Jared Isaacman

We have domestic and international partners.

So why does it all take so long?

Why does it cost so much?

And what are we going to do about it?

So lots of those answers are because we have lacked real competition for decades.

After the last space race, we were the only game in town.

So we built partnerships all over the world to spread goodwill.

We spread ourselves thin with broad-based science.

We took on lots of side quest projects, some of which are very cool, but ultimately distract from the world-changing mission the taxpayers have entrusted us with.

It costs a lot because we outsourced a lot of our core competencies.

Industry consolidated.

We let stakeholders set the priorities to serve constituent interests and adopted policies in the attempt to make everyone happy.

Maybe make everyone happy other than the American people and really people all over the world that were waiting for the headlines that only NASA was capable of making.

As a result, you get moon rockets that fly only every three-plus years, the worst cadence by far of NASA-designed rockets, hardware that is obsolete by the time it's delivered, 51 nuclear propulsion programs that have never flown, less flagship science and discovery missions, less X-planes, less astronauts in space, less kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween.

I don't like this.

President Trump doesn't like it.

Clearly, President Trump doesn't like it and doesn't like it given what he's trying to accomplish in national space policy.

But maybe this was tolerable to some when there was no geopolitical rivals capable of challenging America in the most important strategic domain.

But that's not the case anymore.

Not anymore.