Jared Isaacman

Look, there are a lot of things we are doing in parallel right now.

Sure, we need to build programs like Habitable Worlds Observatory, which is actually work that's being done here at Goddard Space Flight Center so that we can look out and try and identify exoplanets that have biosignatures, you know, start building the picture, have situational awareness on like the star systems around us.

That's a good effort.

But for the human track, like what do we need right now to continue this journey, make meaningful progress?

What is, you know, what is the sail on the oars?

Rapid reusability.

The moment we stop throwing away our spacecraft and we can do the equivalency of air-to-air refueling in orbit changes the game on the affordability to move lots of mass, whether it's to and from the Moon or Mars, that's a huge step.

Nuclear power and propulsion.

You need to be able to efficiently move a lot of mass there.

Then when you actually get the nuclear power and propulsion to the surface, that's going to be your critical energy to power all the things you want to do there.

But I want to point out that's just the start of the journey.

A lot of people would say like, well, NEP has negligible improvements over solar under these circumstances or whatever.

Yeah, and I can tell you too, if you go back to World War II, that there was a lot of disadvantages on a jet fighter relative to a piston airplane at the time.

But, you know, that equation changed an awful lot in the 80 years since.

We will get better.

We will get better at our power conversion.

We will run at higher temperatures, which will decrease a lot of our cooling radiation requirements.

We won't need, you know, radiators the size of football fields.

So just getting in that motion, that reps of moving things back and forth, our capabilities will evolve.

We'll have our outposts on Mars, so we'll learn to live away from Earth.