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

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 sixty-five years from Orville and Wilbur's first flight to Neil and Buzz walking on the surface of the Moon.

Now, it's been fifty-seven 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, the 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 pa- 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 twenty-five thousand 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, foregoing 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 head, payload headed for the Moon.

With more time between the Artemis I and Artemis II mission than all twelve of the Gemini missions that were flown sixty 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 nineteen sixty-five.