Jared Isaacman: A New Era for NASA and American Space Exploration

Chamath Palihapitiya (0:00)

Ignition sequence, start.

Jared Isaacman (0:04)

All engines are going.

Chamath Palihapitiya (0:06)

It's good to have an aviator and astronaut in charge.

David Sacks (0:09)

Jared Isaacman.

Jason Calacanis (0:10)

The new NASA administrator.

Jared Isaacman (0:12)

NASA's still hot. Humankind will not be contained to planet Earth indefinitely. In the next giant leap capabilities, that's nuclear power and propulsion, that's what extends America's reach farther into the solar system, that's what guarantees the third race will never be in question.

Chamath Palihapitiya (0:28)

Please welcome Jared Isaacman.

Jared Isaacman (0:41)

Good morning, everyone. It is an absolute honor to be here at All-In.

We are living through an extraordinary moment in history, aren't we? It took just 65 years from Orville and Wilbur's first flight to Neil and Buzz walking on the surface of the moon. Now, it's been 57 years since Apollo 11, and for a while there, pace of progress hasn't been all that inspiring. But look at what is on the horizon right now. We got artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, robotics, additive manufacturing, promise of fusion energy, biotech to heal the disabled, autonomous transportation, this whole abundance thing everyone's talking about. All converging in the years ahead is beyond what most people can comprehend. Our world will fundamentally change. How we live, how we work, how we fight wars, how we reach out and touch the stars. But we are not alone on this journey. We are living through a great power competition. Other nations understand the opportunities that can elevate nations and change civilizations. And perhaps nowhere are the possibilities, the competition, and the consequences of getting it wrong more apparent than in the ultimate high ground above us.

Now at NASA, we are doing things differently and we are regaining our swagger and putting wins on the board. But absent this president, absent this geopolitical competition and the very real possibility of losing the second space race, I suspect very little would have changed. For too long, resources at the world's most accomplished space agency were spread everywhere, trying to make everyone happy. Much of it was through external imposition, but plenty of it was self-inflicted. We partnered for the sake of partnerships, oftentimes becoming a drag on the mission instead of accelerating it. As a result, we have the Orion spacecraft that we can't inject into low lunar orbit like we did during Apollo, and the prior administration canceled the Mars sample return mission that was on track to cost more than an aircraft carrier. We created programs that were too big to fail, too costly to truly succeed, in the hope that they would survive administrations. The results being a rocket that was designed when China was predominantly operating coal-fired locomotives and now becoming operational as China operates 25,000 miles of high-speed rail and is just a few years away from their own Apollo 11-like moment. Core competencies and tens of thousands of the NASA workforce were rented, outsourced, or lost, which turned what should have been months worth of progress into years at tremendously greater cost. Eventually, too little was left to do things the right way, the way NASA showed the world how to do it in decades past. So, we invented this whole dream state as a service thing, forgoing the playbook of success and shifting the impossible burden onto others.

The result is that our moon rocket is, in fact, less efficient than Saturn V at converting launch mass into payload headed for the moon. With more time between the Artemis 1 and Artemis 2 mission than all 12 of the Gemini missions that were flown 60 years before. A lunar space station that, whenever it may have been delivered, put our astronauts in a position to look down on the most desirable lunar real estate instead of operating on the surface and occupying it. One X plane that wasn't flying very much and billions spent on failed nuclear programs that had not left the laboratory since 1965

Now during the first space race, we were slow out of the gate, but NASA ultimately ran up the score. The second will be much closer than it ever needed to be.

Since becoming the administrator of NASA last year, we have made a different choice. We are not going to try and make everyone happy. We are not going to spread every penny across every district or partner with every nation just to try and make everyone happy or because that's how people incorrectly believed it always was. I am certainly not here for the money to favor companies, for the title, the notoriety, the politics. I'm not here to be your VC, to entertain your dream or invent new markets if it detracts in the slightest way from the missions that we have been entrusted to achieve on behalf of the American people. You can take those conversations up with the Department of Commerce if you like. I'm here to execute on President Trump's national space policy to align and focus resources to work alongside and unleash the best this nation has to offer from the NASA workforce to our industry, to our partners and deliver the world-changing outcomes, the kind of outcomes that put Neil and Buzz on the moon, the kind of outcomes that inspired many of you to be in this room in the first place. This is a very reinvigorated and energized NASA, and America is back in the business of sending our astronauts to the moon.