Jared Isaacman

And what a travesty that we haven't been back.

And I can tell you how we got there.

We had a great Cold War rivalry, our ideology versus theirs, and 4.5% of the federal budget and the will of the nation is what happened.

And once we got there and we went a handful of times and collected enough moon rocks, that was an expense that was no longer palatable.

I will say for 35 years, as taxpayers, we spent over $100 billion to return to the moon.

35 years later, we haven't been able to do it.

That's obviously a big problem that we need to fix.

There's probably a lot of underlying reasons associated with it.

It's interesting.

Some of it goes to even the competitiveness that we have with the competitive nature of our country, our great geopolitical competitor in China that now has incredible second mover advantage on us.

What I mean by that is take the Manhattan Project.

We know something can be done and we resource it accordingly.

We gather up the best and brightest and we set up locations all around the country to

to contribute and bubble up to this grand endeavor, which was to build the atomic bomb.

We did the same thing during the space program.

We opened up Stennis in Mississippi to do engine work, and we set up Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama to build the actual rocket, and Kennedy Space Center, what a great location to shoot a rocket going eastbound.

You staff up all these great locations, and it all bubbles up to a singular purpose, and then you get it done, and then what?

you know, the mission kind of loses its way a little bit.

And then everybody goes into self-preservation mode and it's like, well, let's move on to other broad-based science or other things, lots of little things that we're going to entrench ourselves into.

And then what happens is when you are ready to re-rally those resources back towards their original goal, it means a lot of people changing what they've been accustomed to for some period of time.