Jared Isaacman: NASA's Moon Base by 2028, Optimus Robots on the Moon, and 15 Years to Mars | Ep #274

He's a jet pilot who's flown in air shows and set around-the-world speed records. And then he did something epic, purchasing two private Falcon 9 Dragon missions. He commanded Inspiration4 in 2021, the first all-civilian orbital mission. And then in 2024, he commanded Polaris Dawn, where he performed the first ever commercial spacewalk, stepping out of a Dragon capsule into the vacuum of space. During his start at NASA... He laid out five key objectives, get America back to the moon, build a permanent moon base, begin using nuclear power in space, ignite a real orbital economy, and reinvigorate the science that lets us look for life among the stars. Jared, welcome to the Moonshots and Moonshot mates.

You know, we've known each other for 17 years, and I could not be more proud to have you on the show. Well, Peter, thanks for having me on the show. It's an absolute pleasure to reconnect. I'm going to challenge you a little bit on that. I appreciate the generous introduction. It's super early right now. I know it is. I have faith. I have plenty of time to screw things up, but I'll tell you right now, we are all, everybody at NASA, from leadership down to the engineers and technicians, we are having a great time right now. We're moving very quickly. There isn't a person who shows up to work every day at NASA that's not excited about changing the world in air and space, and everybody is just really enthusiastic about getting after it. Yeah, agreed. You know, you said something very nice that 17 years ago in Baikonur, I got you started on this mission. Is that actually true?

That is. Now, I mean, look, since kindergarten, right, I wanted to be an astronaut like a lot of kids that just look up at the night sky and, you know, imagine the possibilities. I just never thought it was even close to possible or achievable. That's why I became a pilot. And And I started undertaking some mini adventures, like flying around the world on those speed records. And somehow along the way, you found me and invited me to Baikonur. And it was during that trip, I was like, well, maybe it is a possibility. So you absolutely helped steer me down this path. And just so you know, I mean, it's only been a matter of days since I came back from my second visit to Baikonur.

I have to tell you, it was very different than the first trip. I didn't have any Russian delegations coming out to meet with me when you and I were on that journey. Yeah, that was the mission. I think Richard Garrett was flying into space. I'd actually brought Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergei to that mission, too. We watched the mission from a bunker about a half a kilometer from the launch pad and then went outside to watch it. It was like an epic. It was like the thunder of God before you. Yeah, I always describe it as we were like a solid par 3 away from the launch pad. When we were there, they have moved us back a little bit, I can say, as of this current launch.

But still, I mean, I walked Anil Menon. right up to the ladder of Soyuz, and then was involved in a bilateral discussion with our counterparts in Russia, a hundred yards away. I mean, a building right next to that fully fueled vehicle. So it's a, it's a little different. Crazy. Wait, was that first one, the one where you said, if anything goes wrong with this launch, what happens? So Sergei was there. We had two or three, you know, Soviet era Russians there, you know, with incredible outfits in the bunker. And when we walked outside, Sergei asked the question, so what happens if something goes wrong in Russian? And the response, which he translated was like, enjoy, it will be the last thing you ever experienced. Well, that's, I mean, there was plenty of risk before we ever got there.

Like we all had to go on a Soviet TU-154 airliner. I mean, this is the same plane that I think took out a lot of the Polish political leadership a few decades ago. So the entire Google leadership team, not to mention whoever else you invited on board, had some serious concentration risk on that old Soviet plane just even getting to Baikonur. It was. It was like Eric was saying, do not let the media know that we're here. It's so cool to have somebody that fearless running a government agency, that's got to be rare. But you've got the DNA for it. That's real cool. Jared, let me kick it off. You know, on this podcast, we talk a lot about AI exponentials, robotics, and have to imagine that living at this moment in the singularity, it's got a chance to really accelerate NASA's timeline across moon, Mars, and everything else. And the first question is, you know, we talk a lot about the large language models, the small embedded language models that are going into robots and everything. Can you imagine a time when NASA basically allows full autonomy on all of its robots and probes? And these robots and probes, whether they're in Titan or Mars or moving out to Europa, are on their own investigating what's interesting and

deciding what experiments to run independent of scientists back on Earth? A hundred percent. So, I mean, we still, no matter what, want to get the data back. It's just if you have a limited window of opportunity to do so, do you let the on-orbit, or I'm sorry, the on-mission AI make the determination of what is the most interesting data in the least amount of time I have available possible and send it home before perhaps destruction? And there's already a mission designed for that, which is da Vinci, which is going... to Venus. And in that pressure environment, that mission will not live long. So we're designing it from the get-go to have on-mission AI, and it will determine what actions it needs to take based on the data it's able to collect as quickly as it possibly can, use it to inform its mission direction, and then send home what's most useful back to the scientific community. So that's probably the first and best example, but just the beginning for where we should be going with this technology. The timelines with everything AI are compressing and compressing and compressing. So

Well, Jared, I would say NASA has a storied history of human spaceflight on the one hand, and on the other hand, sending lots of non-humanoid robots throughout the solar system. I'd be curious to hear your timelines, what you perceive as the future in the context of Artemis in the near term or other planets in the solar system for deploying humanoid robots with your NASA hat on throughout the solar system. And what role and what timeline you perceive humanoid robots, to the extent Friend of the Pod, Elon, has characterized the Optimus as the ultimate von Neumann probe for the solar system.

What role you see humanoids in constructing Artemis and other facilities elsewhere? Well, I think any place that we believe there is a realistic probability of building a, you know, an eventual human outpost. So the moon, for sure, I mean, we've been blessed with having, you know, this proving ground, you know, three to four days away from Earth. We are absolutely going to build a base there and make the most of it. So any area that you're going to have, you know, human involvement eventually, it would be crazy not to, you know, make a force multiplier and put humanoid robots there to do some of the work.

I mean, honestly, when you think about having human beings on the moon base and saying, well, what's their job going to be? It's like, I mean, the least possible. I mean, it's still incredibly dangerous the moment they walk outside. It's incredibly dangerous to be there in the first place. So, leveraging robotics there for all things from infrastructure, build-out, logistics is imperative. I mean, you want there to be no alternative but to put an astronaut outside the habitat for an EVA. And the same would be applicable for Mars, which is the next logical destination, the next stepping stone on this grand journey that we're undertaking.

But there's plenty of places, obviously, where why would we even need to require a humanoid robot there? You think about exciting missions to seek out signs of life or ancient life that could have existed. in our solar system. So take Europa Clipper, or I'm very, you know, optimistic that we might be able to commission a mission to Enceladus at some point in time, or, you know, Dragonfly, for example, going to Saturn's moon of Titan. We just need to build the best probe or discovery instrument for that mission to get us the data that we're excited for. And it doesn't necessarily have to obviously take on any sort of humanoid form. You'd like that, Slade, my bad. Dave, Back to you, pal.

Yeah, I love that split focus of, hey, we have reams of proprietary data. Let's AI it. And then trans-solar, you know, nobody in the commercial world, you know, I totally get the big budgets, but nobody in the commercial world is going to work on fusion or antimatter annihilation to get to other solar systems.

Amazing. Salim, over to you, pal. I have a quick anecdote where I used to be the head of innovation at Yahoo running their incubator in San Francisco. And we had NASA speakers come and speak because I wanted these developers to understand what real innovation looked like.

And we once had this kind of 70 plus year old fellow who'd worked on the Apollo program. And you have to imagine 300 tight jeans, white sneaker, gelled hair, MacBook developers all sitting in this room. And during the Q&A, I asked him, what's the biggest difference in the space industry between when you were launching on the Apollo program and today? And he said, huh. And he goes, maybe it's computers, because back then all information was transmitted via carbon copy paper. The pink sheet went here, the green sheet went. And you could see these 300 developers look up, and I could see their brains exploding one by one as they looked at the implications of this.

Totally incredible. You've kind of looked at this unbelievable transformation of NASA, where you have launch capacity, you have capital, you have technical expertise all locked up, and those are now becoming abundant. As those become abundant, how do you steer NASA? What does it enable, what does it provide for the private sector to take it to the next level?

anymore, hopefully helps us get back to some of those headlines that were made in the 1960s, but on a different level today. Well, you know, when you have all of the capability, you know, the biggest constraint for NASA has always been the rate-limiting step, right? When you see fleets of humanoid robots out there doing things, and when you envision the moon, becoming almost a platform that a broader ecosystem can build off of?

Well, look, I think in terms of rate, the biggest driver there is going to be just, I mean, it's going to be the breakthroughs in rapid reusability until, I mean, Starship is obviously the first example of a vehicle where we don't throw away the, you know, the upper stage, building multiple factories to mass produce that hardware, multiple launch pads. And of course, Blue Origin, New Glenn's vehicle, is going to have obviously already proven reusability with the first stage. I think Stoke is trying to do reusable first and second stage. I'm sure Rocket Lab with Neutron is going to get there. All of that is critical to bringing down the cost to accelerate mass to orbit.

And in which case, it doesn't matter if you're using it for commercial space stations, for commercial purposes, scientific missions, or transporting lots of mass efficiently to the surface of the moon. Now, that's key to everything in NASA. We're going to be able to get far more of our dollars doing the near-impossible tasks than simply paying for the cost to get there. Great example, I said we're thinking about repurposing something the taxpayers already paid for, which is the Engineering Development Unit of the Perseverance and Curiosity rover. It's just sitting there at JPL. That's probably, I don't know, a half a billion all in that's just sitting there.

No question, I'm like, well, we were all talking, why don't we just put it on the moon? It'll be a great rover and it can survive in the permanently shaded regions. The most expensive part of doing that is not the nuclear fuel, it's not the modifications needed for lunar surface, it's getting it there. And that's getting it there in the most mature and competitive launch environment that we've had in the history of the space program. So, the next breakthroughs that come thereafter with full rapid reusability is going to be enabling for everything we want to do, not least of which is on the lunar surface.

Now, again, if you're talking about armies of humanoid robots on the lunar surface as well that are actually going to start building out the infrastructure, you'll start to go from what NASA's vision of a phase one moon base, which is a lot of broke down stuff everywhere, as we learn the science of survival, which I refer to almost as a junkyard in early days, to that more utopian dome of a city that probably some of us envision, that's what's going to bridge the gap between those two worlds. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-compiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80% or more of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring

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Alex, over to you, pal. Yeah, pulling on this lunar theme, Jared, 20 years ago, you were a civilian pilot with ambition and you, in some sense, you bought your way into space. There are many civilian pilots out there right now, some of whom have written to me that I would absolutely love a path to the moon, a path to be basically a civilian settler corps, including apparently Peter, who would love to be civilian settlers or reserve astronauts with a way to the moon. Question for you, does NASA, do you and or NASA have any plans or have you contemplated setting up a civilian settler core to enable those trained civilian pilots who want to move to the moon or spend time on the moon to travel and move to the moon or to Mars? Or do you perceive that pathway as being purely commercial and not flowing through NASA? So there's a lot there to that. Let me just first say that having an aviation background is hardly a requirement anymore.

I mean, there are certainly advantages that come in, but if you think about what a crew of astronauts should look like going from the Earth to the moon or Mars, having one or two people with that background, important and helpful for sure. if you want, I think number one in this, and this also very much qualifies Peter, is medical professionals. The technology to enable humans to go to Mars is going to happen far faster or sooner than having the countermeasures in place for how demanding physiologically it is to be in space, not to mention psychologically as well, especially when you get to extreme distances like Mars. I just don't ever see a world in our lifetime where you're not going to have considerable investments in medical professionals supporting outposts on the moon and certainly Mars someday. Now, what does that mean? Again, what is NASA's charter again? I think we're out there trying to, again, unlock the secrets of the universe.

And every step, moon, Mars thereafter, is just a step on that journey for crewed and uncrewed missions. And, you know, there will always be a need for NASA astronauts. And I'd be shocked if you didn't see at some point in time that NASA astronauts played a role in helping train and certify commercial or private crews going on those missions. The same way that as a pilot, you know, whether it's an FAA examiner or an FAA designee, is verifying that a pilot is safe to fly in national airspace, to take off and land in what is something that is inherently dangerous. Well, you know, several times that once you start leaving our atmosphere.

So there'll be a role for NASA astronauts in this. And hopefully as costs come down, again, back to rapid reusability and you have the ability to put hundreds and thousands of people in space through, you know, through government programs, you're going to you're going to you're going to require a lot more NASA astronauts. But but no doubt there is going to be a time period where private and commercial will. far out to overtake that in terms of the number of people living and working in space on moon or elsewhere. And I'd love to think that the expertise inherent with NASA will help set up those private and commercial astronauts for success. Alex, we're going to we're going to speed run. The moon is a harsh mistress without the rocks falling on Earth. Rod's from God, Peter. Rod's from God. Dave, over to you, pal. Yeah. You know, you mentioned a second ago that the South Pole of the moon is a particularly harsh environment. Love to drill in on that. And And is it harsher in particular, or is it just the moon in general is harsh that you're referring to?

Well, I think the moon in general is rather harsh. But, I mean, you're talking about negative 400 degrees in some of the permanently shaded regions. I mean, we actually, you know, have survival problems in the south pole of the moon that exceed that of Mars. So, you know, it's certainly going to be the, as I said, again, the optimal proving ground that we've been gifted several days away from Earth for everything else that humankind should hope to achieve in space someday. So at least it's close enough to come home if we run into some challenges. So then what does that mean for this race that's on right now?

Your launch costs are coming down like crazy. And that's because of reusability. and at the same time the idea of having mass drivers on the moon as a way to get more things into orbit is a really compelling idea and so that idea you know is moving at a pretty good clip too so you know there's a view of the world where launch costs come down so much that you know when you watch one of these launches the amount of energy it takes to get a ton into orbit is just mind-boggling and and not being in the gravity well is really compelling you know just you can just railgun it right off the moon instead. On the other hand, you were just describing how harsh an environment that is. So actually manufacturing the first railguns on the moon and then getting something significant manufactured there to launch is a pretty daunting challenge. So how do you see the timelines of those two ways of getting things into space competing with each other?

Well, it's a really interesting question. Here's one where, again, you don't bet against Elon and his big engineering brain on the subject, how cool would it be to have a mass driver on the moon? I'm all for it. But it does beg the question a little bit that if Starship is, and just, again, broadly, rapid reusability is such a game-changer where you're turning around these vehicles in a matter of hours and your cost is essentially the... The consumables, if you have to bring a lot of the materials necessary to assemble, build, whatever it is you're looking to accelerate off of the moon with the mass driver to the moon, could you not just bring it from the get-go?

You'd have to be highly confident that, again, the costs to refine, extract, manufacture from the regolith on the moon, unless we're starting to get really going and retrieving asteroids and everything else will be lower. And then essentially, 3D printing it on the moon and using the mass driver to accelerate will be lower and more economical than transporting the materials to the moon in the first place through what should be an extremely economical form of bringing mass to the surface of the moon. But that's, again, people that are far smarter than me are thinking out the long-term picture on that. I just want to get us back to the moon because we've been waiting damn long enough. Yeah, we have. Salim. You know, there's a huge tension in geopolitics

When you look at the constraints that you're facing culturally at NASA, You know, there used to be this huge mantra that failure is not an option, right? And you're clearly, your mindset is one of nonstop experimentation and learning. What are the biggest hurdles that you're facing in shifting the culture inside NASA to something like the new model of how we build organizations? Well, I would just say that I don't think the culture of it, and I don't even say accepting more risk.

Look, really, a lot of what you see, at least in my opinion, when you see some of the things that SpaceX have done and how they choose to operate, is very similar to how NASA operated in the 1960s. I mean, we had the same 20-something-year-olds that were burning themselves out, brilliant minds doing incredible things, making tough decisions, extreme ownership, moving with urgency. and look how many people talk about NASA doesn't blow up rockets. Go back into the late 1950s, early 1960s on YouTube, and you can see plenty of examples of our iterative design philosophy not working out initially, and then rolling in what we learned into subsequent versions.

In a lot of ways, they've drawn on what worked well for NASA during that time period. They're far more efficient with their capital allocation than any government agency. There's no doubt about that. And we are just going back. I mean, that's what we're trying to do is pivot a little bit more in the direction of where we started and focusing, again, our resources on those kind of, you know, those near impossible type objectives. Now, where I'd say there's sometimes resistance is when people generally hate change. That's just human behavior. And absent competition and a policy of trying to make everyone happy for so long, trying to get people to stop doing what they're passionate about or what they've been working on for a long time, which could be awesome and very cool work, but saying, we've got to get back to the moon.

We've got to build the moon base. We can never give up the moon again. We have to help industry to the extent possible and rapid reusability as a true game changer, enabler for all the other things we want to do. Science is fantastic. I love Hubble. I love James Webb. I love all that we're working on. We just need to do more of it. We can't get comfortable launching flagship missions every 10 years. We want to be doing it annually. And even now, I'll tell you, in meetings, when somebody brings up, like, we're really excited about... about this. It's going to launch in 2035. We're really excited about this. It's going to launch in 2045. It's like, I don't want my grandchildren to be excited about this mission. I want to be excited about it. So those are the things where culturally implementing some change can be a challenge, but we're getting there. I love you for that. Let's talk about

Love it. Dave. Yeah. You know, if you if you achieve that goal, it seems like the technical risk is seems like a very doable challenge. You know, it's out there, but doable. Then you have this kind of foot race between are we trying to put boots on Mars so that we can then back up humanity on Mars someday? Or is it more likely that we start putting humans in orbit in O'Neill colonies in the asteroid belt and using that material, which is, you know, surprisingly abundant? Because you get these two science fiction views of the world, you know, or the future of humanity, one where there are many, many space stations out there.

and they're huge they have 10 000 people on them the other is no we've colonized mars and that's our backup copy of humanity and there's kind of a an equal foot race between those two views of where we're going to do you have a you have a preference versus bezos in that regard yeah very much so very much so yeah well i mean look step one uh we need rapid reusability and on-orbit assembly because whatever spacecraft are going to take humans to mars whether it's just the lucky few to support an outpost versus necessarily a colony or actually achievable missions. On-orbit assembly is everything. Rapid reusability is our step in that direction.

Look, from my perspective, we cross the oceans for a better life. It's extremely unlikely in any near term that you're going to go to Mars and have a better life or live on a space station and and have a better life. I think a lot of initial motivation in our lifetimes will probably be much more akin to going to Antarctica for an extended scientific duration or campaign down there. But it's just a step. I mean, again, we're trying to conquer the tyranny of distance that is inherent in our solar system and our galaxy and beyond. And we have to start somewhere. And we're lucky we've got a moon that's nearby to help us learn.

The next step is Mars. That is going to be another learning environment. Generally favor gravity, again, for the, you know, overcoming the physiological challenges of being in space. So I, you know, I guess we're getting totally we've evolved to be born and live in a in a space in a mega space station is not, I guess, out of the realm of possible. But I think a lot of the problems that we know we encounter when even keeping people on the space station for six months, even, you know, a six, a third of gravity is going to make a huge difference along the way. But presumably we will have conquered artificial gravity and such in that effort, too.

I love this saying, if God had wanted humanity to become an interplanetary species, she would have given us a moon, and we have one. Salim, over to you for asteroid mining. You know, asteroid mining has been this promise, Peter, you and I, you're kind of tracking that. You've invested and built companies around that. Do you think it's a real thing, or is it perpetually 20 years away? And if it is, does NASA take an active role, or do you just enable the private sector to go down there? Well, I think we can be helpful. Again, I think about, again, our primary objective is, you know, if you want your NASA's sole focus to be on, you know, stimulating the economic potential of microgravity or from asteroids or on the lunar surface, like, put it under the Department of Commerce.

You know, the Department of Commerce has a space office in that. Like, again, I do think foundational. Our job is to go out and answer the questions. You know, are we alone? Unlock the secrets of the universe. You know, world-changing, pioneering technological breakthroughs in air and space. From my perspective, if we are investing in the capabilities that are necessary to undertake missions to the moon, to build a moon base, to go to Mars, and along the way, you can have demonstrations or work with industry that bring us closer to asteroid mining, we should do it. We actually have some methods that we're exploring to do that.

The America's Competes Act actually allows us to put prizes out there. I'm very open to doing it, not trying to compete at all with the XPRIZE and that, But we could work or potentially partner in that. I'll let the lawyers weigh in on that. Go and do something cool with an asteroid. And we could put up $25 million. I don't know, hypothetically. But I would like to believe that by making investments in that, it's going to give us, I don't know, the hypergob. thrusters that we need for uh to reduce the cost for landers on the moon or mars someday you know it you know i think always has to be further in some of our scientific and exploration objectives as a as a space agency welcome to the health section of moonshots brought to you by fountain life you know ai is having an outsized impact on every aspect of our lives how we teach our kids how we run our companies it also is having a huge impact on health helping you prevent heart disease is one of the key things.

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I got to admit, I was there a lot during the first couple of seasons and I've been really busy of late. Imagine that. Well, you know, the way it plays out in the TV world is, you know, the U.S. and Russia at the time are cooperating in space because everybody's just trying to, you know, build and create and survive. And then something back on Earth, you know, creates tension. And then they radio up and say, stop cooperating with the Russians.

So here we are in a moon race with China. The competition is good. As you said, it's going to get everybody there faster. Do you have a counterpart in China that you talk to, or does it all get tied up? And, you know, we talk a lot about on the podcast about Kimmy K3 coming out in a couple of weeks. That's going to create all kinds of drama. Does that drama then come back to you? Six days, Dave. Six days. Six days now? Oh, geez. Yeah, that's a turning point. Give us the inside baseball. How does it actually work? Can you talk to China, or do you have to go to the White House and call from the bat phone, or how does it work?

I mean, you know, the foreign policy is established by the president and the secretary of state. Now, a lot of that policy has already been established with the International Space Station and our cooperation with the Russians for a while. So I have, I would say, you know, regular sounds like a lot. It's probably more quarterly, maybe a little bit more frequent than that, communication with my counterpart in Russia. Director General Bukhanov, I was just with him during the Soyuz launch, because there's already established norms of operation in half for more than a quarter of a century. And that certainly, again, has proven to transcend a lot of the, you know, the political climate that happens here on Earth.

Now, with the Chinese, you know, the Wolf Amendment pretty much restricts NASA from establishing any sort of norms, you know. So there is some scientific data sharing outside of NASA with universities and such. But that's, you know, so I would say. We are very much squarely in the competitor lane. We obviously watch what they do and have an appreciation for their approach. They very much watch what we do. I would just say in terms of your, for all my, I mean, I don't think it's a secret that, you know, the ultimate high ground of space at this point. I mean, that is a warfighting domain. So, you know, in the horrifically unlikely event, the day we never want to see come where, you know, things have devolved.

I don't think it's going to be a shooting war on the surface of the moon between troops. You know, I think that there's a lot of things that would go down in space that have far more strategic implications back here on Earth to affect whatever warfighting means they're trying to achieve before it would ever require, you know, boots on the moon duking it out on the surface. I hope that I hope there is no scenario where that ever seems like a good idea. Just a quick follow-up on that. What about just the more narrow case? When the SpaceX IPO came out, it was very, very clear that it's first come, first serve in low Earth orbit. And it's been a long time since on Earth we've had land grabs where, you know, hey, our Navy is finding new islands. We're just going to claim them. Well, that's a long past idea.

But now in space, low Earth orbit is first come, first serve. The moon is first come, first serve. So that that seems like is there any cooperation or does when the White House is deciding what the rules are, do they call NASA and you all get together and say, look, this is this is the rules as we see them? Or how does that how does that part work? Well, we're not I don't think anyone is talking about new rules. So we have the outer space treaty. And in some respects, sure, that is first come, first serve. And that if I'm putting a, you know, if we need to put a lander in a certain spot and we value that spot for whatever reason, you know, the first person to get it there is it.

But, I mean, look, it's a big moon. Even when you think about the South Pole, it's still rather, you know, it's still rather large. And, you know, we're still, even in NASA's moon-based plan vision of dozens of landers over the next few years during phase one, there's still a lot of moon to go around. And look, I think even when we think about low-Earth orbit and the orbital regimes that are available for data centers, comms, there's a lot of opportunity there. I think just making sure we are sharing information in terms of the orbital trajectories is obviously vital. And I know many in industry have spoken out.

You know, pointed out that if we fail to disclose information about where these orbital constellations are going to, you know, where they're going to propagate, then that creates collision risk and problems that impact everybody. And that's that's something, again, that I think everybody, even in times of conflict, when we have airliners flying around the world, we're communicating with each other. There's transponders and we're we're avoiding potential hazards in that respect at all costs. That needs to happen better in space.

I'm curious, Jared, you've made public comments in the past commenting that you estimate a 90% probability of life or former life on the Mars subsurface. I'd be very curious to hear, what is your mental model of non-Earth-based life in the solar system, in the universe?

Does it look more like panspermia? Does it look more like life is ubiquitous, life is rare? What is your mental model at this point? So first of all, I think the only, I was discounting when I said 90%. I think if you talk to some of the brightest minds here at NASA, they would give you almost 100% certainty that at one point there was microbial life on Mars. And I think really we're in this seeing is believing, I can't, no one's willing to make the declarative statement based on, I would say, I want to say failed efforts, but they were kind of swinging and misses in the past that people said for sure it was there, and then they walk it back.

I just don't think the scientific community is going to reach that consensus unless you bring those samples back to Earth and you get enough people looking under a microscope or, you know, that's just an example, you know, not quite literally in that to say, okay, it was there. Now, if... If it turns out to be the case, and I think we're very much talking, again, very dead microbial life. I mean, for all purposes, Mars is at vacuum. I think it would be extremely unlikely, like a virtually nonexistent chance that there's anything still active there. But if you can prove that there was, at one point, microbial life there, and then Europa Clipper starts sending back some interesting data, and Titan, you know, you send Dragonfly to Titan, you get a mission off to Enceladus. And this is all in our backyard. This is our star system, right? Let alone the billions of other stars out there, the trillions of other galaxies, and all of the exoplanets that would be in Goldilocks zones. It changes the dynamic a little bit from, surely it must be out there somewhere, to what if it's everywhere? Now, So, look, there is certainly, you know, an evolutionary nature to this and, you know, a technological, you know, filter you have to break through to some extent to actually have to cross into the intelligent life to, you know, come and visit us, you know, to, you know, which I think just, look, there's a lot, again, with the tyranny of distance in space that makes that, you know, a substantial obstacle.

But I certainly believe that as we undertake more missions like Dragonfly and Europa Clipper and get even more vans where nuclear power and propulsion maybe can take our probes there and back with greater ease, that we might reach conclusions that at least, you know, you know, that, you know, probably to answer the question that we are we've been entrusted to to solve is whether or not we're alone. You're arguably the NASA administrator during the most extraordinary time of scientific missions as well. I mean, Dragonfly looking for the chemistry of life on Titan is pretty extraordinary. Can you imagine a time where you're like 10X-ing or 100X-ing the science missions out there with AI and robotics?

I mean, the price of manufacturing is plummeting by allowing yourself to increase the risk and just really aggressively sending out probes. Here, here. I'm 100%, Peter. I think what we're faced with, to some extent, and maybe this is a budgetary cycle point, is I do think that once big flagship programs have been greenlit, There is a risk element to it, too, which is it can't fail, so therefore, I have to build in more and more redundancy. If it's going to cost this much, then it better do even more than what I originally intended. A $1 billion, by definition, flagship program becomes $3 billion, and as a result, it takes a really long time to come to fruition.

But I think there's another element to it, too, the fear of what comes next. That's also a human nature thing. A lot of us, you see across people's professional careers, they kind of entrench themselves and build moats and walls around whatever they do for almost job security to some extent and never want to engineer themselves out of a job. And then there's some extraordinary companies out there where people can't wait to engineer themselves out of a job because they believe whatever they work on next is 10 times cooler. we need to do the same thing here uh so that that's kind of the the human side of it aside from where technology will benefit us is that if i'm working on dragonfly i'm going to bang this thing out so fast because whatever i work on thereafter is going to be 10x that and then get all of our teams our our science mission directorate budget seven billion dollars a year do you believe with what you know to be coming into existence between ai and additive manufacturing that with $7 billion a year, we couldn't be cranking out seven dragonflies a year?

Hundreds. Yeah, right? So I'm totally with you. We have to move in that direction. And that's a cultural change, too, not to mention, obviously, the technologically enabling. But it's just a matter of time. Alex, you have a bunch of your access to that AI, being a government agency. like when Mythos came out and now, you know, Fable 5, did you get preferential access and can you use your government position to get the latest, greatest stuff? Because that's going to become an issue very soon. It's already, you know, it was an issue just a few weeks ago for the first time in history, but that's the bellwether for the future. But do you get special access to Frontier AI going forward? Yeah. So, I mean, I really have no interest in wading into any of the policy discussions in terms of what has to be made available to government in advance and whether it's optional or not.

I think that Director Kratzios at OSTP and all those that contribute to ensuring government agencies are armed with the best technology for the good of the nation and humankind. They're doing that well. I'll leave that over there. I'll just say, where we have some access, when you think about things like nuclear power and propulsion, again, giving birth to NASA's nuclear-navy equivalency, you have a lot of data that would have come from a world that needs to be constantly doing analysis in that arena for a variety of programs. And that could be an accelerant for some of NASA's ambitions that, you know, wouldn't be as applicable, I'd say, in the commercial or in the private sector, if that makes sense.

Alex, as we enter our final segment, let me give you the leadership here. Please take the lead. Beautiful. I have to ask, Administrator, this is, I think, the question on the minds of many people I've spoken with who would just love to hear your perspective, a bit of context. The Department of War recently dropped their fourth release under the presidential unsealing and reporting system for UAP encounters. The White House and the Department of War and other cabinet-level agencies have seen sort of, I would argue, a C-shift in terms of how they talk about UAPs and the possibility of non-human intelligence.

As we speak, I think based on the headlines I was seeing right before we started this recording. Representative Burleson is introducing right now an amendment to the NDAA to encode in statute a variety of UAP-oriented reporting requirements. So I have to ask you the biggest question, I think, and you may be gestured at this earlier by speaking of NASA's ultimate mission as answering the big questions of, are we alone? What is your position on the allegations regarding the possibility that there's been an 80-year-long legacy program? What is your position on the so-called Fermi paradox? What is your position? NASA had a study group a couple of years ago that was publicly announced and held a press conference on UAP studies. If I could bundle this all up into one big question, what is your position on all of these allegations that there has been such a legacy program? So what I would say is since the, first of all, there's already, you know, statutory language that goes back to, I want to say 2022, that created the arrow group within the Department of War, where it's mandatory.

uh, you know, public disclosure of any information related to UAPs. So I don't know if we, if this is a matter of law anymore, uh, because that got supercharged under president Trump and his, what we interpret as a direct order, the executive order, he put out a truth that said, release everything. And within a week of that, you know, I was, uh, you know, in the situation room with the heads of, uh, you know, almost every government agency. And, uh, and we all went in there like, what do you know? And what I'll tell you is, there is a top-down push from the president and the Homeland Security Advisor saying, if you have any data on this, I don't care what classification level it is. It has to be disclosed, and this is under the pursue effort.

And if you go through those four tranches, I mean, I'm telling you, we have released video footage, photographic evidence, eyewitness account. Some of them are from FBI agents that took the footage on some of these. You're talking highly credible individuals on sightings that we can't explain. Now, I do want to be very clear here. Can't explain right now does not mean it's unexplainable. We are gathering data. The best example is think about your doorbell cams. We have cameras on everything. I mean, you've got drones that are up continuously right now in combat zones, right? And there is absolutely, I mean, I can't tell you it's conclusive.

You got a drone with an IR camera that catches something flying in the bottom corner. It's almost off frame, right? And is it a missile because it's in a combat zone? Is it another drone or is it something else, right? And the president said, put it out. It turned to basically citizen scientists. Put it out there. We want to combat the notion that this is not a subject that people want to be transparent about and that there's stigma associated. Put it out there. And again, like some of it, pretty wild stuff when you look at it. Some of it I look at and say, you know what, if I had a couple scientists and I had a few other video, I'm pretty sure it's a balloon or I'm pretty sure it's a bird or I'm pretty sure it's an Iranian, you know, one way attack drone. But based on the angle, I can't say that for sure. But then there's other stuff that honestly, we can't explain what it is. And the president is pushing it out. I will tell you, I have...

immense access and have been a seat at the table since the get-go on this. I have no information, no knowledge. I take a lie detector test on any crash spaceships or bodies or biological organisms on this. But for sure, we're gathering a lot of data and there is some unexplained anomalous phenomenon, and we are putting it out there as part of these disclosure efforts. What is your, just a quick follow-up then, there have been a number of House and Senate hearings where a number of whistleblowers have testified under oath that there has been an 80-plus year long U.S. government and contractor effort to collect and reverse engineer UAPs.

Again, in speaking with folks before this interview, this was the single biggest question they wanted me to ask you. What is your position on these allegations that other government agencies, perhaps portions of NASA even, have been involved in such an effort, even though I take you at your word, haven't seen anything firsthand. But nonetheless, there are a number of whistleblowers and enough whistleblowers that Congress has already taken steps, as you mentioned, via, I think it was the 2022 NDAA, which incorporated the RO statutes. What is your position, speaking either as an individual or as administrator of NASA, on all of these allegations. My position on this is that, look, I don't want to comment as to the credibility of individuals. Ever since I was first nominated to this position, I get dozens of emails every day from some very bright and smart people giving their views and thoughts on things NASA should be doing or things that NASA has done. And some of it I look at and say, this is really insightful.

And some of it, I say, that falls outside the bounds of what I think is perhaps credible on that. Just because somebody who worked for the government or had a clearance does not necessarily mean that their interpretation of what they saw is accurate. So, meaning, I saw the same videos that, and they've been disclosed, by the way, that people were referencing saying it was 100% an alien spaceship. And we put these videos out, and you can look at them and determine whether or not you think that to be the case. And I think some of it is certainly unexplained, based on what we know. And I think some of it, if you probably...

put enough people behind it, you'd say that was a weather balloon, that was an Iranian one-way attack drone or something of that nature. It would be great if we had alien spacecraft. I mean, that would definitely move the timeline forward by a couple of decades, if nothing else. I assume, Jared, you'd be quite excited if all of these allegations amounted to something non-trivial. Yeah, look, I mean, it's what our job is here, right? I mean, whether you're a space enthusiast or the head of NASA, don't you want to know if there is intelligent life out there? Isn't that, again, I think part of the greatest adventure in human history? If there was some crashed ET-level kind of technology that allowed you to exceed the cosmic speed limit, then we'd be doing everything we could to reverse engineer it and get it going, because I want to know what's in other star systems out there.

So, if it were true, we're terrible at reverse engineering, because I don't think anyone would argue that what the B-2 or the B-21 or the SR-71 was capable of doing is well within the realms of physics and our technological means at that time period, not something that would have been derived from aliens, and certainly not something that would have helped aliens get from another star system uh you know to the uh to earth in that time period but look again we're putting things out it's very forward-leaning um but i have not seen anything there's no secret programs that i'm aware of related to biologics or or crashed uh when i've interviewed elon on the subject he said i would know but yeah you wouldn't shouldn't we have better photographs we have great we've got great cameras why are they all so crappy celine you want to uh close this out with a question i don't believe i would also just put it and you just say like it you know look if i if i came all this distance from another world i'd be very curious about i mean that some of the best people watching ever uh... is in times square uh... it's uh... it's on the las vegas trip like why are they showing up uh... where we uh... where we test our weapons fire you know

like that and they see if you know they seem to be that they seem to be and i'm not trying to be dismissive like i said this is what this is a subject that if you are a true space enthusiast If you're excited about it, you should want to know. You should be excited about it. So I'm not being dismissive of any of the claims. I'm just saying they tend to seem to show up where we keep our naval ships and where we test our advanced weapon systems. You want to ask Imad's closing question here, Salim? Which one? I can't remember. So Imad asked, when we went to the moon, the saying was we went to the moon because it's hard.

So what's the new organizing goal that keeps everybody reinvigorated? You said before Apollo had a singulitarian mission and now we're sort of spread out. Is there sort of one thread that pulls them all? Yeah, I mean, and I think just in the same way that going to the moon was hard, All of the pioneering technology to get there had a direct benefit back here on Earth. The same is, I think, equally applicable. To me, this is all setting up for the day that astronauts plant the stars and stripes on Mars. We are going to the moon, and we are building a moon base, first and foremost, to master the skills to go to Mars.

It's just as you said before, Peter. We've been given this gift of a moon three to four days away from us to test out all of the capabilities from the spacesuits to the ECOS. habitation, the physiological countermeasures for being in the harsh reality of space, for in-situ resource manufacturing, for propellant life support systems to get to Mars. Amazing. I hope everybody watching agrees with me that, you know, Jared is one of our most extraordinary administrators. Buddy, I have known many. I have never been more excited in my life for what NASA is going to be doing. Thank you for your commitment. Thank you for stepping into this role and really bringing all your entrepreneurial energy, your vision, your engineering, your science, your passion to this.

Grateful so much. Well, can I just reciprocate and say thank you for your endless, extreme optimism in every one of the subjects that you take interest in and every one of the companies you create and where you choose to put your energies and resources are all for the betterment of humanity and it's infectious. So thank you, Peter. Thank you, buddy. Thank you. on behalf of the moonshot mates and everybody listening awesome can't wait to to watch your success next year and thank you administrator thanks guys truly a blast take care