Jared Isaacman

The next stop is the moon, which is what our course is on today.

But the president, even through his national space policy, committed us to the investments in nuclear power and propulsion to someday achieve American astronauts on Mars.

So to your second point on, is this expensive?

It is.

But what's different today than it was in the 1960s is it's not on the taxpayer's shoulders.

I mean, in the 1960s, we went to the moon with NASA's budget at four and a half percent of the discretionary budget.

Right now, it's about a quarter of a percentage of that.

Who's making up the difference?

You've got some fantastic entrepreneurs across commercial space industry.

Elon Musk at SpaceX, Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin, dozens of other companies putting their resources on the line here for a capability for the benefit of the American people and really the world.

Well, really, it's about what you're trying to accomplish on the lunar surface and what you can learn, right?

So if you have a orbiting...

base above the moon, which we have in our plans called Gateway.

That has potentially some benefit from a logistics perspective, but you're not interacting with the regolith, you're not constructing infrastructure, you're not mining, you're not doing in-situ resource manufacturing, which is essential to future Mars missions.

You're not able to develop a lunar economy above the moon, but you can develop a lunar economy on the moon.

So it's vitally important

Certainly, the President of the United States, President Trump appreciates the strategic significance of certain real estate out there.

No one is better at this than the President of the United States.

And some of the most important real estate that's within our reach, where we can, again, begin to realize scientific and economic value, it's on the lunar surface.

I hope someday my kids are going to be watching, maybe decades into the future, the Artemis 100 mission.