Jared Isaacman

Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are under contract to build the landers that will take American astronauts back to the surface of the moon.

And if you can build those landers, they're going to be able to use it to bring lots of cargo.

I mean, maybe 100 tons of mass down to the lunar surface.

I mean, we're going to be able to build out a base pretty quickly with those type of capabilities.

You know, we are in a race right now against Arrival, the Chinese.

Their path is very similar to the approach we took with Apollo.

And look, we don't have as much schedule available as we did in the 1960s in hindsight where we had near infinite time to get to the moon compared to the Soviets.

In this case, this could come down to a year or two.

What I'll say, though, is just we spent 4.5% of our discretionary budget in the 1960s.

to build out these extraordinary capabilities for the good of America, for humankind to go to the moon and back.

Right now, we're a quarter percent, and it's in large part being supplemented by folks like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk willing to throw resources well in excess of what we've contracted them to do to provide a capability that someday could enable us to go to Mars.

This is a new domain where it should be NASA's job to take on the hardest engineering challenges, again, to attempt to achieve the near impossible.

And we figure it out, we hand it off to industry and see if a market develops.

Look, there was a time when the army flew our mail.

right?

So if you're asking me like initially, I think it's going to be NASA astronauts that are stepping off the spaceship on the moon.

I think it's going to be NASA astronauts that are helping construct the initial lunar base and doing a lot of the initial scientific research.

Is there a world thereafter where SpaceX and Blue Origin and others are doing direct missions to the moon for commercial or even tourism reasons?

Totally.

That would be a great day because it would mean NASA's costs to go into that environment would have decreased materially.