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

2028, an aggressive timeline for landing on the Moon. Steps 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 lunar surface. It's— We all enjoyed the headlines of Artemis II, but reminded us of what's possible and got us all excited. We don't want to wait several years in between the next, the next episode, right?

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

Any area that you're going to have human involvement eventually, it would be crazy not to, you know, 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 that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

We just flew 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's plans to run NASA, a $25 billion agency, more like a startup than a bureaucracy. And 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 in the last 40 years. In my humble opinion, our guest today is the greatest of them all. I want to welcome everybody to Moonshots, you know, 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 government agency. He's a builder. He founded his first company, Shift4 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. And then he did something epic, purchasing two private Falcon 9 Dragon missions. He commanded Inspiration4 in 2021, the first all-civilian orbital mission, and 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 start 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 The Moonshots. And moonshot mates, you know, we've known each other for 17 years, and I could not 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 I have faith.

I have plenty of time to screw things up, but I'll tell you right now, we are all, everybody at NASA, from leadership down to the engineers and technicians, we are having a great time right now. We're moving very quickly. There isn't a person person who shows up to work every day at NASA that's not excited about changing the world in air and space, and everybody is just really enthusiastic about getting after it.

Yeah, agreed. You know, you said something very nice that 17 years ago in Baikonur, I got you started on this mission. Is that actually true?

That is. Now, I mean, look, since kindergarten, right, I wanted to be an astronaut like a lot of kids that just look up at the night sky and, you know, 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 on those speed records. And somehow along the way, you, you know, you found me and invited me to Baikonur. And it was during that trip, I was like, well, maybe, maybe it is a possibility. So you absolutely helped steer me down this path. And just so you know, I mean, it's, 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 It was a little different than 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, I think Richard Garriott was flying into space. I'd actually brought Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey to that mission too. We watched the mission from a bunker about half a kilometer from the launch pad and then went outside to watch it. It was like an epic. It was like the thunder of God before you.

Yeah. I always describe it as we were like a solid par 3 away from the launch pad when we were there. They have moved us back a little bit, I can say, as of this current launch. But still, I mean, I walked Anil Menon right up to the ladder of Soyuz and then was involved in a bilateral discussion with our counterparts in Russia 100 yards away. I mean, a building right next to that fully fueled vehicle. So it's a little different.

Crazy.

Wait, was that first one the one where you said if anything goes wrong with this, at this launch? What happens?

So Sergei was there, we had 2 or 3 Soviet-era Russians there with incredible outfits in the bunker. And when we walked outside, Sergei asked the question, "So what happens if something goes wrong in Russian?" And the response, which he translated, was like, "Enjoy, it'll be the last thing you ever experience." Well, that's, I mean, there was plenty of risk before we ever got there.

Like we all had to go on a Soviet Tu-154 airliner. I mean, this is the same plane that I think took out a lot of the Polish political leadership a few decades ago. So everyone, 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 even getting to Baikonur.

It was, it was like Eric was saying, like, "Do not let the media know that we're here." Well, I tell you, it's so cool to have somebody that fearless running a government agency.

That's gotta be rare. But you've got, you've got the DNA for it. That's real cool.

Jared, let me kick it off. You know, on this podcast, we talk a lot about AI, exponentials, 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 Moon, Mars, and everything else. And the first question is, you know, we talk a lot about the large language models, 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 on Titan or Mars or moving out to Europa, are on their own investigating what's interesting and deciding what experiments to run independent of scientists back on Earth?

100%. So, I mean, we still, no matter what, want to get the data back. It's just if you have a limited window of opportunity to do so, do you let the on-orbit— or I'm sorry, the on-mission AI make the determination of what is the most interesting data in the least amount of time I have available possible and send it home before perhaps destruction. And there's already a mission designed for that, which is DAVINCI, which is going to Venus. And in that pressure environment, that mission will not live long. So we're designing it from the get-go to have, you know, on-mission, you know, AI, and it will determine what, what actions it needs to take based on the data it's able to collect as quickly as it possibly can, use it to inform its mission direction, and then send home what's most useful back to the scientific community. So that's probably the first and best example, but just the beginning for where we should be going with this technology.

The timelines with everything AI are compressing and compressing and compressing. So now we're, you know, talking a lot on the pod about speedrunning Star Trek and getting to that destination in some bounded timeframe. But two questions for you. One, one, AI back here on the ground, how is it accelerating the rate at which you design new ships, new missions? And then also 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, than an astronaut.

Yeah. So good question. Maybe just if I can reframe it just a little bit to say like, what are we doing with AI right now and how is that informing NASA's mission? And I'll tell you one, like we are structurally very disadvantaged relative to any of the hyperscalers where a government agency, I mean, if you think about even NASA's budget, which you said at the beginning of $25 billion a year, I mean, the hyperscalers are investing many times NASA's budget into just, you know, hardware procurement right now. So how do you even be smart knowing you're at somewhat of a disadvantage at NASA to get the most out of the capability to further our mission, ensure America's competitiveness in the high ground of space? And I'll tell you, President Trump with OSTP, OSTP Director Kratios have come up with a really good idea, the Genesis program. I don't know how familiar you are with it, but—

We are.

Okay, so you're all track and everybody in government is kind of kicking into this.

But the audience may not be, so if you wanna hit that, yeah.

Yeah, sure, so I mean, again, it's recognizing even 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, consolidating resources into the department Department of Energy, which by the way, for a very long time, it's, you know, has had some pretty substantial computing power available to it. Obviously that even that gets quickly outdated, but they've always had the budget for investments in, you know, in compute and consolidating your, you know, your AI strategy, leveraging some data that's very unique to government agencies just based on the work that's being done. And having a whole-of-government approach to leveraging the potential of AI. And NASA's job, we submitted two overarching themes to leverage the Genesis program. Number one 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? I mean, there wasn't just that long ago headlines were made from a teenager in Texas who leveraged AI and went through some archival NASA data and found new galaxies. I mean, that's not something we should generally wanna overlook. And we've since extended an internship offer to him. And I think he may start next year. But that problem's gonna, and maybe you call it a problem or an opportunity, is only gonna 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 Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which will launch August 30th on a Falcon Heavy. I mean, you know, 100 times the field of view of Hubble, 1,000 times the scan rate. You're gonna be gathering so much data. And then there's so many new missions again that will be going up. So how do we just leverage AI to go through this immense amount of data that we have for scientific breakthroughs we might have overlooked or could likely overlook? And that goes, kind of goes to the heart of NASA's mission of unlocking the secrets of the universe. The second category is extending our reach, and that kind of goes to your advanced spacecraft design. I'm kind of concentrating that into propulsion, but whether you have on-orbit or on-mission robotics, whether that's actually necessary or not, what I care about is overcoming the tyranny of distance in space right now, which, you know, appreciating that we barely barely even scratched the surface in our solar system, let alone the next closest star system. And industry is doing a fantastic job of maturing chemical propulsion, you know, so from rapid reusability or, you know, like you see the evolving performance that they get out of even Merlin, let alone Raptor, which is very early in its, you know, its kind of design cycle. How do we go, how do we leverage AI and go well beyond that and try and unlock a little bit more of the energy potential from matter, which is almost, you know, you know, I mean, immeasurable in chemical propulsion to, you know, I don't know, 1/10 of 1% with fission or 0.5% with fusion until we ultimately get to the desired destination of, you know, antimatter annihilation, which maybe actually gives us the real potential to start thinking beyond what's in the reach of our solar system. So those are two overarching themes.

Alex, over to you, pal.

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, 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 and what role and what timeline you perceive humanoid robots to the extent friend of the pod Elon has characterized the Optimus as the ultimate von Neumann probe for the solar system. What role you see humanoids in constructing Artemis Mars and other facilities elsewhere?

Well, I think anyplace that we believe there is a realistic probability of building an eventual human outpost, so the Moon for sure. I mean, we've been blessed with having this proving ground, 3 to 4 days away from Earth. We are absolutely gonna build a base there and make the most of it. So any area that you're gonna 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. I mean, honestly, when you think about having human beings on the Moon base and saying, well, what's their job gonna be? It's like, I mean, the least possible. I mean, really, like, it's still incredibly dangerous the moment they walk outside. It's incredibly dangerous to be there in the first place. So leveraging robotics there for all things from infrastructure build-out, logistics, is imperative. I mean, you want there to be no alternative but to put an astronaut outside the habitat for an EVA. And 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's plenty of places obviously where why would we even need to require a humanoid robot there? You think about exciting missions to seek out signs of life or ancient life that could have existed in our solar system. So take Europa Clipper, or I'm very optimistic that we might be able to commission a mission to Enceladus at some point in time.

Nice.

Or Dragonfly, for example, going to Saturn's moon of 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. And it doesn't necessarily have to obviously take on any sort of humanoid form.

You like that, Suleiman, I bet. Dave, back to you, pal.

Yeah, I love that split focus of, hey, we have reams of proprietary data, let's AI it, and then trans-solar. You know, nobody in the commercial world— you know, I totally get the big budgets, but nobody in the commercial world is going to work on fusion or antimatter annihilation to get to other solar systems. So that's, that's just incredibly cool. But at the same time, orbital data centers have stolen the spotlight recently. What's NASA's position on orbital data centers and You know, it's going to create a huge amount of launch capacity. So maybe assembling things for Transsolar in space is part of the, part of the stepping stone there. But what is the position on orbital data centers?

Well, first, just to hit— I mean, even, even unlocking fission forms of propulsion, I would still argue, would be a major distraction for a lot of commercial industry right now when, I mean, there is so much potential else there, not to mention all the terrestrial applications for fission power when we are trying to win an AI race, which I think is, by the way, just to point out, extremely healthy for NASA. Like, I think the worst thing for NASA is the world's most accomplished space agency is trying to do, you know, what the rest of industry is doing. Like, I don't think that is a good thing for recruiting the best talent or retaining it or workforce development. Right now, I see NASA, like, I mean, this is our opportunity to have the Hyman Rickover nuclear Navy transition and start working again on the near impossible, what others are not focused on that have no obvious, you know, business use case. Cases where NASA will not be one customer of many and truly have those kind of pioneering breakthroughs for the benefit, again, for all humankind, enabling capabilities for surface power on the moon, for Mars surface power at some point, and to be able to undertake, again, realistic exploration missions to the outer solar system. So even fission power, by the way, was a huge step in the right direction for NASA outside of where industry should rightfully be trying to raise capital put their attention to it. In terms of orbital data centers, right? So if, you know, if Elon and SpaceX are betting on this right now, there is no reason to believe this will not come into existence.

Never, ever, ever bet against Elon, right?

100%, right? And never bet against an extremely well-capitalized Elon. So people ask, you know, in my position as NASA administrator, what do I think of, for example, if SpaceX is an IPO? Like, first of all, I'm thrilled with any of our partners that are essential to undertaking and achieving our mission, like again, number one national space policy objective, return American astronauts to the lunar surface, 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. And, you know, I think without question, you know, the greatest entrepreneur and engineer in recent history at the helm. So I think that's all very good. No doubt it will come into existence. What I kind of 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 bit 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 there is like, we at times 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, those are the only things we know for sure. And people say that all the time, like, it's your obligation for NASA to go to the moon and establish a lunar economy. I'm like, what does that mean? Like, I can't guarantee that we can get more value out of the lunar regolith than all the cost that goes into getting there and extracting what you need and then bringing it back to Earth or manufacturing there. There's kind of no guarantee on all that. Like, our job is to go out, try and change the world in air and space, and if along the way, You know, you can have pioneering breakthroughs in, uh, in commercial space. Fantastic, because I don't believe we will all live in that exciting future we imagined about— imagined as kids, uh, if it's entirely funded by taxpayers. So to see perhaps another leg beyond launch, observation, and communications and say orbital data center is a thing, the math closes, you know, the economic potential there is real, and it will help fund a lot of the things we are all excited about in space, like like maybe lots of commercial space stations or the infrastructure we wanna see on the moon, fantastic. We should all be really excited about it.

Amazing. Saleem, over to you, pal.

I have a quick anecdote where I used to be the head of innovation at Yahoo running their incubator in San Francisco. And we had NASA speakers come and speak 'cause I wanted these developers to understand what real innovation looked like. And we once had this kind of 70-plus-year-old fellow who'd worked on the Apollo program. You have to imagine 300, 300 tight jeans, white sneaker, gelled hair MacBook developers all sitting in this room. And during the Q&A, I asked him, what's the biggest difference in the space industry between when you were launching on the Apollo program and today? And he said, huh? And 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— and 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, you've kind of looked at this unbelievable transformation of NASA where you have launch capacity, you have capital, you have 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, I again kind of use this an opportunity maybe You hit on another point too, because I would have loved that for that NASA scientist or engineer from the Apollo era. 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 what we see from commercial industry and private capital is willing to fund is available, is how well do we wield it and use it? And who's a great example of this, of focus? It's Elon and SpaceX, right? Like this is a person, and it's not just obviously at SpaceX, he did it at Tesla too. This is somebody who has no problem executing the Cortés model of burning the ships, right? I mean, could have the greatest rocket with an unbelievable economic model to support it and endless demand and says, "Nope, obsolete, time to focus on the next thing." He's gonna shut down Falcon 1 and he's gonna shut down Falcon 9. But it makes great video, doesn't it? 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? And outside of that, like all this flexibility, but essentially to focus on 1 or 2 incredibly important things to the nation. You see, again, SpaceX is very good at doing that. Tesla is okay. This generation of vehicle, its time has come. I'm now focusing on doing one or two 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, have been asked to do everything for everyone and try and make as many people as happy as you possibly can.

And as a result, you generally make no one happy in as many congressional districts as possible.

Yeah, I mean, you know, even, even now I think about it, I was, uh, you know, forgive the kind of DOW example, um, but, uh, you know, 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 where, I mean, the F-47 has been available, so your, your 6th generation fighter, that we will still advocate for production of 4th generation, 5th generation, and 6th generation? And as a result, probably what you want to buy from 6th generation is several times more expensive than it needs to be and you'll get a lot less of them because you're divvying up your resources in so many different directions. You would never see that happen with some of the entrepreneurs we're talking about and their companies. It'd be like, why would I be doing that? It's 50 years old. It's literally a half century ago. I'm gonna focus everything I can at doing what I'm supposed to be doing today really well. And NASA is something, that is something President Trump has been able to give us with our national space policy and now actually global competition being in a second space race has enabled us to do is say, We can't do everything for everyone anymore. We're gonna go back and dust off the playbook from the '60s and start focusing on doing a couple things that are extremely hard very well. And to your question, having things like lower launch costs available and private capital willing to make investments alongside 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, you know, when you have all of the capability, you know, 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-limiting, The biggest driver there is gonna be just, I mean, it's gonna be the breakthroughs in rapid reusability until, I mean, 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, multiple launchpads. And of course, Blue Origin is New Glenn's vehicle is gonna have obviously already proven reusability with the first stage. I think Stoke is trying to do reusable first and second stage. I'm sure Rocket Lab with Neutron is gonna get there. Is critical to bringing down the cost to accelerate mass to orbit. And 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. Now that's key to everything in NASA. Like we're gonna be able to get far more of our dollars doing the near impossible task than simply paying for the cost to get there. You know, great example, I said, you know, we're thinking about repurposing something the taxpayers already paid for, which is the engineering engineering development unit of the Perseverance and Curiosity rover. It's just sitting there at JPL. I mean, that's probably like, I don't know, half a billion all in that's just sitting there. No question. I'm like, well, you know, 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 shaded regions. The most expensive part of doing that is not the nuclear fuel, it's not the modifications needed for 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 is gonna be enabling for everything we wanna do, not least of which is on the lunar surface. Now again, once you have, if you're talking about armies of humanoid robots on the lunar surface as well that are actually gonna start building out the infrastructure, you'll start to go from what NASA's vision of a Phase 1 moon base, which is a lot of broke-down stuff everywhere, as we learn the science of survival, which I refer to almost as a junkyard in early days, to that more utopian dome of a city, you know, that probably some of us envision. That's what's gonna bridge the gap between those two worlds.

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Let's talk about the Moon a second, Jared. Uh, 2028, an aggressive timeline for landing on the Moon. Thank you for that. It's super great to have aggressive timelines once again. Uh, once we land on the Moon, give me a step-by-step, if you would, for getting a lunar base there, because getting a permanent lunar base where humanity for the first time is ever existing off the planet of Earth, beyond Earth's orbit, is huge. Uh, steps 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, you know, lots of Apollo missions before we landed on the moon. And in this world that we've been in, absent competition for some time, where I told you that, you know, focus is a problem and we are distributing money everywhere to make everybody happy, we kind of are forgetting all of those interim steps to getting to the, the exciting outcome, and we just design a dream state, a dream state as a service sometimes, and it's usually very late and much more expensive than we want, and none of us want that. We all enjoyed the headlines of Artemis II, 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 wanna wait several years in between the next episode, right? So 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, uh, it worked very well for NASA in the 1960s. We're bringing it back. So what I described, Phase 1, and this is before the astronauts ever get there in '28, we're gonna be dropping landers and rovers on a near-monthly basis. We're gonna take advantage of the commercial market that exists today, the CLPS program that started years past. We're gonna start printing these things off. Uh, we'll, we'll learn from every one of them. In that incredibly harsh environment on the lunar south pole, 'cause if we're going there and we're gonna build a base, we better at least do it near the water ice, or what are we doing there? And we're gonna learn how to survive in that environment, and we're gonna do it before we lock in the dream state. So I'm like, I don't wanna hear how we're locking in lunar comms, surface or orbital yet, or what our power source is gonna be, or what the interface is gonna 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 space station subsequent design. And Phase 1 is gonna leave a lot of debris everywhere like that, like a lot of dead rovers and, and, and landers. But we're gonna learn from it, and then we'll roll into Phase 2. And I think, you know, once, once Starships are launching with frequency and they've, you know, worked out orbital prop transfer, and once Blue Origin's got their on-orbit aggregation strategy down, then when you're moving mass very efficiently to surface, that's when you roll in the humanoid robots. Again, you want the least— you want the fewest reasons possible to ever put an astronaut in a suit outside the base unless there was no no other alternative, and humanoid robots are gonna give you that.

Best guess, under, 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. But we're not waiting that long, right? I mean, you're talking the next 4 years, maybe 6 years as a window as these start showing up up and building that infrastructure.

Boots on the moon, except they're Optimus or Figure boots on the moon, circa 2028, '29. That's great. Alex, over to you, pal.

Yeah, pulling on this lunar theme, Jared, 20 years ago you were a civilian pilot with ambition and you, 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, that would absolutely love would love a path to the Moon, a path to be basically a civilian settler corps, including apparently Peter, who would love to, to be civilian settlers or reserve astronauts with a way to the Moon. Question for you: does NASA— do you and/or NASA 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 and move to the Moon or to Mars or do you perceive that pathway as being purely commercial and not flowing through NASA?

So there's a lot there to that. Let me just first say that having an aviation background is hardly a requirement anymore. I mean, there is certainly advantages that come in, but if you think about what a crew of astronauts should look like going from the Earth to the Moon or Mars, having one or two people with that background, important and helpful for sure. If you want, I think number one in this, and this also also very much qualifies Peter is medical professionals. It's like the technology to enable humans to go to Mars is gonna happen far, far faster or sooner than having the countermeasures in place for, you know, how demanding physiologically it is to be in space, not to mention psychologically as well, especially when you get to extreme distances like Mars. So I just don't ever see a world in our lifetime where, you know, you're not gonna have considerable investments in medical professionals supporting outposts on the moon and certainly Mars someday. Now, what does that mean? You know, again, what is NASA's charter again? I mean, I think we're out there trying to, again, unlock the secrets of the universe and every step, moon, Mars, thereafter is just a step on that journey for crewed and uncrewed missions. And there will always be a need for NASA astronauts. And I'd be shocked if you didn't see at some point in time that NASA astronauts played a role in helping train and certify commercial or private crews going on those missions. The same way that as a pilot, whether it's an FAA examiner or an FAA designee, is verifying that a pilot is safe to fly in national airspace, to take off and land in what is something that is inherently dangerous, Well, you know, several times that once you start leaving our atmosphere. So there'll be a role for NASA astronauts in this, and hopefully as costs come down, again, back to rapid reusability, and you have the ability to put hundreds and thousands of people in space through, you know, through government programs, you're gonna require a lot more NASA astronauts. But no doubt there is gonna be a time period where private and commercial will far outtake, overtake that in terms of the number of people living and working working in space, on Moon, or elsewhere. And 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 gonna speedrun The Moon is a Harsh Mistress without the rocks falling on Earth.

Rods from God, Peter. Rods from God.

Dave, over to you, pal.

Yeah, you know, 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. And is it harsher in particular, or is it just the Moon in general is harsh that you're referring to?

Well, I think the moon in general is rather harsh, but I mean, you're talking about -400 degrees in some of the permanently shaded regions. I mean, we actually have survival problems in the South Pole of the moon that exceed that of Mars. So, you know, it's certainly gonna be the, as I've said again, 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. So at least it's close enough to come home if we run into some challenges.

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. And 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 so that idea, you know, is moving at a pretty good clip too. So, you know, there's a view of the world where launch costs come down so much that, you know, when you watch one of these launches, launches, the amount of energy it takes to get a ton into orbit is just mind-boggling. And not being in the gravity well is really compelling. You know, just, you can just railgun it right off the Moon instead. On the other hand, you were just describing how harsh an environment that is. So actually manufacturing the first railguns on the Moon and then getting something significant, you know, manufactured there to launch is a pretty daunting challenge. So how do you see the timelines of those two ways of getting things into space competing with each other?

Well, it's a, it's a, 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. I think it would be— I mean, how cool would it be to have a mass driver on the moon? I'm all for it. But it does, you know, it kind of does beg the question a little bit that if Starship is— and just again, 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, build, whatever it is you're looking to accelerate off of the Moon with the mass driver to the Moon, could you not just bring it from the get-go? So you'd have to be highly confident that, again, the costs to refine, extract, manufacture from the regolith on the Moon— unless we're starting to get really, you know, going and retrieving asteroids and everything else— will be lower than— and then, essentially, you know, 3D printing it on the moon and using the mass driver to accelerate will 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. But that's, again, you know, people that 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 long enough.

Yeah, we have.

Salim, um, you know, there's a huge tension in geopolitics where the going to space is really kind of a humanity effort, and I love the way NASA is always positioned that way. How do you take into account all the geopolitical tensions with China, India, Russia all trying to get to the moon? And long term, do you see that resolving in some way, or does it just stay a tension and you just figure out how to navigate it.

Is competition better than the collaboration, for your budget at least?

For all mankind, yeah, of course it is. Look, there's nothing wrong with having good healthy comp— we're Americans, we like competition. Uh, it worked very well for us in the 1960s, and now, now what happens? Uh, Peter and I go to Baikonur in 2008, and the same rocket we were competing against was, uh, helping. I mean, it was really the beginning of the commercial space era in a lot ways. And then, uh, you know, again, just days ago I was able to take a, you know, a close friend and NASA astronaut, uh, and walk him to the ladder of Soyuz. So what an example of where competition fueled so much for the benefit of all in early days, uh, and now turns into a collaborative effort of which without 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 And yet you were able to have continuity because there was an American who was up there, Chris Williams, via the Soyuz method. So look, where competition starts can lead to really totally 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's no doubt. I mean, 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 things. And certainly we've shown that even having a space race can help, and its eventual collaborative mean, if it turns into collaborative means like we have in the International Space Station, can transcend a lot of the geopolitical strife that can happen here on Earth. On Earth.

Chinese on the moon by 2030. That's their goal. Do you think they hit it?

Yes, I do. I think that they are— they have a second mover advantage in a lot of ways. They do not have any baggage. What do I mean by that? Like, if you look at the way they're there, I want to say their civil space program, but they've recently merged that back again into their military efforts. It's à la the Manhattan Project and the Apollo era. And they're building centers and recruiting the people they need to do one thing. Stennis just doing propulsion, for example. Kennedy Space Center just launching rockets. Marshall doing a lot of the engineering. Texas being the operations and training center. That's how they all began. If you think about it, even it's analogous again to the Manhattan Project of what did we need Los Alamos for? What did we need Oak Ridge for? And what happens absent competition is 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 adding on a lot of other things that can distract from its 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. Scratched and highly focused in their effort. They're drawing on a playbook that worked very well for, uh, uh, for us in the 1960s. I have no doubt they're going to achieve their goals.

And they have 5-year plans, not annual budget cycles. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When you look at the constraints that you're facing culturally at NASA, you know, there used to be this huge mantra that failure is not an option, right? And you're, you're clearly— the— your mindset is one of non-stop experimentation and What are the biggest hurdles that 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 the culture of it— and I don't even say accepting more risk. Really, a lot of what you see, at least in my opinion, when you see some of the things that SpaceX have done and how they choose to operate, is very similar. To how NASA operated in the 1960s. I mean, we had the same 20-something-year-olds that were burning themselves out, brilliant minds doing incredible things, making tough decisions, extreme ownership, moving with urgency. And look, how many— people talk about NASA doesn't blow up rockets. Go back into the late 1950s, early 1960s on YouTube, and you can see plenty of examples examples of our iterative design philosophy not working out initially and then rolling in what we learned into subsequent versions. So 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. And we are just going back. I mean, that's what we're trying to do is pivot a little bit more in the direction of where we started, and focusing, again, our resources on those kind of, you know, those near-impossible type objectives. Now, where I'd say there's sometimes resistance is when people— people generally hate change. That's just human behavior. And absent competition and 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, but We gotta get back to the moon. We gotta build the moon base. We can never give up the moon again. We have to help industry, you know, to the extent possible on rapid reusability as a true game changer enabler for all the other things we wanna do. You know, 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 wanna be doing it annually. And even now, I'll tell you in meetings when somebody brings up like, we're really excited about this, it's gonna launch in 2035, '85, we're really excited about this. It's gonna launch in 2045. It was like, I don't want my grandchildren to be excited about this mission. I wanna be excited about it. So 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 one second. Thank you for reigniting nuclear as a propulsion system and an energy source. So on the nuclear propulsion side, I will sort of 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 plans on nuclear propulsion?

So first plan is just put a win up on the board, which is what SR-1 Freedom is. It's a lot of repurposed hardware, no doubt. You know, it's funny, I think Politico put an article out today on, you know, NASA administrator intends to spend $2.5 billion on his nuclear power and propulsion program. Propulsion spaceship. I was like, actually, the taxpayers spent that money over the last few years already. I'm just repurposing it into something that has real, you know, practical value instead of sitting in a warehouse or in a lab for some time period. So the power, you know, uh, PPE element, uh, power propulsion element from the Gateway, we repurposed. That's basically the main spacecraft, all of its electric thrusters. It's already integrated into it. Uh, we have a nuclear reactor, at least, you know, components of it that have been matured and funded by other services. For decades at INL that we're gonna 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 sub. A lot of people don't know it, but even, you know, Rickover said, "Hey, it was the 70% solution, but it gave birth to the nuclear Navy." We're trying to do the exact same thing at NASA. So SR-1 is not gonna knock your socks off outta the gate. It's not mass optimized by any means, but it's a step. Step in the right direction. Uh, what comes thereafter will be— will continue to be optimized until what I think is the, the ultimate goal is to be able to bring astronauts to Mars and back with the fewest miracles required. And that may not always be the fastest way, but if it doesn't require cryogenic refueling as a step to getting the boots on Mars, that's a win. Uh, so I actually think that the, the first human mission to Mars will be, at least if it was, you know, as NASA would be, chemically augmented nuclear electric propulsion, and be able to send astronauts to Mars and bring them back, not the fastest, but without having to require a lot of extra miracles along the way. And we just got to keep going, right? This is the whole point of taking it out of the lab, getting into practical application, budgeting it properly, because material sciences, the hotter we can run the reactor, the more mass we can save, because we don't need football field-sized radiators that are 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 wanna go in the outer solar system and you wanna at least delay the necessity of cryogenic refueling for missions to, crewed missions to Mars and back, like we gotta be making investments in nuclear.

Love it. Dave.

Yeah, if you achieve that goal, it seems like the technical risk seems like a very doable challenge. You know, it's out there, but doable. Then you have this kind of footrace between are we trying to put boots on Mars so that we can then back up humanity on Mars someday? Or is it 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? 'Cause you get these two science fiction views of the world, or the future of humanity. One where 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. And there's kind of an equal footrace between those two views of where we're going to. Do you have a preference between those two views?

It's sort of Elon versus Bezos in that regard.

Yeah, very much so, very much so.

Yeah, well, I mean, look, step one, we need rapid reusability and on-orbit assembly because whatever spacecraft are gonna take humans to Mars, whether it's just the lucky few for, you know, to support an outpost is necessarily a colony or actually achievable missions. The on-orbit assembly is everything. Rapid reusability is our step in that direction. Look, from my perspective, we cross the oceans for a better life, and it's extremely unlikely in the near term that you are gonna go to Mars and have a better life or live on a space station and have a better life. I think a lot of initial motivation in our lifetimes will probably be much more akin into, you know, going to Antarctica for an extended scientific duration, you know, or campaign down there. But it's just a step. I mean, again, we're trying to conquer the tyranny of distance that is inherent in our solar system, in our galaxy and beyond, and 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 gonna be another learning environment. Generally favor gravity, again, for the, you know, overcoming the physiological challenges of being in space. So I, you know, I guess if we're getting totally, we've evolved to be born and live in a space, in a mega space station is not, I guess, out of the realm of possible. But I think a lot of the problems that we know we encounter when even keeping people on the space station for 6 months, even a, you know, a sixth, a third of gravity is gonna make a huge difference along the way. But presumably we will have conquered artificial gravity and such in that effort too.

I love this saying: if God had wanted humanity to become an interplanetary species, she would have given us a moon. And we have one. Salim, over to you for asteroid mining.

You know, asteroid mining has been this promise, Peter. You and I, you've kind of tracking that. You've invested and built companies around that. Do you think it's a real thing or is it perpetually 20 years away? And 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, again, our primary objective is, you know, if you want your NASA's sole focus to be on, you know, stimulating the economic potential of microgravity or from asteroids or on the lunar surface, like put it under the Department of Commerce. You know, the Department of Commerce has a space office in that. Like, again, I do think foundational, our job is to go out and answer the questions. You know, are we alone? Unlock the secrets of the universe. World-changing, pioneering technological breakthroughs in air and space. So from my perspective, if we are investing in the capabilities that are necessary to undertake missions to the moon, to build a moon base, to 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. And we actually have some methods that we're exploring to do that. So the America Competes Act actually allows us to put prizes out there, and I'm very open to doing it, not trying to compete at all with XPRIZE and that, but we could work or partner, yeah, potentially partner on that. I'll let the lawyers weigh in on it, of like, go and do something cool with an asteroid, and we could put up $25 million, I don't know, hypothetically is, but I want, I would like to believe that by making investments in that, it's going to give us, I don't know, the hypergol thrusters that we need to reduce the cost for landers on the moon or Mars someday. I think always has to be furtherance of our scientific scientific and exploration objectives as a space agency.

Welcome to the health section of Moonshots, brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsized impact on every aspect of our lives. How we teach our kids, how we run our companies. It also is having a huge impact on health. Helping you prevent heart disease is one of the key things. I'm here with Dr. Dawn Musalem, our Chief Medical Officer at Fountain. Heart disease has been personal for you as well, hasn't it?

It really has, Peter. When my daughter was 5, my husband died of sudden cardiac death, and so this is a topic that is one that I I am mission-driven to try to eradicate. Prevention first and early detection is absolutely critical. 50% of people die of heart attacks with no warning signs. Silent killer.

No shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing.

No, silent killer.

They just don't wake up in the morning.

They don't wake up. And so, you know, AI, this is our mission to advance science, to try to help to one day democratize wellness. We know at Fountain Life, when we do this CT angiography with AI analytics, we are actually finding We're finding that 88% of people coming in have detectable coronary artery disease, but Peter, what's more alarming to me is 23% of those individuals had soft plaque. This is the plaque that would not traditionally be seen on CT looking at calcium scores alone. And this is the plaque that we must intervene with, with the multimodal testing we're doing, including diagnostic laboratory studies partnered with healthy lifestyle recommendations.

So listen, make sure you understand what's going on inside your body genetically, metabolically, and cardiovascularly. You can know, and it's your obligation to know. So check it out at fountainlife.com/peter to find out more and really make sure that you're the CEO of your own health. All right, back to the episode. Jared, let's talk about getting to Mars. So Elon is very aggressively committed to going to Mars. Um, and you know, I was there with him when he was having the conversation and he basically said, we're gonna shut down, uh, Falcon 9 Falcon 9 because it's not going to get us to Mars, and we're going after Starship all in, you know, burning the boats as you said. So 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? And what's a timeline? When do you think the earliest, uh, will set boots on Mars? You know, Optimus boots and then human boots. What's, what's your, what's your under-over on that?

Well, I think, you know, again, I'm pretty excited about the, the, the TAM that, you know, that SpaceX and others are pursuing right now with orbital data centers and such. Because again, I don't, you know, you saw the back, it's, here's an interesting stat. Uh, it's actually, it was 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 spent in 1967, you know, at a comparable time period. And, um, sorry, any, any, anyway, on that note, I, I think that, um, uh, SpaceX, SpaceX right now, if they were to put all of their capital and focus on going to Mars, it would be very different, uh, time frame than, uh, right now where their stated intention is going to the moon. So when you ask the question of like, uh, look, we're Going back, boots will be on the moon in 2028. We're gonna build the base and learn from that environment. And SpaceX pursuing this mega TAM that allows them to make investments in capabilities for the good of all humankind, which is probably again, why it's 69% approval rate versus in the 1960s when it was 4.5% of the discretionary budget. And I'm sure that was a big factor in why we were in the 30% range for going to the moon because, hey, we got a lot of other problems here back here on Earth. So good companies like SpaceX that are pursuing these massive TAMs and all this economic economic potential in space allows them to make investments alongside NASA to do all these great things for humankind is probably why you generally have greater public support for, uh, for what we're pursuing. But the fact that Moon is step one for them right now, or at least stated intent, is certainly going to change some of the timelines on Mars and absolutely would change like the quantity of people we're talking about on Mars. So we can make investments in nuclear power and propulsion as part of the National Space Policy. It is the next giant leap and and potentially put 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 like millions of people someday in a self-sustaining city on Mars, but that's the— NASA can do some things governmentally through taxpayer funding, leveraging investments in nuclear investments over many decades, plus industry coming alongside. Decided. SpaceX saying, forget the moon, we're going all in, like, you know, Elon was saying a couple years ago, is much faster for sure, because now you're concentrating all that brilliant brain power and, um, uh, and their capital and resources towards achieving that objective. So seems like we're on step one, 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, you know, along with the rest of industry that's pursuing all the economic potential in space. And 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 know, you're probably in that 15-year timeframe.

Best guess, first mission to Mars is private, first mission to Mars is NASA? And when you say mission to Mars, I mean landed astronaut mission.

I would bet on NASA would probably be first. And that's just because I do think your first mission, if you wanna bring back people to talk about it, like NASA's not doing one, way missions. And as a result, I think your dependency on chemical propulsion has to be limited in that, because you're gonna, otherwise, you're gonna need a lot of Optimus robots on Mars and they're gonna be walking around dusting off all the solar panels without nuclear for making propellant. And then it's hard enough to do, it's hard enough to fuel launchpad here in 1G and under 1 atmosphere, let alone making the propellant on another planet, reloading a rocket and bring it back.

So I love that view because if you scratched and clawed with chemical propellant your way to Mars, you'd be exactly repeating the 1960s Moon mission where, yeah, we barely got there, but not in any kind of thing 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, you know, a pathway to doing it repeatedly and not just going as a one-off. It's such a cool vision.

It just initially, right? I mean, so there's no doubt doing So to me, Starship and everything it hopes to achieve is just when. There's no if on that one. So step one, get it going, put up a lot of depots in low Earth orbit, make the moon efficient transport of mass to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure, master a lot of in situ resource skills you're gonna need, because those are all necessary if you wanna pull off Mars and a return trip without nuclear. But even then, minimum, you're still gonna want nuclear surface power if you can, and we're testing that on the moon as well, or else again, you'll need a lot of Optimus robots cleaning off football fields of solar panels. But step one is start that foundation. Imagine like the space shuttle orbiter equivalent, obviously assembled on orbit assembly of these NEP, chemically augmented NEP spaceships. And yes, it might be 3 years round trip, you know, with 30-day surface time, but it's a start and you get in a rotation until eventually the, you know, the V6 Starships are rolling and you've got armies of Optimus robots and nuclear power on the surface of Mars. And then you could be, You could just, you're just extending what you've already proven you can do to the moon to Mars.

Dave, you wanna continue?

Yeah, well, okay, so you've seen For All Mankind, right? I'm sure.

I gotta admit, I was there a lot during the first couple seasons and I've been really busy of late and so.

Imagine that. Well, you know, the way it plays out in the TV world is the US and Russia at the time are cooperating in space 'cause everybody's just trying to build and create and survive drive, and then something back on Earth, you know, creates tension, and then 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. Uh, do you have a counterpart in China that you talk to, or does it all get tied up? And, you know, we talk a lot about on the podcast about Kimi K3 coming out in a couple weeks. That's going to create all kinds of drama. Does that drama then come back to you?

6 days, Dave.

6 days now. Oh geez. Yeah, that's a turning point. Now give us the inside baseball. How's it actually work with— can you talk to China, or do you have to go to the White House and call from the bat phone, or how's it work?

I, I mean, you know, the, the foreign policy is, uh, is established by the president and the Secretary of State. Now 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 I would say, you know, 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's already established norms of operation and have for more than a quarter of a century. And that certainly again has proven to transcend a lot of the, you know, 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. So there is some scientific data sharing outside of NASA with universities and such, but that's, you know, so 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 your, for all my mankind, I don't think it's a secret that the ultimate high ground of space at this point, That is a warfighting domain. So, you know, in the horrifically unlikely event, the day we never wanna see come where, you know, things have devolved, I don't think it's gonna be a shooting war on the surface of the moon between troops of, you know, I think that there's 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 achieve before it would ever require, you know, boots on the moon duking it out on the surface. I hope that— I hope there is no scenario where that ever seems like a good idea.

Well, what about just a quick follow-up on that? What about the just the more narrow case? You know, when the SpaceX IPO came out, it was very, very clear that it's first come, first serve in low Earth orbit. And it's been a long time since on Earth we've had land grabs where, you know, hey, our Navy is finding new islands, we're just going to claim them. Well, that's a long, long past idea. But now in space, low Earth orbit is first come, first serve. The moon is first come, first serve. So that, that seems like— is there any cooperation? Or does— when the White House is deciding what the rules are, do they call NASA and you all get together and say, look, this is, this is the rules as we see them? Or how does that, how does that part work?

Well, we're not— I don't think anyone is talking about new rules. So we have the Outer Space Treaty, and in some respects, sure, that is first come, first serve, in that if I'm putting a, you know, if we need to put a lander in a certain spot and we value that spot for whatever reason, you know, the first person to get it there is it. But I mean, look, it's a big moon. Even when you think about the South Pole, it's still rather, you know, it's still rather large. And, you know, we're still, even in NASA's Moon Base Plan vision of dozens of landers over the next few years during Phase 1, there's still a lot of moon to go around. And look, I think even, you know, even when we think about low Earth orbit and the orbital regimes that are available for data centers, comms, there's a lot of opportunity there. I think just, you know, making sure we are sharing information in terms of the orbital trajectories is obviously vital. And I know, you know, many in industry have spoken out and pointed out that if we think fail to disclose information about where these orbital constellations are going to, you know, where they're gonna propagate, then that creates collision risk and problems that impact everybody. And that's something, again, that I think everybody, even in times of conflict, when we have airliners flying around the world, we are communicating with each other, there's 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, you're— every time you're, uh, 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? Because I know previous projects have been really hampered by that lack of budgeting availability.

How do you preserve the budget over the next 5 years to get the base built?

And can we help you increase it? Yeah.

Can we donate?

You know, it's an interesting thing. I mean, people have talked about when I came in that, you know, the continuity between administrations and the variability in the budget cycle is what 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? Like, it's a lot of money. Like, when people start saying we don't have enough money to do the job, it's like, really? I mean, I know 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. So you talk about phase 1 of the moon base. If I had come out and said, all right, here's the vision, it's gonna be glass and it's gonna have this amazing closed-loop ecosystem in it and a Ferris wheel, and we're gonna have big crop farms on the surface, and it's only gonna cost $100 billion, but we'll be able to pay it off as a service to these 3 companies over time, gonna get canceled. It's like, it's gonna be under assault constantly. But what did we do with phase 1? We said, look, we're gonna do local, low-cost landers every month, and we're going to start learning. And, uh, and, and now when it, you know, if a new administration comes in and says, you know what, uh, once a month is, uh, it's too much, uh, we can dial it back to 8 and we still feel like we can, we can get where we want to go, that's fine. Or you have somebody, you know, very forward-leaning, we're going to go 15, we want to pick up the pace in this, great. That is, that is much better. Same with, uh, our nuclear program going from SR-1 to SR-2 We're not jumping right to Battlestar Galactica here. We want to start with the Nautilus. 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. Start testing out high-temperature materials and better power conversion. A lot better than saying we're going to just build the Battlestar Galactica or something, and then that gets canceled. This is just smart capital allocation, guys, is really what it is. Focus, $25 billion is a lot of money every year.

A lot of money.

The entire Manhattan Project, you know, over 4 years adjusted for inflation was $33 billion. We can do a lot every year with a reload of $25 billion. Just focus in on the needle-moving objectives and design the programs, the architecture in such a way, not too big to fail that keeps, you know, on the chopping block. Do it in a logical evolutionary way to get to where you wanna go.

Amen. Alex, over to you about life. In the universe of science.

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

So, first of all, I think the only— I was discounting when I said 90%. I think 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. And I think really we're in this, you know, seeing is believing. I can't— no one's willing to make the declarative statement based on, you know, I would say, I wanna say failed efforts, but, you know, they were kind of swinging and misses in the past that 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 you get enough people looking under a microscope, or, you know, that's just an example, you know, not quite literally in that, to say, okay, it was there. Now, if it turns out to be the case, and I think we're very much talking, again, very dead microbial life, I mean, for all purposes, Mars is at bat. A vacuum, I think it would be extremely unlikely, uh, like, you know, virtually non-existent chance that, that there's anything still active there. But that if you can prove that there was at one point microbial life there, and then Europa Clipper starts sending back some interesting data, and Titan, uh, you know, you send Dragonfly to Titan, you get a mission off to Enceladus, and this is all in our backyard, this is our star system, right? Uh, let alone, you know, the, 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? Now, look, there is certainly an evolutionary nature to this and a technological filter you have to break through to some extent to actually have the— to cross into the intelligent life to come and visit us. To, you know, which I think just, look, there's a lot again with the tyranny of distance in space that makes that, you know, a substantial obstacle. But I certainly believe that as we undertake more missions like Dragonfly and Europa Clipper and get even more advanced where nuclear power and propulsion maybe can take our probes there and back with greater ease, that we might reach conclusions that at least, you know, that probably to answer the question that we've been entrusted to solve is whether or not we're alone.

You know, you're arguably the NASA administrator during the most extraordinary time of scientific missions as well. I mean, Dragonfly looking for the chemistry of life on Titan's pretty extraordinary. Can you imagine a time where you're like 10x-ing or 100x-ing taxing the science missions out there with AI and robotics. I mean, the price of manufacturing is plummeting, but increase, you know, allowing yourself to increase the risk and just really aggressively sending out probes.

Here, here. I, I'm 100%, um, Peter. I, I think what we've, um, you know, what we're faced with it to some extent, right, is, uh, and maybe this is a budgetary cycle, you know, point, is, um, I do think that once big flagship programs have been greenlit. There is a risk element to it, too, which is, it can't fail, so therefore, I have to build in more and more redundancy. And 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, and 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. A lot of us, you see across people's professional careers, they kind of entrench themselves and build moats and walls around whatever they do for almost job security to some extent and never want to engineer themselves out of a job. Then there are some extraordinary companies out there where people can't wait to engineer themselves out of a job because they believe whatever whatever they work on next is 10 times cooler. Like, we need to do the same thing here. So that's kind of the human side of it, aside from where technology will benefit us, is that if I'm working on Dragonfly, I'm gonna bang this thing out so fast because whatever I work on thereafter is gonna be 10x that. And then get all of our teams, our science mission directorate budget, $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, cranking out 7 dragonflies a year?

Hundreds, hundreds.

Yeah, right? So I'm totally with you. We have to move in that direction, and that's a cultural change too, not to mention, you know, obviously the technologically enabling, but that's, it's just a matter of time.

Can I ask you a follow-up on that? Your access to that AI, you know, being a government agency, like when Mythos came out and now, you know, Fable 5, Did you get preferential access and can you use your government position to get the latest, greatest stuff? Because that's going to become an issue very soon. It's already, you know, it was an issue just a few weeks ago for the first time in history. But that's the bellwether for the future. But do you get special access to Frontier AI going forward?

Yeah. So, I mean, I really have no interest in wading into any of the policy discussions in terms of what has to be made available to government in advance and whether it's optional or not. Like, I think that Director Kratios at OSTP and all those that contribute to ensuring government agencies are armed, uh, you know, with the best technology for, for really the good of the nation and humankind. They're doing that well. Like, I'll leave that over there. I'll just say where, where we have some access, um, you know, when you think about things like nuclear power and propulsion, uh, you know, again, giving birth to NASA's nuclear Navy equivalency You know, you, you, 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. And that could be an accelerant for some of NASA's ambitions that, you know, wouldn't be as applicable, I'd say, in the commercial or in the private sector, if that makes sense.

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

Beautiful. Um, I, I have to ask, Administrator, this is, I think, the, 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 their fourth release under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP encounters. The White House and the Department of War and other cabinet-level agencies have seen sort of, I would argue, a sea shift in terms of how they talk about UAPs and the possibility of non-human intelligence. As we speak, I, I think based on the headlines I was seeing right before we started this recording, Representative Burleson is introducing right now an amendment to the NDAA to, uh, to, to encode in statute a variety of UAP-oriented reporting requirements. So I have to ask you the biggest question, I, I think, and you, you maybe gestured at this earlier by speaking of NASA's ultimate mission as answering the big questions of 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? What is your position— NASA had study group a couple 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?

So what I would say is, since the, uh, uh, first of all, there's already, uh, you know, statutory language, uh, that goes back to, I want to say, 2022, um, that created, uh, the AARO group within the Department of or where it's mandatory, you know, 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 his— what we interpret as a direct order, the executive order he put out, a truth that said, "Release everything." And within a week of that, you know, I was in the Situation Room with the heads of almost every government agency. And, uh, and we all went in there like, uh, is there— is there— what do you know? And, uh, and, and what I'll tell you is there is a top-down push from the president, uh, you know, and the Homeland Security advisor 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. And if you go through those four conscious. I mean, I'm telling you that there, there— we have released video footage, photographic evidence, eyewitness account. Some of them are, you know, from, uh, from FBI agents that took the footage on some of these. I mean, you're talking highly credible individuals on, uh, on sightings that we, we can't explain. Now, I do want to be very clear here, you know, uh, can't explain right now does not mean it's unexplainable. We are gathering data in— I mean, it's— I— the best example is think about your doorbell cams. We have cameras on everything. I mean, you got, you got drones that are up continuously right now in combat zones, right? And, and there is absolutely— I mean, I can't tell you it's conclusive. You got a drone with a, with an IR camera that catches something flying in the bottom corner. It's almost off frame, right? And is Is it a missile because it's in a combat zone? Is it another drone? Or is it something else? Right? And the president said, "Put it out." Turn 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. And again, like, some of it, 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 I had a few other video— 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, you know, one-way attack drone, but based on the angle, I can't say that for sure." But then 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 back on this. Uh, 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, uh, anomalous, um, phenomenon, and we are putting it out there as part of these disclosure efforts.

What is your— just a quick follow-up then. There have been a number of House and Senate hearings where a number of whistleblowers whistleblowers have testified under oath that there has been an 80-plus-year-long U.S. government and contractor effort to, to collect and reverse engineer UAPs. I, again, I, I, 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, even though I take you at your word, 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, I think it was the, the 2022 NDAA, which incorporated the AARO statutes. What is your position, speaking either as an individual or as administrator of NASA, NASA on all of these allegations?

My position on this is that— look, I don't want to comment as to the credibility of individuals. Look, I get— ever since I was first nominated to this position, I get like dozens of emails every day, you know, from, you know, some very bright and smart people giving their views and thoughts on things NASA should be doing or NASA— things that NASA has done. And some of it I look at and say, "This is really insightful," and some of it I say is that that falls outside the bounds of what I think is, you know, perhaps credible on that. Just because somebody worked for the government or had a clearance does not necessarily mean that their interpretation of what they saw is accurate. So, meaning, I saw the same videos that— you know, and they've been disclosed, by the way. That people were referencing saying it was 100% an alien spaceship. And we put these videos out and you can look at them and determine whether or not you think that to be the case. And 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, you know, that was an Iranian one-way attack drone or something of that nature.

It would be great if we had alien spacecraft. I mean, 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 non-trivial.

Yeah, look, I, I mean, it's what our job is here, right? I mean, you know, you, you, you know, whether you're, 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, I think, part of the greatest adventure in human history? If there was some crashed, you know, 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 wanna 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 or the B-21 or the SR-71 was capable of doing what we were doing is well within, you know, the realms of physics and our technological means at that time period, not something that would've been derived from aliens, and certainly not something that would've helped aliens get from another star system, you know, to Earth in that time period. But look, again, we're putting things out. It's very forward-leaning, but I have not seen anything. There's no secret programs that I'm aware of related to biologics or crashed, you know, aircraft.

When I've interviewed Elon on the subject, he said, I would know. But shouldn't we have better photographs? We have great, we've got great cameras. Why are they all so crappy? Celine, you wanna close this out with a question? Oh, please.

I would also just put and just say like, you know, look, if I came all this distance from another world, I'd be very curious about, I mean, some of the best people watching ever is in Times Square. It's on the Las Vegas Strip. Like why are they showing up where we test our weapons? Why are, you know, like— You know, they seem to be— they seem to be— and I'm not trying to be dismissive. Like I said, this is what— this is a subject that if you are a true space enthusiast, if you're excited about, you should want to know, you should be excited about. So I'm not being dismissive of any of the claims. I'm just saying they, they tend to seem to show up where we keep our naval ships and where we test our, uh, advanced, uh, weapon systems.

Uh, you want to ask Imad's closing question here, Salim?

Uh, which one? I can't remember.

Uh, so Imad asked, when we went to the moon, uh,— you know, the saying was, "We went to the moon 'cause it's hard." So what's the new organizing goal that, you know, keeps everybody reinvigorated? You know, you said before Apollo had a singletarian mission, and now we're sort of spread out. Is there sort of one thread that pulls them all?

Yeah, I mean, and I think just 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 is, I think, 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 we are 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, you know, 3 to 4 days away from us to test out all of the capabilities from the spacesuits to the ECLSS habitat the physiological countermeasures for being in the harsh reality of space, for in-situ resource manufacturing, for propellant life support systems to get to Mars.

Amazing. I hope everybody watching agrees with me that, you know, 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 gonna be doing. Thank you for your commitment. Thank you for stepping into this role and really bringing all your entrepreneurial energy, your vision, your vision, your engineering, your science, your passion to this. Grateful so much.

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 and 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, listening. Awesome. Can't wait to, to watch your success next year.

Thank you, Administrator. Thanks, guys.

Truly a blast.

Take care.