Jared Isaacman

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

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 enhancing our infrastructure for terrestrial infrastructure across our centers.

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 astronauts 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.

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.

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.

Just to give you a sense, though, the Manhattan Project adjusted for inflation was $30 billion.

And we really knew nothing about that at the time.