Eric Berger

The goal is the same.

And actually, the plan is to try to accelerate the Artemis program to get humans back to the moon from the United States and its partners as quickly as possible.

The reality is that the Artemis program had kind of been floundering.

Dates had been slipping year for year.

The program costs had been going up.

You know, each launch of the rocket and spacecraft as currently configured is more than $4 billion.

So all told to date, the Artemis program has spent something on the order of $25 billion.

And so the NASA administrator essentially tried to take a rocket that was overpriced and sort of get it in a more affordable and useful configuration and fly it more frequently.

I mean-

What we were dealing with was the space launch system, which only launched every three or four years.

And that's just not a sustainable program.

You need to fly often because otherwise you're, you know, the people who are working to launch, you need a kind of a cadence or a rhythm.

You know, imagine if you had a football team,

that played one game every three or four years.

I mean, it would be sort of difficult to manage that.

He's sent out a pretty big ask of both people at NASA and the private companies it works with, Boeing, Lockheed, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other companies.

But he's making some internal changes that give him a chance.

You know, they're hoping to fly the Artemis II mission, send a crew around the moon in April, and then fly another mission in low Earth orbit in 2027, and then potentially do a lunar landing in 2028.

When I hug my kids, that's your fuel.

That's your why.