the smart people to make good decisions. You give them the tools to make those good decisions. You hold them accountable when they get them wrong. That does not exist inside NASA or the government.

There are so many layers of management. Everybody's got a deputy. It's crazy. I would have deleted all that—not that the people need to go, but the amount of deputies, assistants, associate assistant to the deputy, the amount of committees, the meetings with 200 people on them, and the review boards—all that needs to go. You need so many more doers. There are a lot of them there, and they're really smart, but you've got to push ownership down to the absolute lowest level.

So you've got this crushing bureaucracy that impedes progress. And here's where Congress plays a role: Every state has some equities that they care about and protect like hell, and it impedes the big progress. I tell you, I love talking to all the senators. The Senate was so fair to me, and I know I would have had a lot of great votes. But you talk to some senators, and they're like, “We have a local rocket club that supports these schools, and NASA contributes to it every year. I want to make sure that continues.”

It's like, well, why can't you do a car wash for the rocket club? This isn't huge dollars. Why can't the community raise those funds? And then you might say, “Well, what's wrong with a couple of rocket clubs to inspire kids all across the country?” Well, one turns to 10, turns to thousands, and it becomes a distraction.

Those are parts to delete. Those are resources that are draining away from what every senator should care about, which is how do we get to the moon, get to Mars, and shock the world with world-changing headlines? That's what people are waiting for from NASA.

100%. What you're saying resonates with me so much. It's not just NASA; it's across the federal government. I've spent enough time interacting with people, meeting with them, and hearing similar stories. It's just the chaos that builds with scale, age, bureaucracy, and competing interests that all have to be met, and you end up diluting everything away. It's so frustrating to hear that.

I think this does play into why China is really moving at lightning speed right now. They have this immense second-mover advantage that is crushing across all technology. When you had the Manhattan Project, we had the technical know-how, the will, and the resources to get something done, and we set up facilities where we needed them: Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore.

You put the facilities where you need them and the talent where you need it to execute on the mission. Everything builds up logically to it, and you deliver a win. We did the same thing with the space program in the 1960s.

Well, now all of those national labs, and really honestly a lot of the facilities within NASA, are doing lots of little things for existence's sake. Some of them are relevant to the mission, and some are not. When you try to do something glorious now, you have to try and repurpose those resources that are super entrenched, and they don't necessarily want to move. Then, of course, you have Congress protecting their programs.

China is literally doing what we did in the '40s and '60s and saying, “Hey, we're going to go after fusion, or we're going to work on next-generation, fifth-generation nuclear reactors.”

We're going to build sixth-generation fighter jets. They put the facilities where they belong, with the right people and resources. There's no baggage, and they have this incredible second-mover advantage. They're able to get things done at lightning speeds because they don't have all that drag, and we have a lot of drag. Again, it's not just NASA; it's government-wide.

Do you think there's a way to fix it without Congress? Or is the only way to fix it—if we have a shot at fixing this—that there needs to be no Congress and a different governing model?

Yeah. Look, I think this is why I absolutely support the president. Despite everything, my single largest political donation ever was to President Trump to support his inauguration. It's why I got charged up when Elon was assembling the DOGE team: We do have to shrink the government. We do have to get rid of all these inefficiencies, the waste, and the distractions from the mission—things that we don't need every taxpayer contributing to—and actually concentrate those dollars, real dollars, on the things that taxpayers should be fighting for.

When you do that, $20 billion or $25 billion is actually a lot of money. I know it's a super-tough budget environment right now, and people hate change, but I'm always surprised when a million isn't a million anymore and a billion isn't a billion, because you can do an awful lot with that. If there was ever a time to get this done, it's now, with President Trump having the House and the Senate behind him.

I'm not surprised that there's frustration from people who were really passionate, and are still passionate, when this much time goes by and we're not able to get those things done that we thought we'd be able to.

NASA's budget last year was $25 billion. Break it down for us. How is that money being spent? What are the dimensions along which you would categorize that budget? We'll talk about what's going forward.

I think an incredibly large portion of it is human spaceflight, and specifically the Artemis program and SLS. It's a lot of billions going to a disposable rocket. I think it's like a 500 or 600 percent overrun to build Mobile Launcher 2 for the next-generation SLS.

Sorry, just tell us what SLS is for the audience.

That's the Space Launch System—or they also call it the Senate Launch System, I think—and a lot of dollars are spread across some key states. Well, just to give you an idea, SLS is repurposed shuttle hardware. I don't blame anyone for putting us down this path because, at the time, you didn't have Blue Origin, SpaceX, or any of these other commercial companies doing the things they're doing today.

They were like, "Let's take the shuttle program parts and put them into a program called Constellation, and let's take the Constellation parts and put them into a program called SLS." Essentially, it's the same shuttle motors and the same solid rocket boosters; you're basically taking the tank and putting Orion on top of it.

Orion is 20 years old, by the way. It hasn't flown humans yet. It's incredibly expensive and very disposable, but it creates a lot of jobs in certain states. At some point—and look, there's enough hardware now to fly a couple of missions and make sure you beat China back to the Moon—but you can't be stuck on this forever.

This is literally the equivalent, by the way, of taking P-51 Mustangs from World War II and using them in Desert Storm because we have to keep the plants open. That obviously makes no logical sense whatsoever for factories that used to make landing ships in World War II, made Saturn rockets, pivoted to the shuttle, pivoted to SLS, and now believe that you can't make another pivot. That's kind of crazy, and the right thing you should pivot toward, honestly, is nuclear.

I want to talk about the Trump budget proposal for NASA. This is NASA's budget over the history of NASA, and the proposed budget would basically create the lowest budget since 1961. They're proposing to reduce the overall budget from $25 billion a year down to $19 billion a year.

Were you part of the conversation on building this budget? Did you have conversations with the administration as this was being put together and some of these proposals were being considered? How deeply have you gone in this?

No. When you're a nominee, you're actually kept in the dark on a lot of things. You do get briefed on everything that's going on with every center, every major program, and things that senators could ask you about from a one-on-one perspective, but you're not given access to sensitive information. You almost need some deniability when you're talking to senators about that, or else your nomination could get held up really big-time.

I wasn't aware. I was voted out of committee—the Commerce Committee—by Senator Cruz and 18 other senators; it was 19 senators in total. The next day, the skinny budget came out. If that skinny budget had come out a day or two earlier, I would never have made it out of committee, because obviously, as I think is playing out right now, both sides of the aisle are not happy about the budget.

In this budget, there's a proposal to cancel SLS and Orion, terminate numerous robotic science missions, including the Mars Sample Return mission, probes to Venus, and several future space telescopes. It represents the White House's desire to end the development of a nuclear thermal rocket engine.

Having scrutinized this budget, how do you react to what's being proposed? Does it solve what you've identified as some of the challenges in NASA, or are those more management challenges? Does the budget create a constraining force here that fixes some of the issues with respect to focus and concentration of capital in the right projects, from your point of view?

The big budget reduction is a great forcing function for change. I know there's a lot of people that probably don't want to hear that, but it is true. That doesn't mean I would have landed at $19 billion in this whole thing, but I fully support the president with the goal of shrinking the budget, getting back to responsible footing, and I do think billions can go a very long way.

Everything you just said, directionally, is in the right direction. We've already paid for enough SLS hardware that, if you were to terminate it for convenience now, you've got enough to launch two or three of them. It's enough to get you back to the Moon, check that box, make sure that you don't have any economic, scientific, or national security reasons to stay on the Moon, and put your energy much more toward commercial industry.

Nuclear thermal propulsion, I'm not a fan of. I like nuclear electric. To test it, you're spewing radioactive debris here on Earth. It's not going to go over well with anyone, and it doesn't really solve your refueling problem. You still need to top it off with hydrogen in space if you want a reusable space tug. So I don't like that either. It's subscale. It's a program that sits in a lab forever.

What you need in nuclear electric—I'm passionate on the subject—is to get back to the good old days. We went from the atomic bomb in 1945 to laying the keel of the Nautilus in 1951—5 or 6 years. We didn't keep it in a lab forever. We said, "You know what? We're going to do big, bold things." That's what we need to be doing in space when it comes to nuclear.

A lot of the science programs—I’m a huge fan of Mars Sample Return. The best thing to do is, when the astronauts get there, to bring the samples home. Why would we spend billions to send a robotic mission? We can put that into commercial industry and accelerate their timeline. I wasn't a fan of a pure robotic mission on that one.

For a lot of the big science programs, I want to see the James Webb and Hubble telescope programs launching annually, if not more. Flagship programs, definitionally, are billion-dollar spends. If you spend a billion, you've got to get it right, and that means lots of requirements. We can't take unnecessary risk, and a billion becomes a $3 billion program, and it's never on time.

We should be challenging the best and brightest. Give me 10 $100 million missions a year. Let's try that, and let's accept that 3 fail.

I was going to introduce “time to science” as a KPI. Why do we accept things taking 10 years when they could take a year? Even the decadal process of prioritizing scientific missions over a 10-year span is kind of insane.

100%. 100%. I think a lot of people hear budget cuts—and I hear this on the NIH side as well now—that the administration's budget cutting is going to take lives: People are going to lose lives, we're going to lose science, and this is an anti-science agenda.

But if you can get more efficient with how you deploy capital, how you manage the deployment of that capital, and the utilization of that capital, you actually accelerate science. You accelerate outcomes, and you improve the condition and prosperity for humanity and for America.

It’s a completely misdirected statement when people say that a budget cut is an anti-science movement. It’s about finding the right places so that you get more outcomes and redeploy in a smarter, more efficient way. It drives me nuts. I just see it all over right now. That’s just politics. I do think overfunding leads to complacency and bureaucracy, which actually leads to a slowdown in discovery, a slowdown in invention, and a slowdown in progress. Anyway, I’m sorry for my rant.

I agree. Look, as entrepreneurs, we know some of our probably best decisions were always when we were running low on cash. So it kind of drives efficiency, and necessity is the mother of all invention there.

Yeah. Look, I think that’s just a product of some of the politics of our time. I’m not familiar with any of the NIH, and I’m not pretending to go deep on that at all. I do think this is a product of the politics of our time. It’s a very divided country. People have to take an opposing view and go to extremes. People will die over this.

But the government is terrible at capital allocation. Come on. We should all know that. As taxpayers, we should be contributing to the things that no one else is willing to do, where there is no good business use case or economic model. If competition is working, it can solve a lot of problems, and we should put our energy toward what it won’t solve.

And look, I think Kratsios, by the way, in science, is a great leader. I’ve spoken to him a bunch of times. He’s not a quack. He doesn’t think wild things like that. He wants the golden age of science and discovery.

I’m for good science.

Yeah, good science.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s talk about Artemis. I think this is a big piece that the American public doesn’t fully grasp: that we have this effort. Maybe you can just lay out for us the case for Artemis, lay out for us the case for Mars, tell us about the relationship between the two, and the timelines.

Sure. And why are we doing them? Let’s just say I am in the return-to-the-moon camp. I know Elon is very focused on Mars, and he has a lot of great reasons why, including just the survival of our species. In the long term, it is the right move.

I remember during my hearing, one senator was really grilling me: What really is the difference between the moon and Mars? Isn’t the moon a stepping stone? I’m like, well, one’s a planet, and it has an atmosphere. If you looked at the moon, it doesn’t look pretty. It’s getting beat up all the time. It has no protection from solar radiation.

The reality is, you should go to the moon because for 35 years we said we were going to. I think that’s very important. It’s very late in the game to say, “Well, we did it in the ’60s and early ’70s.” That would have been the fine position to state the entire time: that we’d done it and were moving on. But we didn’t. For 35 years, we said we were going back, and we spent over $100 billion of taxpayer dollars saying we were going to do it.

For us not to be able to do it now and watch China do it signals a far greater disease across our government and how our system operates. I don’t think we want that reckoning. So, look, we paid for the hardware anyway. Let’s go back, but let’s parallel going to Mars.

That’s what Artemis is really about. You can say Artemis is about Mars, too, but that’s like 100 years down the line. Like I said, it’s a giant disposable rocket program that repurposes shuttle hardware. It’s incredibly expensive. We signed up a lot of international partners to support it because we like collecting flags, and it doesn’t necessarily always mean that what they’re contributing to is in the best interest of the program.

Case in point: Gateway. This is going down a rabbit hole of a lot of things because of the shortcomings of the vehicle, but it’s expensive and disposable. It is not the way to do affordable, repeatable, efficient exploration, whether it’s to the moon, Mars, or anywhere else.

So let’s get it done and then focus on the right way to go about doing this, so that we’re not seeing people walk on the moon every 5 years or something crazy, but that it’s happening all the time, which is what we get excited about.

What is there to do on the moon? Why should we go back? What is the purpose?

I think it’s almost like, if you’re going to go and commit yourself, take risks in a conflict, you want clear objectives. In my mind, again, aside from the fact that the hardware is already essentially purchased, you want clear objectives. Is there any economic, scientific, or national security reason to be there? I don’t think we can say conclusively right now that there are none.

China is going, and if they were to find something—even a small probability, a 1% chance—let’s say hypothetically it’s helium-3, and they’re going to usher in a new form of power. Think about how many conflicts we’ve had over the last century over sources of power, over energy. Do we want to get that one wrong? Are we willing to take a 1% chance that could shift the balance of power here on Earth? I don’t think so.

We said we were going to do it for 35 years, and we spent $100 billion of taxpayer money. Like I said, the hardware is there. I think you do it and make those determinations: Is there a scientific, economic, or national security reason to be there? If not, you move on.

If companies like Blue Origin, SpaceX, and even Rocket Lab are successful with their vehicles, you’re going to have the optionality to go to the moon. The delta-v is a negligible difference between whether you’re going to the moon or Mars. We should colonize Mars. We should build a colony on Mars. I think we need to go there.

By going there, it is the first step on a far grander journey. Elon is obviously very passionate about it: “Occupy Mars.” He knows it’s not the perfect destination. There’s nothing like it in Earth’s history. People say it’s analogous to the explorers of the 1400s, or putting people in those shipping containers for 6 months and saying we know how to live on Mars. You could work your whole life on Mars and still live in a bubble.

It’s not going to be an easy way of life, but it is a step in the right direction. Our destiny is out and among the stars. We will inevitably learn something out there that’s going to change our thinking, and it’s going to create a craving for that knowledge. We’re going to want to continue to go out and explore and learn even more. Mars is the best first step on that journey.

Let’s talk about getting there and achieving some of the other missions that we might have as a country and as a species, and the relationship with private industry. Elon believes he can get payload into orbit for $10 per kilogram with the Starship platform, which is roughly a 100× reduction in cost.

Maybe more. Depending on the point at which you’re measuring it, maybe a 1,000× reduction in cost.

That unlocks the potential to do these things in an economically viable way: going to the moon, going to Mars. Why shouldn’t NASA be more fully embracing of this private-industry capability? Is it because it’s Elon, or is it because it reduces money going to defense contractors? What is the motivation against going all in on SpaceX, or companies like it, that have built these competencies that would have been unfathomable just a few decades ago but are real here today?

Oh, this is such a deep conversation. Look, one thing I’d say is that I obviously love SpaceX. They safely put me into space twice on 2 awesome missions, brought me home, and I’m cheering them on. I’m happy with what SpaceX is doing. I’m thrilled about the investments that Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Firefly are making. We have a great industry.

The broader question is, why isn’t NASA leaning more into commercial? NASA’s foresight gave birth to the Commercial Crew Program that enabled me to go to space. They are thinking in that direction, but there are politics in play.

The nice thing is those winds are shifting. Throughout my whole confirmation process, you are educated heavily by some very smart political folks. They sherpa you around every senator, and they were like, “Look, a year ago, 2 years ago, the idea of talking to senators that are in SLS states and convincing them we need to be looking a little bit more to the future with commercial, and maybe pivoting to things like nuclear propulsion, would be a nonstarter.”

I’ll tell you, they were very reasonable. All of them were very reasonable. They know that this rocket, built on 60-year-old technology, that’s $4.5 billion a launch, has an expiration date. I do think that ship is turning. It’s just not a speedboat. The government is like a giant shipping container. It turns half a degree a year, and that’s obviously not fast enough for a lot of us.

But I would say it’s moving in that direction. NASA also has to repurpose its resources on things that SpaceX or Blue Origin won’t do. They’re not going to build a nuclear reactor and launch it.

You're not going to get the indemnities for that. Even shipping highly enriched uranium is a nightmare. That is what the government should be doing. NASA should be doing what the commercial industries can't.

That, by the way, takes so much stress off a company like SpaceX trying to get to Mars. If you can minimize the number of space-based refuelings or the in-situ resource manufacturing—look, even when a Starship gets to Mars, you're betting on 100 consecutive miracles happening to mine propellant there and bring it back. NASA should be helping. The government should be helping with that because it creates a lot of other optionality.

We can have nuclear battle stars in low Earth orbit as part of Golden Dome. There's a lot of reasons why it's not all SpaceX, all commercial, versus NASA.

Both, totally. So, just to compare, last week Space Epoch, a Chinese rocket company, completed its first sea recovery test. Much like we saw a few years ago with SpaceX, they had a vertical launch and landed back in the ocean after about a 125-second flight. The key question a lot of folks are now asking is: Has China caught up? Is this a space race? Why does it matter? Because isn't space big enough for everyone?

I mean, space is the ultimate high ground, and the high ground has mattered. It has had tactical and strategic significance since the beginning of humankind. It matters.

I was grateful to have the opportunity to lead the peaceful exploration of space, but it's not all peaceful. We can't be naive to the fact that it has been weaponized, and China leading in this domain makes a difference. There are things of scientific, economic, and national security value out there, and we can't—we have to lead. We can't fall behind. If we fall behind, we may never catch up.

I am concerned about China moving closer to reusability. They launch the second-most orbital rockets every year without reusability. Thank goodness for SpaceX, or we would definitely already be behind in that regard. I am concerned about it. Honestly, it is a race. The domain is vitally important, and we can't fall behind.

So that gives them the high ground with respect to weapons systems, observational platforms, sensors, et cetera, right?

Yeah.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about your nomination. I would give you my vote. You should be the administrator of NASA. It would be amazing.

You testified in front of the Senate committee on April 9. I think it was a 19-to-9 vote to move you out of committee.

Yes.

Then there were reports going into this weekend that you were going to be voted on by the full Senate this week, and the estimates were that you were going to get 70 confirmation votes—or that was a news report I had read. It seemed like you were going to fly right through and administer NASA. So then what happened?

I got a call Friday of last week that the president had decided to go in a different direction. It was a real bummer, and I know a number of parties in government need to be notified of that. I expected to have a peaceful weekend, and the next thing I knew, on Saturday, there was a lot of activity on the internet. Maybe that's just my perspective because I follow space and such, but it was certainly disappointing.

The president needs to have his person that he counts on to fulfill the agenda.

The person who called you, what did they tell you was the reason the president was withdrawing your nomination?

They just said the president had decided to go in a different direction. We all serve at the pleasure of the president.

I started to get some more details as it went on. Honestly, I'm not playing dumb on this. I had a pretty good idea that the timing was not much of a coincidence, that there were other changes going on the same day, and it was obviously a little bit of a disappointment.

So are you referring to Elon?

There was obviously more than one departure that was covered on that day, and it became clear, at least from what I've heard—I read the news the same as everybody else—but I had obviously been in D.C. for the last 6 months getting ready, and there were some people who had some axes to grind, I guess. I was a good, visible target.

I know the news talks a lot about Democratic donations being the cause. That was not a new development. You can just Google it; they're all public. The New York Times published an article saying that President Trump knew about your Democratic donations in the past when you received the nomination. So that was actually not news, according to The New York Times. It was well understood and well covered. That kind of puts the kibosh on that explanation.

So what are the axes to grind—or the axe to grind—with Elon? Are there kind of 2 factions? Whatever color you can provide, I think it would be really helpful to understand, because there's a lot of speculation going on right now. Some folks are really disappointed in some of the transitions that are taking place, and some folks are really trying to grok it and understand it. Anything you can do to help folks understand would be helpful.

First, I want to be overwhelmingly clear: I don't fault the president at all. I fully support him. The president of the United States, the leader of the free world, makes 1,000 decisions a day with seconds of information. He's got to get a lot more right than wrong.

I don't blame an influential adviser coming in and saying, "Look, here's the facts, and I think we should kill this guy," and the president has to make a call and move on. I think that's exactly how it went.

It was not the Senate at all. You don't get floor time, by the way. There are 100 nominees waiting for floor time. The only way you get floor time is when a lot of senators call Senator Thune and say, "This is our guy, and we've got to move him along." That's how you get a high vote count.

The Senate was very fair and really nice. I enjoyed that experience. I think you got 1 person—and I don't know the history of what the trigger was or wasn't—who decided to make a move. Again, I don't fault the president for it at all.

In terms of donations, I've always been somewhat of a moderate. Actually, I am right-leaning. I do support the president's agenda; that's why I made as big of a donation as I did to his cause.

Let me just ask for clarity.

Yeah.

Sorry, go ahead.

I was just going to say, when you fill out your questionnaire for the Senate committee, which is public, it asks you to list every donation. Before you go in front of a single senator, before you do a hearing, you have these prep sessions at the White House where people pretend to be senators and prep you on the donation question. That wasn't new news. It might have been new to the president at that point, or might have refreshed his memory, perhaps, but I don't think that was the cause. I think the media has got it pretty accurate.

So was this a shot at Elon by someone who is anti-Elon?

People can draw their own conclusions, but I think the direction people are going in—or their thinking on this—seems to check out to me.

What is the root of that? Is it vested interest in spending that Elon is advocating gets cut? Is it diametrically opposed philosophical points of view on the role of government? What is the root of the anti-Elon sentiment that's kind of on the other side of the equation here?

I think people overwhelmingly voted for the president to go in and shrink the government, bring about change, and get rid of fraud, waste, and abuse, of which I am 1,000% behind the president. I believe that's what Elon and DOGE were working toward.

But people also hate change. We all know this. People can be very protective of their empires, and when somebody comes in, Elon's got a playbook. I think he knows how to get things done. In a lot of respects, I think that rubbed some people the wrong way. I think that was one of the reasons people had axes to grind. I don't know, and I'm just waiting. I don't want to speculate on all this.

I think you've said enough, and I guess you've seen the tweets from Elon today, where he was pretty negative about the House bill that's being labeled the One Big Beautiful Bill, making the case that it's actually going to drive up the government deficit to over $2.5 trillion a year. It doesn't make deep enough cuts. There's a lot of pork in there and a lot of wasteful spending.

The House Speaker responded to Elon today, saying, "We've still got a rescission bill coming. We've still got an appropriations bill coming, where we're going to start to fix the budget." Clearly, Elon is now getting vocal about his point of view on this. Have you spoken with him at all about what's going on in government spending and his take on things as he's walked out of the office there?

As I mentioned, I told the Senate, too: I've only spoken to Elon a couple dozen times, most of which related to human spaceflight missions. But when I was talking to him toward the end of last year, it was all on government-efficiency-related programs.

I think Elon got a lot of people excited about DOGE by making one simple point: the interest on the national debt exceeds the DoD budget. That’s scary, it’s getting worse, and we can’t spend our way out of this problem, which we’ve grown a habit of doing.

I know he’s very passionate about it, and he sacrificed a lot, along with all the others at DOGE, to try and bring about some significant spending cuts. To see a bill come in at, you know, 1,200 pages or so that adds to the deficit, I think, was pretty disheartening. I suspect—I mean, I’m not in this fight—and I think trying to codify a handful of billions in cuts is probably a drop in the bucket. So I can’t imagine that’s too exciting.

Do you think he’s going to get more vocal?

I wouldn’t presume to know what goes on through his mind. Like I said, I think he spends a lot of time trying to solve a lot of the world’s problems. A problem for this country, and I think a lot of people agree with it, is that the national debt is just getting way out of hand.

This has been my case for about 4 years: If we don’t fix this, it eventually becomes an intractable death spiral. When that happens, all of the wrangling we’re doing over budget priorities, programs, interests, and jobs are no longer possible. It’s like you’re trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. You don’t get the choice of what programs to fund when there is no funding. That’s the unfortunate iceberg we’re running into.

Do you think DOGE is dead? Any point of view on that?

It was interesting. Obviously, there was kind of the grand exit this past week, and then, at least in my Twitter feed—I try to follow a lot of the cabinet secretaries—they were all coming out and saying, “DOGE is alive and well, embedded inside the agencies.” I think it was more implying that we’re going to clean house. We’re going to take care of our own house, as opposed to letting other people help us do it.

The problem is that we haven’t been very successful at that historically. I suspect going into the midterms, people don’t want to let the other side be pounding the table on DOGE. I don’t know. I’ve been an outsider nominee, so I have no idea how it’ll play out. But I imagine some people in the government want to see it go quiet late in the night.

Is there a deep state? And is the deep state too big to break?

I don’t know what I would classify as the deep state. There is an absolutely bloated bureaucracy that hates change, gets very entrenched, and is happy to ride out political appointees. It’s like, “You’re gone in 3 or 4 years, or you’re dead before you even arrive,” in my case. “We’ll wait you out.”

I think there’s some of that, and then I think there’s some of that with actual politicians and political appointees who advocate like hell for the status quo. Some of it might be well-intentioned because they’re just afraid of what comes next. Why take a risk when you’ve got something right now that supposedly works?

I ask, what if that comes at the cost of the competitiveness of the nation and our economic security? What if we get it wrong because you weren’t willing to take some risk and make changes? I don’t think they’re necessarily all evil, by the way. I just think some people get very comfortable with the status quo.

Are you going to go back to space?

I don’t know. This is the first time in 26 years that I’ve really been out of work. I’m definitely going to go back and help Shift4. I won’t ever rob my CEO of his well-deserved title now. I’ll probably be an executive chair or something.

I’ve got to work. I’ve got to have a mission. But I’ll find something to contribute to. I love flying, I love space, and I like the philanthropic efforts we’ve been doing with St. Jude. I’ll keep busy.

Amazing. Well, you’ve been, if nothing else, Jared, an inspiration to many. I appreciate your commitment to service, your commitment to charity, and your commitment to discovery. I want to thank you for the time today. It’s been really great talking with you.

Thank you. I appreciate having the opportunity to chat.