The New Space Race

14:52Ross Douthat:What is lunar regolith?

14:53Jared Isaacman:Basically, the materials on the surface of the moon.

14:57Ross Douthat:The grit on the surface of the moon.

14:59Jared Isaacman:Taking that and using it to cover some of our infrastructure would be a good way to provide debris protection and radiation protection.

15:05Ross Douthat:Does NASA have enough money to do this? Yes. Yes. Under current, so as with other areas of the federal budget, the Trump administration proposed cuts to NASA. Congress is not doing those cuts. Are you happy overall with the money that NASA has to spend?

15:24Jared Isaacman:I think, well, first of all, yes, I'm very happy with the resources available to us. But I just want to clarify because it's not as simple as, you know, did the president want to take, you know, cuts to NASA and did Congress, you know, work this out? The president created an incredible national space policy and his one big, beautiful bill, you know, the Working Families Tax Cut Act, you know, was one of the most significant financial plus ups to NASA in decades. I mean, billions of dollars to invest in our exploration programs and the infrastructure required for the moon, plus in enhancing our infrastructure for terrestrial infrastructure across our centers.

16:01Jared Isaacman:So to be clear, the president loves space, created the Space Force, created the Artemis program, returned human spaceflight to the United States after a hiatus when we had to send our astronaut space through Russia after the shuttle was retired. That said, do I have any fault that, you know, through the budgeting process, we were asked to take a closer look at how we spend things, get things more on track on budget? I don't fault that at all. That's a good forcing function to take a close look at how we operate. And like all government agencies, we're not good capital allocators. We could do better.

16:32Jared Isaacman:And we are trying to do that right now. And if we can, within our resources, within our budget,$25 billion a year, yeah, we can do some pretty extraordinary science and discovery.

16:40Ross Douthat:But it does seem like in the optimal scenario where you are establishing a permanent presence on the moon, you're going to need a larger budget. And is it something where you feel like each technical success, the success of the Artemis mission, that success generates support for more spending? Is that how you envision it?

16:58Jared Isaacman:Well, I think that with every win, we earn more trust from all our stakeholders, our workforce, the American public, Congress, OMB, the president, for sure. Now, I will say again, I visited every one of our centers. I mean, we've been running, you know, 18-hour days for the last two months since my confirmation getting a handle on things. I don't think we have a shortfall in resources. $25 billion is an awful lot of resources. It's not going to get us to Mars, though, right?

17:25Ross Douthat:I'm not trying to push you into demanding more money. I'm just trying to calibrate.

17:29Jared Isaacman:Just to give you a sense of the Manhattan Project adjusted for inflation was$30 billion. And we really knew nothing there about that at the time we had to build factories across the country for, you know, enriching uranium, plutonium production reactors. I'm just saying, like, people at times think that like a billion is not a billion anymore. 25 billion with some of our one big, beautiful build plus ups, like we can do an awful lot.

17:51Ross Douthat:That's fair. You know, one of my recent interviews was with the head of an AI company. And, you know, the amount spent on data centers for AI is, you know, extraordinary. And so I just I have that in the back of my mind as perspective. So is it safe for astronauts to go to the moon? I ask because you had some really critical comments about some of NASA's failures on an earlier project, the Starliner project. And I guess I'm wondering, just even in terms of public support, right, for the space program, how essential is it that the safety of astronauts be the paramount thing versus how important is it for everyone to just be comfortable with risk and the possibility of death?

18:32Jared Isaacman:So I do think that it's impossible to undertake our mission, explore the worlds beyond ours without taking some risk. Now, I do think we have a responsibility to drive risk, you know, down to the greatest extent possible. In order to do that, you need to fully understand it. What am I dealing with right now? And that's why we have tests and qualification programs. Okay, we found something, we don't like it, we can't make it go to zero. How do we mitigate it to the greatest extent? How do we get comfortable with it? That should be inherent in how we operate as a space agency. But I will say at some point or another, you do have to go.

19:07Jared Isaacman:My comments reflect a culture that I've grown up in between flying high-performance aircraft, going to space twice, which is, you know, you debrief your successes and your failures, your shortcomings, your mistakes. You understand it, and then you communicate by it. And by doing that, it instills confidence with every other person in the room and everyone else who depends on those missions to be successful because you understood what you got wrong. If you don't do that, if you pretend mistakes never happened at all, then you invite them to happen again. And I don't know how we can ever get comfortable with that.

19:41Jared Isaacman:I did not use the press conference, you know, to bash Boeing about building a bad spacecraft or how we let these qualify. Look, this is hard. You know, the Russians are still flying essentially the same spacecraft for more than a half century. Not a lot of countries have built a vehicle that can take humans to and from space successfully. It is hard. We played a role in why that spacecraft was built the way it was, but worse in my mind. And that's where I chose to concentrate my energy on is that we did not own our shortcomings. We didn't declare a mishap a mishap when we should have done it. And we didn't have accountability when those bad decisions were made.

20:20Jared Isaacman:and we didn't have the right leadership that should have stepped in at the time when it was clear that we were going off course to correct that course trajectory. And that's what we called attention to. So really, it's imperative that that story was told before we step into sending our astronauts around the moon, before we start landing astronauts on the moon and building a moon base.

20:38Ross Douthat:Do you think that the Challenger disaster, which was my primary childhood encounter with the space program, and then the Columbia disaster later, Or do you think those created a kind of overhang of skepticism around the space program that needs to be overcome by Artemis?

20:56Jared Isaacman:No, I look, I I think the American public, the space loving public from around the world should understand that we cannot undertake missions like this without accepting some risk. And there there will be bad days. And that's unfortunate. it, but it's applicable to our people that undertake dangerous jobs every single day, flying off aircraft carriers, diving under the sea, working in nuclear power plants. These things are not without risk and certainly accelerating human beings on a controlled explosion into space where there's no atmosphere, no breathable air, and everything coming from the sun and the debris around you is trying to kill you.

21:35Jared Isaacman:Yes, it's a dangerous environment. And there are scenarios like the past, you know, catastrophic events where people say at times that made NASA too risk averse. And maybe so in some cases. And then there are situations like I saw with Starliner was what are we doing here? You are continuing to take risks that you don't understand. And by failing to communicate it and acknowledging where we got things wrong, you were inviting it to happen again. You were sending a message to the workforce that in this environment, failure is an option. And it's not. And that needed to be fixed.

22:43Ross Douthat:All right, so let's talk about the private side of space exploration, the role of private industry. You mentioned public-private partnerships and government contractors. You have a pre-existing relationship with Elon Musk. And in fact, your accession to this job was delayed for a little while when Musk and the president had a falling out. I think people perceive that to be closer relationship than reality. Maybe, yeah, perceive. Let's say there was a perceived delay or a perceived falling out. But regardless, Musk, I guess I'll say Elon because everyone says Elon. Elon has his own vision around the moon for SpaceX.

23:21Ross Douthat:He's recently said that SpaceX is pivoting from, you know, trying to do a direct Mars mission soon to aiming at the moon. What is the overlap in the relationship there? Are these sort of separate track projects? Is there going to be a SpaceX moon base and a NASA moon base? Like, how does NASA and SpaceX actually fit together?

23:41Jared Isaacman:Well, I would just say, I mean, since the 1960s, NASA doesn't undertake these kind of world-changing endeavors alone. We always have gone after it with industry. I think sometimes just because there's new names now, like Blue Origin and SpaceX, that there's this impression that this is like a whole new approach to going to space. No, I mean, in the 1960s, it was Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. And many of those names still exist today. And then we have new names. And some of those new names are SpaceX and Blue Origin and Stoke and Rocket Lab and all these.

24:09Ross Douthat:But they are, I mean, just they are actually sending astronauts and rockets up themselves privately in a way that was not happening in 1968. Oh, for sure.

24:19Jared Isaacman:I mean, that's how I went to space twice with SpaceX. So, sure, capabilities I would expect to evolve over a half century. We were the only game in town 60 years ago when we created this whole thing of space exploration. And we, you know, we cracked the code at NASA on the near impossible. We hand things off to industry where there's clearly demand outside of, you know, one and outside of a single agency like NASA and let a market develop. This is good for us. It allows competitive forces to do their thing and make products capabilities better and at lower cost. So that's fine. I'll just tell you, this is a good thing for us.

24:52Jared Isaacman:Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are under contract to build the landers that will take American astronauts back to the surface of the moon. And if you can build those landers, they're going to be able to use it to bring lots of cargo. I mean, maybe 100 tons of mass down to the lunar surface. I mean, we're going to be able to build out a base pretty quickly with those type of capabilities. You know, we are in a race right now against a rival, the Chinese. Their path is very similar to the approach we took with Apollo. You know, and look, we don't have as much schedule available as we did in the 1960s in hindsight, where we had, you know, near infinite time to get to the moon compared to the Soviets.

25:27Jared Isaacman:In this case, this could come down to a year or two. What I'll say, though, is just we spent four and a half percent of our discretionary budget in the 1960s to build out these extraordinary capabilities for the good of America, for humankind to go to the moon and back. Right now, we're a quarter percent, and it's in large part being supplemented by folks like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk willing to throw resources well in excess of what we've contracted them to do to provide a capability that someday could enable us to go to Mars.

25:54Ross Douthat:But is your expectation going forward that Musk, Bezos, anyone else who gets in the game, they will always be working in partnership with NASA in some way? Or is there a future where, you know, there is a kind of privatized, like actual privatized space exploration where there are bases being built and other things being done, space stations and so on that are just separate from the U.S. government?

26:18Jared Isaacman:This is a new domain where it should be NASA's job to take on the hardest engineering challenges, again, to attempt to achieve the near impossible. And we figure it out. We hand it off to industry and see if a market develops. Look, there was a time when the Army flew our mail, right? So if you're asking me, like, initially, I think it's going to be NASA astronauts that are stepping off the spaceship on the moon. I think it's going to be NASA astronauts that are helping construct the initial lunar base and doing a lot of the initial scientific research. Is there a world thereafter where SpaceX and Blue Origin and others are doing direct missions to the moon for commercial or even tourism reasons?

26:53Jared Isaacman:Totally. That would be a great day because it would mean NASA's cost to go into that environment would have decreased materially. But you know what we do then? We set our sights on Mars. And we do things that industry is not capable of doing, like building nuclear power and propulsion spaceships, which is actually a component of President Trump's national space policy. I don't think even with all the resources in the world, Blue Origin or SpaceX or any of the others is going to be in a rush to launch a nuclear reactor into space. You know who does that? NASA does that. And when we do that, we actually help industry make it possible to undertake a mission to Mars and explore the outer solar system.

27:27Ross Douthat:Let's talk about what industry gets out of space besides government contracts. As far as I know right now, Elon Musk doesn't want to launch nuclear reactors into space. He does seem to want to launch data centers for artificial intelligence into space. What is the potential advantage of having data centers in space? Is there one?

27:46Jared Isaacman:I would just say in terms of what is a space or an orbital economy, it has been like grossly overstated. So we have created a economy here on Earth that manufactures and builds things that we launch into space. But in terms of actually extracting more value out of the unique environment of microgravity than we put into it, we have not developed anything in 60 years other than launch, observation, and communications. And those are largely funded by government customers. Now, over time, it's expanded. So, you know, companies that are doing earth observation almost as a service for whether it's environmental, agriculture, or intelligence, DOW purposes, they have customers now all around the world.

28:28Jared Isaacman:That's good. That's winning. Launch is obviously the healthiest with demand from everywhere that it's ever been in the history of the program. And comms, that's a huge success story with Starlink. That might be the only example of like a true profitable program that takes advantage of the unique environment of space that consumers are paying for and creating value in excess of what it costs to do it. Amazing success story. Honestly, we don't have anything else from it. All the experimentation we've done at Space Station, cancer-fighting drugs, again, like 3D printing, you know, biotech, you know.

29:00Ross Douthat:Well, make it concrete since to a lay person, what is the potential benefit of, say, doing medical research in space? Like, just literally, why is there potential there?

29:11Jared Isaacman:Sure. So there's actually a way to almost densify cancer-treating compounds through crystal formulations that you could not do on Earth.

29:18Ross Douthat:Okay.

29:19Jared Isaacman:So gravity is really helpful almost all the time for us, unless you fall out of a tree. but there are certain things that you would want to manufacture in a microgravity environment. You think we've been experimenting with that on the International Space Station. I can tell you with all this industry that's waiting around for the silver bullet that changes everything, like we find we crack the code on a cancer drug that has to be formulated in space. You'll be seeing missions launch like crazy. We're going to have lots of commercial space stations up there. We hope for that day. It hasn't come yet.

29:49Jared Isaacman:So again, like launch observation and communication, there's real broad-based demand for people can generate a profit. in those markets. Beyond that, we're not there. Maybe these AI data centers can do it.

30:00Ross Douthat:What would be, again, as with the cancer drugs, what does space do for a data center? Why would you put a data center in space? Besides not having to do permitting in a US state?

30:10Jared Isaacman:It is energy. So, you mentioned before that, hey, people are throwing crazy money at building AI data centers. You brought this up in context of like Manhattan Project and our space budget. And one, it's because they believe that if you lose in this, like you may never catch up. So who's going to be really the first to ultimately crack the code on AI? And as a result, they're willing to spend to build massive data centers and procure GPUs. But what does it require? It requires power. And we are at a massive deficit on that. I mean, even our last major industrial nuclear power plant took like 15 years and$15 billion for a single gigawatt.

30:48Jared Isaacman:Don't hold me to it, but I think that's directionally right. That's not going to work right now. So I think what SpaceX and others are considering is, well, we do have a pretty incredible fusion reactor up there. Now, that's a good source of power. That's not the end of the argument. Just putting something up with solar arrays doesn't solve the problem. Heat rejection is a major issue in the vacuum of space.

31:10Ross Douthat:But you theoretically can draw more energy from the sun in space than on Earth?

31:16Jared Isaacman:I mean, can you draw more energy in space than you can on Earth? Look, this is not conclusive, right? There's energy conversion issues. And then, you know, are you beaming things back down to Earth? Are you doing on-orbit processing? Are there better locations that you could potentially than pure just low-Earth orbit, you know, or more creative orbits that might make this project more feasible? I don't know. Look, I think Elon Musk is probably the greatest engineer and entrepreneur for the last, I don't know, half century easy. He obviously feels pretty strongly about his views, and I want it to work.

31:51Jared Isaacman:I want it to work for SpaceX and all the other companies trying to figure out the orbital economy.

31:54Ross Douthat:Yeah, I mean, my core theory about space exploration has always been that you need some kind of commercial imperative woven in. Like if you look at the age of discovery right here on Earth, right, it's not just people sailing into the unknown for the sake of human ambition, as important as that is. It's also, you know, it's also about colonization and settlement, but it's also about people looking for ways to make money. And it seems like space needs that to sort of draw human energy upward on the scale that certainly your vision has in mind. Are there resources on the moon that people would ever extract?

32:37Ross Douthat:Can you imagine that happening?

32:38Jared Isaacman:So I think, by the way, you just said a good statement there on the scale that we all imagine. That's so key, right? I mean, do I think that the taxpayers, world governments will always make some investments in space for just the pursuit of breakthrough discoveries that benefit everyone? Sure. But is that enough to fund three or four space stations and a Mars outpost and a lunar outpost? I don't think so. So, yeah, you're right. We need that economic driver to remove or reduce the dependencies on the taxpayers to actually have the future that we all imagine in space someday. There will be breakthroughs.

33:13Jared Isaacman:We don't know what they are yet, but we are too early on in this journey right now to think we have it all figured out. Jeez.

33:20Ross Douthat:In the world where there's a moon base, you would be essentially looking for things on the moon.

33:25Jared Isaacman:Sure. I don't know anything on the moon right now that's going to be easier and more affordable to mine, manufacture, and then bring back to Earth than what we could make here on Earth. And that includes helium-3. Now, that, people believe, could be the key to a more efficient fusion reaction. Fusion reactors are inevitable, I have no doubt. So helium-3 will play a role in it. It has a role potentially in quantum computing. Certainly does have in various nuclear detectors. But point is, like, I don't have anything immediate to point you at and say, this will make economic sense in the moon other than this is directionally correct.

34:00Jared Isaacman:But I am hopeful and I would guarantee we will find things in space that will have enormous economic value. Hell, I mean, at some point in time or another, we're going to be mining asteroids. Like, that's definitive. Like, I don't know if the whole that asteroid's worth, you know, 10 quadruple trillions of dollars. But yes, there's real value there.

34:18Ross Douthat:Tell me again, what is one thing you would mine from an asteroid? And I'm just I know there's lots of possibilities, but just for a layman who's trying to picture a world where the dream of riches is propelling companies and people into space. What's a concrete example? Platinum. OK, good. That's a good example. Perfect. So the platinum mines in the asteroid belt.

34:42Jared Isaacman:Yeah, I look I don't want to. Everything is thrown off by like an abundance of supply. the moment you figure out how to capture even a single, you know, but for sure you are talking about rare minerals that are going to be in far greater quantity than you would have on Earth. And I don't think that that to me is just inevitable. I couldn't predict what lifetime it's happening in that we are actually capturing, mining, and then downmassing those minerals back to Earth, or maybe it's even manufacturing in space. But at least that you can reasonably predict is inevitable.

35:14Ross Douthat:And at some point, politics enters into this. You know, you mentioned that, you know, we're in a new mini space race with China to see if we can get back to the moon before they get there. But we're not in a world where we're going to be fighting China for territorial control of the moon anytime soon, right?

35:33Jared Isaacman:Oh, I look, I our job at NASA is really to think things through on like the peaceful exploration of science and discovery. Right. And I don't think that there is anything on the moon right now that's worth taking up arms over, right? Now, look, there is interesting real estate that we care about that's up there. They care about where there could be ice to work with. Is that something you go to war with over the moon? I don't think so. But it's certainly not lost on us that the high ground has always been of strategic and even tactical significance since the beginning of humankind. um thankfully we have a space force a department of war to kind of be out on the hill looking out for us as we undertake our mission um you know and again pursuit of peaceful science and discovery you know and in in china for example they they blur those lines you know they don't really separate their version of nasa from their kind of military focus in space so that's something we're

36:26Ross Douthat:you know keenly aware of okay yeah but the war can wait for the asteroid yeah we don't the asteroid mining wars of 2174.

36:35Jared Isaacman:You know, at least with the, I mean, we have to be real that when you take the people out of the equation, you know, is space a military domain? Absolutely, right? But at least when the people have been involved, even going back to the Apollo-Soyuz program, you know, those relationships in space, what they're doing there from a scientific perspective transcended politics and geopolitics on Earth. I would hope that would continue.

37:29Ross Douthat:How do we get to Mars?

37:32Jared Isaacman:So getting to the moon will certainly help us get to Mars. During my hearings, people were like, how can you talk about parallel tracking moon to Mars? That makes no sense. We have no budget for it. Of course it does. Said simply, if you can send a lander to the moon, when you see American astronauts step foot off a lander onto the lunar surface, we have the capability to send lots of mass to Mars, period. Now, there's a whole habitability thing. You know, keeping them alive on a couple of days to the moon is very different than keeping people alive six to nine months going to Mars. It's very different to land on one-sixth gravity versus one-third gravity without an atmosphere versus with an atmosphere.

38:08Jared Isaacman:And then how do you bring them home, right? That's the real hard part. This is where nuclear power and propulsion comes in. Obviously, a huge proponent of it. I've written op-eds on the subject. We will get America underway before the end of the president's term with nuclear power propulsion in space. It'll be an extraordinary demonstration. Kind of excited to talk about it in the months ahead. But that's a game changer for the speed of getting to Mars or our ability to get back or both? It's a game changer, in my opinion, for our ability to come home. It is not necessarily a faster way to get there.

38:41Jared Isaacman:So when you think of nuclear electric propulsion, I don't want you to think of airplanes. I want you to think of trains. Like, well, is that the way I want to go across the country? Maybe not me personally, but if I need to move a lot of coal or steel or iron, yeah, that's the way to do it. But NEP allows us to move lots of mass across, you know, really across our solar system. And the farther you get away from the sun, the more relevant it is. So will NEP increase reliability for moving lots of mass and potentially even people to Mars? Absolutely. When you get to Mars, now you have an energy source on the surface, which you can use to make the propellant on Mars to bring your astronauts home.

39:19Jared Isaacman:It's imperative. The alternative is you're literally setting up endless football fields of solar panels that are going to get covered in dust and debris, and then you're going to have to rely on the robots to go out and clean them. Like, we're starting to ask for a lot more miracles here versus can a nuclear reactor or lots of nuclear reactors embedded in some of these landers give us the power source to make propellant on Mars and bring them back? Yes. Could you go do, you know, uncrewed missions in the outer solar system past the point of the sun's utility, learn something, and actually come home without having to refuel?

39:49Jared Isaacman:Yes.

39:50Ross Douthat:That's pretty exciting technology. So what's the timeline for that tech?

39:54Jared Isaacman:We are going to do a demonstration by the end of 2028. Okay. We are going to send something under nuclear power and propulsion.

40:00Ross Douthat:And then what's a, I know this prediction is impossible, but what is a best case timeline for an actual manned Mars mission if things go well?

40:09Jared Isaacman:I think we would have to put a concerted effort in. Well, first of all.

40:14Ross Douthat:Everything, everything, there's political will behind it. The tech is there. Ten years. Ten years. Ten years. So mid 2030s. Yeah. So something that we could see. Yes. Certainly.

40:23Jared Isaacman:I would think in our lifetime, we're going to see it happen. To your point, like, what's the will? How many resources? Are we able to really focus all of our best and brightest, all of our energy and resources on that important objective? Is commercials capabilities mature enough? Have we evolved our nuclear capabilities? But yes, I think if we put our effort to it, we'll see it in our lifetime, could even be in 10 years.

40:42Ross Douthat:How important is the human element in these missions? Because we keep gesturing to AI. I think one of the assumptions that a lot of people working in artificial intelligence make is that AI revolutionizes spaceflight, but in part because it lets you send artificial intelligences deep into space where human beings can't go. We obviously already do that with robots, but how important is it that it's actual human beings who are making these leaps?

41:12Jared Isaacman:They're both important for some overlap on missions and some just very different. So, look, if our sensor capabilities now are so, so good, so much better than they ever were even a decade ago, that when you send a probe to, let's say, the outer solar system or we have a mission we're talking about to Venus potentially, it's going to gather so much information so quickly that by the time you send the data back to Earth through transmission delays, allow it to be analyzed, send your next command back of go investigate this or send me more information on that, you will have wasted an incredible opportunity.

41:47Jared Isaacman:So you're going to have to take advantage of all that data you're gathering for like literally on mission or on orbit processing, determine what you just found or learned or what problem you encountered, fix it, move on, and then send your status report back home. So this is inevitable, especially now when you talk about crewed missions, you know, going to Mars, you have 20 minute plus transmission delays. You're going to have to rely on AI in that crude environment for just on-orbit decision-making, troubleshooting. But I do think the human is important on missions that they're capable of undertaking.

42:22Jared Isaacman:Let's take Mars. Look, I think there's been three or four public announcements one point or another that it's like, hey, we've looked at this data. We've analyzed it from this sample. There's a good chance that there was, you know, microbial life here maybe at some point in time or another.

42:37Ross Douthat:I feel like that has been underplayed in the news because we have so many other things to cover.

42:42Jared Isaacman:But this has been going on for decades, right? This isn't like one single news release on this. It's been going on for decades, right? And I think there's plenty of scientists at NASA that are brilliant that would say, look, I'm 99 % sure that at some point there was microbial life, right? So short of like literally having a camera that sees something squirming around and beaming that back home, which we've never seen to be extremely clear on the subject. No one is going to believe it. No tentacles just outside the frame. I'm just talking, like, look, even under a microscope, you see something moving, I think people will be like, okay, that's real.

43:14Jared Isaacman:But short of that, and again, we have not seen that, I think the only way you're going to have that consequential discovery is astronauts are going to go there or they're going to bring those samples back or even maybe a robotic mission will bring them back and then we're going to put them under a lab here and somebody's going to come out and say conclusively, hey, this is 100%, right? So this is why you need a human in the loop on some of these things. Not to mention, it's just inherent in who we are. It's our destiny. We're curious. We want to go out and learn and discover. That's how we evolve.

43:40Ross Douthat:And is it consequential, life on Mars, in part because it suggests that we could live on Mars?

43:46Jared Isaacman:I think it just answers the question that we're not alone. How many of your friends you've ever, you know, you look up at the stars and have the conversation, like, do you think there's life out there? And I bet most people would say that, like, oh, I mean, we've got two trillion galaxies, and every galaxy has who knows how many stars in it. So sure, the odds suggest that there should be something out there, right? Well, does that change from like, surely it must be somewhere to if you find samples that's supported on Mars and signatures on Europa Clipper to what if it's everywhere, right? I mean, that's kind of the light switch moment that could happen when you start finding evidence of life on some of our closest neighbors within our solar system, which is one star across the broader Milky Way galaxy, which is part of 2 trillion others.

44:33Ross Douthat:But so there's a dark interpretation, though, of that, which is you realize life is everywhere. And yet we haven't heard from other civilizations. We have no evidence of advanced civilizations anywhere else in our galaxy. or any civilization. Or any civilization, advanced or non-advanced. We have no evidence of life, direct evidence of life. No direct evidence. And there's a lot of smart people who've looked at that and said, well, maybe that means that there is what, you know, the term, I think it's from the economist Robin Hanson, that there's a great filter, right? That basically it's so hard to become a multi-planetary species that even though life is everywhere, every species gets stuck somewhere around where we are, Achieving some things and then never sort of getting off our initial planet.

45:21Ross Douthat:Does that worry you, that possibility, that there's just some limit that we're going to hit in terms of our ability to get off Earth?

45:29Jared Isaacman:No, I mean, I don't, I think this great adventure that we are on, again, we are, it is our destiny to go venture out and explore and discover and moon is a next stop. Mars, we're going to have an outpost and we will continue to evolve our capabilities until we have the ability to explore other star systems beyond our solar system. I acknowledge that there are a lot of factors in humankind's limited history relative to the age of Earth that, yes, we could have destroyed ourselves before we ever had the opportunity, right? Right. So like the idea that we haven't had we don't have any evidence of intelligent life out there that's been able to reach out or communicate with us does not have me discouraged at all.

46:11Jared Isaacman:Look, we're only 100 plus years into our industrial revolution here where we even remotely have the capability to detect something, let alone our ability to communicate out there. And by the way, space is pretty big. Now, I think that, you know, space is big, but it has been around.

46:25Ross Douthat:It's big, but it's also pretty old, right? And a universe that was teeming with life would presumably have generated some other industrial-level civilizations, you know, a million years ago, 10 million years ago, right? No, we don't. That could have sent probes and...

46:45Jared Isaacman:No, we have no idea in that. I mean, for all we know, the most advanced planet, you know, life that's out there could be a water planet filled with dolphins that can't construct a rocket or something.

46:56Ross Douthat:We don't like. So it could be right. But that is back to that's a kind of human exceptionalism, right? Where you say the universe could be teeming with life. But our particular kind of life is sufficiently unique that you don't get lots and lots of intergalactic civilizations.

47:09Jared Isaacman:I just think if you think about the scale of the universe right now with how many, like we said it before, you got 2 trillion galaxies plus that are out there. Every galaxy has got who knows how many stars in it, how many of them have potentially habitable planets. Like, we don't. We can't put a ceiling on anything. And we couldn't possibly appreciate what could be more evolved than us other than, look, there are things we know based on our understanding of physics today. There is a cosmic speed limit, right? So if you can't travel faster than light, look, what are the odds that you would have some sort of an advanced species be able to arrive in a star system to a planet at a time when that life would have reached a point that we would consider intelligent life?

47:52Jared Isaacman:It's like at this stage, it's near impossible to imagine that. We have literally just dipped our toe in the grandest sea of all, and we haven't even begun to understand what's in front of us yet.

48:03Ross Douthat:But you think human beings can become a multi-planetary species.

48:07Jared Isaacman:I, I, a hundred percent. I was, uh, I was speaking to our associate administrator yesterday, Ahmed, and I was like, you know, you imagine people at a time going back many thousands years ago that were hollowing out a log to make their way across essentially a pond and probably thinking, man, I sure have it better than the guys before who had to swim it. Right. I was like, when it comes to, you know, in our present day at NASA and our capabilities to even explore our solar system, let alone everything around us, we're just hollowing out a log.

48:38Ross Douthat:We're hollowing out the log to try and get across the river, right? But somewhere out there, there is the equivalent of the oar or the sail, right? In this metaphor. And it seems like you could say, well, that's going to be when we figure out how to terraform Mars, or that's when we figure out we have a telescope that tells us that there's a habitable world that's X number of light years away, and we figure out a way to send human beings, I'll just be in cryosleep, right, to be science fiction-y about it. But like, when you're imagining that beyond your everyday duties as NASA administrator, are you imagining human beings primarily colonizing the solar system?

49:23Ross Douthat:Are you imagining us going into deep space? What is the sail or the oar that you're looking for?

49:29Jared Isaacman:No, it's a good question. Look, there are a lot of things we are doing in parallel right now. Sure, we need to build programs like Habitable Worlds Observatory, which is actually work that's being done here at Goddard Space Flight Center so that we can look out and try and identify exoplanets that have biosignatures, you know, start building the picture, have situational awareness on like the star systems around us. That's a good effort. But for the human track, like what do we need right now to continue this journey, make meaningful progress? What is, you know, what is the sail and the oars? Rapid reusability.

49:59Jared Isaacman:I mean, the moment we stop throwing away our spacecraft and we can do the equivalency of air-to-air refueling in orbit changes the game on the affordability to move lots of mass, you know, whether it's to and from the moon or Mars, that's a huge step. Nuclear power and propulsion. One, you need to be able to efficiently move a lot of mass there. And then when you actually get the nuclear power and propulsion to the surface, that's going to be your critical energy to power all the things you want to do there. But I want to point out, that's just the start of the journey. A lot of people would say like, well, NEP, you know, has negligible improvements over solar under these circumstances or whatever.

50:38Jared Isaacman:Yeah. And I can tell you too, if you go back to World War II, that there was a lot of disadvantages on a jet fighter relative to a piston airplane at the time. But, you know, that equation changed an awful lot in the 80 years since. We will get better. We will get better at our power conversion. We will run at higher temperatures, which will decrease a lot of our cooling radiation requirements. We won't need, you know, radiators the size of football fields. So just getting in that motion, that rep of moving things back and forth, our capabilities will evolve. We'll have our outposts on Mars, so we'll learn to live away from Earth.

51:12Jared Isaacman:We'll know if we can live for extended periods of time in, you know, sub 1G environments. And we'll take that to inform our next decision, which is why, again, it's important to have the continuous situation awareness building that our telescopes give us. I'm not necessarily in the camp of like, should we be colonizing Mars? That's not for me. I honestly, let the other great, brilliant dreamers do those things. Do I think we should have an outpost there? Should we get really good at moving mass materials and people to and from Mars? Totally.

51:39Ross Douthat:And then we need the platinum mines to draw the colonists.

51:43Jared Isaacman:Look, we have to cry. I'm not picking on any one particular mineral because who knows what changes in the future.

51:50Ross Douthat:I made you pick one. But we do need an economic driver for sure. Okay, last question. Just in the last 10 minutes, you said repeatedly, we don't have any evidence of any civilizations beyond Earth, let alone advanced civilizations. We're conducting this interview after President Trump, who you've praised repeatedly in this conversation, said that he was planning to declassify material related to UFOs, what gets called UAPs now. He described it as something like a very complex and interesting topic. Does NASA have anything to declassify that would be of interest to viewers of this program?

52:29Jared Isaacman:I'm not aware of anything that we would have at NASA to declassify other than say that I'm as interested in, you know, the president's message is probably any other space enthusiast out there. Now, I will say having, you know, I spent 10 years leading a defense contracting company. You know, we we operated fighter jets all across the country, simulating, you know, bad guy capabilities. capabilities, say, look, there are a lot of, as you would expect, exquisite capabilities that we have as a nation for, you know, for national security purposes that we have developed. All we have to do is look to the history books, right?

53:08Jared Isaacman:SR-71 was a pretty wild capability in the 1960s. Nobody, you know, nobody would have imagined that. F-117 was pretty wild. So do I think that there are probably capabilities we have as a nation that we developed and our adversaries that can do some pretty impressive things, you know. Sure. So I wouldn't be surprised if that were...

53:27Ross Douthat:So that puts you in the camp that says a lot of the UAP, UFO sort of encounters and also sort of vapors around it are covers for human technologies.

53:40Jared Isaacman:Yes. I would say, generally speaking, I think there are some that I'm aware of that were very easily explainable by not even phenomenon. Like this was, you know, a weather balloon at great range that reflected. I know those conclusively. I also know conclusively some of them were related to, you know, test programs that were out there. I mean, look, people misidentified a lot of what was flying in the, you know, 1960s and 80s, you know, in the middle of the desert with lights on at night. It looked strange. Turned out it was B-2. Turned out it was F-117. So I'm not surprised that that could potentially fall in it.

54:21Jared Isaacman:I would also ask people, again, this is a good, you know, kind of Occam's razor thing. If there was intelligent life that visited us from another world, where would you be interested in going to observe us? I mean, Times Square seems like a good spot. The Las Vegas Strip seems like a good spot. I mean, there's got to be interesting areas. Why would you always pick our naval bases? You know, why would you pick off the coast of Virginia or San Diego or Hawaii? that probably signals it's more of a national security interest, I would say.

54:50Ross Douthat:That makes sense, although I will say that there have been a number of UFO reports related to nuclear facilities. And you could imagine some reasons why an extraterrestrial species would be interested in our nuclear capacities.

55:04Jared Isaacman:I could also imagine that...

55:06Ross Douthat:Or even these capacities here.

55:08Jared Isaacman:Or, again, there's a lot of other people that are interested in our, you know, strategic deterrent as well. So, you know, I joke a little bit that I say that in my 60 days at NASA, I've certainly seen things that I can't explain, but they relate entirely to programs to build things that I have no idea why we're doing. But not aliens.

55:30Ross Douthat:All right. On that refreshingly concrete answer, Jared Isaacman, thank you so much for joining me.

55:35Jared Isaacman:No, thank you.

55:36Ross Douthat:Great questions.

55:36Jared Isaacman:I really appreciate it.

56:02Ross Douthat:Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlain, and Emily Holsneck. Jordana Hochman is our executive producer and editor. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker Mixing by Sophia Landman Audience strategy and operations by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski, Andrea Batanzos, and Emma Kelbeck Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Alison Brusek, Marina King, Jan Kobel, and Mike Puretz And our director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser Thank you.