Jared Isaacman

NASA stated we will achieve the national imperative to return to the moon and establish an enduring presence before the end of President Trump's term.

Now, our rival has stated before 2030.

So it's not hard math.

That's less than one year of margin, and they might be early.

And if recent history says anything, we certainly might be late.

President Trump does not like to lose, and if I'm doing my job right at NASA, that won't happen.

Now, I've spent the first few months getting my arms around the challenges and the opportunities, and it generally revolves around ensuring that the extraordinary resources that are made available, I mean, NASA's budget is $25 billion a year, and concentrating them on the most pressing objectives,

clearing out needless bureaucracy and really any obstacles that impede progress to empower the workforce and make sure our capital allocation is done in a thoughtful way that ensures desired outcomes are achieved and ideally ahead of schedule.

So to that end, we are standardizing the SLS rocket, increasing launch cadence from years to months.

We're inserting a new mission in 2027 to buy down risk and increase confidence for lunar landing attempts in 2028.

As I've said many times, Artemis is a program.

Where we begin with SLS is not where we end.

There will be dozens of missions living on long past where Apollo 17 ended with the aim of affordable and repeatable crew and cargo missions to the surface for decades into the future.

We're also going to stop leaping right to the dream state as a service and build a moon base step-by-step in an evolutionary approach.

We're going to start with CLPS programs and LTV-style landers and rovers.

We're going to provide a strong demand signal to industry for

launch, landers, rovers that we can outfit with power, navigation, communication, surface improvement capabilities, scientific and other capabilities that we can experiment with to ultimately inform the phase two infrastructure and move towards long-term habitation.

So the folks in this room, if you're ever coming to pitch me on the Mars-based dream state as a service where the only customer is NASA, costs billions of dollars and it's never been done before, I can assure you we probably won't be that receptive.

We're not going to force an orbital economy where it doesn't exist, but I can certainly provide a demand signal for what we need in line with President Trump's national space policy.

And we are going to do everything we possibly can to ignite the space economy that we all know is inevitable.