See the Artemis III Rocket w/ NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman（原声文稿）

Hi, it's me Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome to NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

This place is busy because the Artemis program is ramping up.

We're adding new missions to the Artemis program. We're seeing launch providers ramp things up like crazy.

We're seeing orange rockets get stacked. We're seeing X planes come out. We're seeing a ton of stuff happen.

So I'm about to go inside one of the most iconic buildings in the entire world, NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building.

And I'm going to speak with the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman. Let's go. Jared good to see you man. I'm fantastic. Good mind if I mic you up here.

Let's have you stick it on here To the VAB. Thank you.

You know I gotta say it's been a hot minute since I've been in this thing And there's been a lot of action in here since I've been in here So well give me the hit how many times you come to the VAB?

I don't know three or four times You know something like that so I mean I Obviously I launched from space here twice and I didn't actually see the inside of the VAB until I was an asset really and I I was I was blown away right oh there's so much history right here and the scales is so hard to you know right I mean it's so much history and then obviously look at it from the exterior you're like well that's gorgeous it's a very big building but until you walk inside it you see the volume in here and you're like there were a lot of Saturn prides in here there were a lot of shuttles in here and you can see it yeah you rockets get lost in here yeah you can't even tell right now we have no an SLS rocket you back in Even when we brought, obviously with leading up to Artemis II, I was in here quite a bit and then when it came back in, you'd get lost if you were trying to find a fully assembled SLS in here.

It's incredible. That really is absolutely insane.

Sometimes when you just stop and look at it, it takes the parallax to see like, oh that is beyond my brain's comprehension of how big this building actually is. There's nothing does it justice, really, until you're standing here. It's crazy.

So you've been extremely busy. I mean are you you're not even a year quite in the job yet?

No, uh, no, it's December before at a year, but It's been yeah, we've been staying pretty active right now I mean, there's just not a lot of time to get as much as we want to get done So yeah, well, I mean some of the morning some of the you know the biggest changes that I've seen It's just it feels like there's just a lot of energy that you've brought I you know, you're constantly talking about like re -empowering NASA to do what you did during the Apollo program and and how do you restart that machine.

How do you kickstart that machine to fire back up and you're seeing the evidence of that. What's that like what is in your mind?

How are you what are you physically doing to empower that in the employees and empower that throughout NASA?

Yeah well I want to start by saying it's not as it's not as hard as you as you might imagine because everybody comes here because they want to do this kind of thing right like that's a thing.

There's in anyone at NASA that wanted you know three and a half years between Artemis -1 and Artemis -2.

So you're just, you're unleashing the potential of the workforce, their desire to do things, right?

I mean, you know, take, you know, take the QD and the hydrogen seal issue on that.

So that was known, it was known for a long time, and then, you know, you heard Jeremy talk about it and Amit talk about it during the Artemis update, and saying like, look, yeah, we knew it was a bad design, but you know, one of our vendors wanted to charge like tens of millions of dollars of which there's really no excuse for that either because there but that is almost budget dust inside NASA and it was like but we can do it yeah and we put together a team on a 90 -day sprint and we said turn on the the workshop machines again we have the ability to test here then we can do further testing out at Stennis and go proven get comfortable so much so that you'd be you'd be you'd feel good qualifying this to to install for for Artemis 3. And they did. And they did it in record time. And then you tell everybody about it. You tell 55 ,000 people at NASA that we just did something.

Not for 50 million dollars, but NASA hands built something again that will be part of the next mission. Now do it everywhere.

Like literally it better be off the shelf in a catalog, like high -rate production that buying off the shelf is just the right thing to do otherwise.

Default to building hardware again ourselves.

And if we have vendors that are out there, and we do, and I talked about this in the Artemis update as well, where it's this huge whatever $50 billion public company, and they've got all the demand from the department of war, and they've got to make lots of missiles and everything else, but we need, you know, four valves.

We need some TBC actuators or something, and they're like, we'll get to it when we get to it.

If it's been a cost plus contract for decades, it's our IP, build it ourselves, do it. And everybody loves that.

They love being empowered like that you know we we don't work for the contractors they work for us and if they're failing to deliver take control of our destiny and that and then again it just that's what that's how you build this momentum this culture around very akin to Apollo again it's that is and we need to talk more about that but for a quick second I need to point out that from here you can't even actually see the rocket at all it's on the mobile launch platform and it's all above basically what we see is a wall and like it's so crazy oh yeah I mean that's it that's kind of the that's that is the craziness is you could actually have multiple rockets in here And I hope we're building to that day again, and you'd get lost trying to find it.

Yeah You don't even see it so let's go I think we can go up the elevator and we can actually get a shot to be able to see SLS the four Artemis 3 coming up and there's been so kind of back to that that culture shift though Artemis 3 is another example of you guys made a pretty big change that hey We're not we don't even need an upper stage to be able to do there's more boosters right there, like that's crazy.

That's cool to see. Yeah, it is awesome to be here.

Yeah, so with Artemis 3, I think that's another thing, is putting some goals out there, right?

You're trying to get back into a habit of achieving the hard things on reasonable timelines. Hey, good morning.

Set an achievable goal. We wanna roll out before the end of the year, and we wanna do a tanking test.

and gain confidence and send a message to all the other suppliers along the way of where's our hardware, if NASA's ready.

And even the change in the actual architecture, there's no longer an upper stage.

And that's a big NASA undertaking to be able to say, hey, we're actually, we're gonna change this rocket to match this mission profile.

Like what did that actually look like as far as dealing with contractors and dealing with everyone from top to bottom? Like how does that work?

Yeah, it was it was simply giving the the NASA leadership and workforce the air cover to do what they knew was right And we said that at the Artemis update like there's a lot of people and just you know I think because we're in this politically charged time that every decision made at the agency is somehow You know politically motivated instead of what is the right thing to do for America's space program?

You think NASA didn't study an Earth orbit rendezvous mission before landing on the moon? Of course they did.

They knew they could build the space themselves.

They just needed the permission to do it. The cover to say this is the right thing.

Because yes, for a very long time, and I know I've been pounding the table on this point, NASA has been micromanaged by everyone other than NASA itself.

I mean you pick it from Congress, to committee staff, to industry and lobbyists, everybody imposing their will on the agency other than the leadership that should be empowered to do the really hard thing.

So of course they did studies on that. They did upper stage studies for a very long time.

They knew they could build the spacer themselves if they were allowed to do it. They knew they could build the QD themselves if they were allowed to do it.

And now we are returning that NASA back into the driver's seat in its rightful place And you're just seeing it play out across Artemis 3 and hopefully you will with Artemis 4 how the suit changes We're making everything is starting to be what is in the best interest of America's space program That is and we're standing here right in front of the rocket that is in question here I mean that is incredible to see isn't it oh like and to see it right now with the boosters and The you know there's not even going to be an upper stage will be the adapter and then Orion on top of that it's pretty amazing. Pretty great backdrop.

And I don't want anyone to think this is somehow by accident either.

NASA had to do hard things to make this come together in the time frame that it did.

It had to rethink its approach every step along the way.

Where can we optimize further?

Not cutting corners, not taking any needless safety risks, but just if we did it this way on We did it this way on to what have we learned that allow us to go faster to get to a proper cadence for this For this rocket and that's what shows up right now But like this is we do the same timelines as we did with with Artemis 2 you wouldn't see anything like this right now Yeah, like we'd be we'd be rolling deep into six months after Artemis 2.

Yeah I mean everybody had to be willing to to kind of challenge the approach a little bit and do things different again Again, this is not radical thinking from commercial industry, or like I said, tech industry pixie dust.

It was really just dusting off the playbooks of how we did things then and bringing it to now. Yeah. This is cool.

When you do take a moment and actually look at, you see the little tiny people up against those giant solid rocket boosters, it does just give you an appreciation for the scale of what you guys are working on here.

And an appreciation for the pioneers from a half century or more ago that kind of laid the foundation for all of this, right? 100%.

To know, like, in the 60s, they were building this building to be able to launch, you know, humans to the moon on the Saturn V and then to come back today and we're still doing it.

Like, it's just, and doing it, hopefully, even more magnificent and giving it our own flavor, I feel like, is pretty darn exciting.

Yeah. But we got to work towards that, right?

I mean, that's why I try and constantly invoke Apollo. Why was a big part of my speech at the Artemis Update?

Why I've talked a lot about it last night, kind of rewound the clock even further, looked at a two year horizon from Apollo 4 to Apollo 11 because everything that we try and do to move in that direction seems so out of reach of folks, Like going even to a one year or an eight month cadence for SLS and it's like what look at what they did during that time period that should not be the ceiling that we are grasping for right it should be the standard that we are capable of improving upon right but it means confronting all the all the all the shortcomings all the tough tough truths right you know what's great about this and what what is you know suboptimal about is this a is this a more efficient rocket than Saturn 5 no it is not Right like that's we made certain decisions a quarter or a century ago that put us on this path And let's do the absolute best we can with it But acknowledge where we got things wrong and take it to the better direction or else you will never get to the point Where you can exceed what those heroes did during Apollo you will always be grasping to come close right right?

And so on that note like in if you if you were in charge for the next ten years Where would you hope NASA is in ten years?

What do you hope NASA is doing in ten years specifically like with the moon?

Where do you see, if you project that far forward towards the end, you know, mid - to end of the 2030s, what are you trying to set up now that you hope is in place then?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there to that because we are charged with doing an awful lot here at NASA.

So what I would say for sure, the moon base in 10 years from now looks very similar in terms of crewed operations, the International Space Station.

It should be that kind of routine where at least every six months we are sending a new crew to Moonbase, that is our safe haven.

We can't wait to get out of the spacecraft that took us there to get on our Moonbase, right? Yeah, yeah.

In the same way that you look at like, let's see how quickly we can dial in a Soyuz or a Dragon rendezvous to station because none of the action happens until we get there.

Right. Like all of this action is to get there right now.

Like we need to make the transportation their routine where it's like oh something is wrong time to abort to the moon base our safe haven Right right and it becomes like the boring thing like this launch and all that stuff is like I can't wait to use this to be able to get to the moon base So I am hoping certainly within 10 years like we are feeling really good about the whole logistic supply chain over that three -day voyage That we've got a lot of good in situ resource manufacturing Underway we feel great about our suits about our habitability. Robotics has to advance.

We talk about that a lot but like doing the EVA should always be the last resort. They're unbelievable for the pictures.

It is essential to have the human component to this.

Like people would not have paid attention Artemis to the way they did if there weren't astronauts on board but like if we're really gonna conduct serious operations off -world for long periods of time, robotics got to be off the charts, right?

And now it's like we got to send our guys outside because there's plan A, B, and C failed. And now we got to go fix something, which is fine.

So that should all be going on in the moon base. Meanwhile, we should be on to at least SR4 by then. So the the the. Do you want to spell it out? Yeah, so that's our nuclear focus.

That is so important. It is extremely dangerous for the health of NASA to do what industry is doing.

We can't offer them the stock options of a Blue Origin or SpaceX or a Rocket Lab or Stoke. right?

Again, we got to have the honest conversations of how we wound up here, which is great and we will make the most use of the hardware that is available to us today.

But NASA is at our best doing the things that don't have an obvious business case to it.

Low TRL, maturing it to high TRL, change of the world in air and space, big breakthroughs, and then do the next thing, right? Yeah. And that means we got to get on to nuclear.

So SR1, very imperfect, talk about it all the time like Nautilus was a conventional design, they put a nuclear reactor and SR -1 is the PPE element from the gateway.

We're taking a reactor design that three different government agencies have been funding over decades, called Valkyrie. We're going to put it together.

It will not even be close to optimize on anything, mass power conversion.

But we're going to send it, and we're going to get underway on nuclear power, but we've got to have more to follow.

And I've told this during my visits to Mishu, to Marshall, all of the centers that have some nuclear component like you've all been fighting over a hundred million a year on a 25 billion budget forever like it is time for a lot of the money that goes into things like this to go into fission powered spacecraft and really explore the outer solar system and mature the technology to do the Mars mission without a lot of the the miracles that we know will be dialed in at some point making prop on Mars great but like we don't we don't necessarily need to jump to that on the first mission right in powered spacecraft Chemo -augmented is the right approach, I think, for NASA to be able to really do the outer solar system missions.

Well, let's talk a little bit about SR -1 then, because SR -1, for those that don't know, is basically, you're taking, like you said, pieces of the Gateway module, or the Gateway station, and you're turning it into kind of a, dare I say, hodgepodge minimum viable product to be able to send three helicopters again to Mars on, like, you're trying to do this Yeah, a pace that I don't think I've ever seen.

So just give me like the full rundown on the power propulsion element, which is Xenon Hall thrusters, right?

And then you said the fission reactor that's never flown before, right?

So like, how do we, who's doing all the building of this thing? Tell, just, yeah.

So let me, again, in terms of everything we're trying to do is draw on the brilliance of this space agency during the 1960s.

A lot of littles, iterative approach to build up to really hard things.

We see this on full display at companies like SpaceX and others in commercial industry and it's like that SpaceX way.

They drew a lot of that influence from what these heroes did long ago. We need to go back into that direction now.

A lot of littles, the path we've seen over the last few decades of, again, and I don't know if it was in a playbook at some point then of like, we must design these programs that are so ginormous that people will be unable to kill them off as administrations change over.

And as a result, things show up really late, cost more than we want, lots gets canceled, which is the worst thing for taxpayers.

Like nobody really talks about that of all the programs where billions of dollars have just vanished and you have nothing to show for it, right?

So you need to do a lot of littles and my opinion is you have to put wins on the board.

As imperfect as they are, give me proof points that you can do things responsibly. So I trust you to do the crazy things, right? Yeah. So the last time we had any real serious nuclear effort, like a fission -powered spacecraft was Prometheus. And that started kind of small, grew huge.

They brought Naval Reactors office in it to design the reactors when they're trying to build submarines and everything.

And what started small became like the $25 billion program that got canceled.

And they wound up writing a book about one of its missions, Europa Clipper, like 15 years before the mission ever even flew, Right, and you're like this is not how we should do these things, but it's the right direction to go in so put the wind on the Board with SR1 just like Nautilus and show that it works and make the case of why I can do a 2, a 3, and a 4 and gradually build up to maybe the transfer vehicle that takes astronauts to Mars someday and brings them back without having to do surface propellant manufacturing, right?

So that's what we're trying to do everywhere and And Promise is another example of it, which we're going to talk about this weekend again, where you certainly have enough components, like from the engineering development unit from perseverance and curiosity, to build a jeep -sized rover that's not doing anything right now for the Mars rovers, right?

We have Plutonium Pew 238, it's 20 years old, right?

So it's only got so much life left, so you would never use it for an outer solar system and decadal priority, like Uranus or Enceladus. So what are you going to do with it? Put them together and send it to the moon.

If you liked Viper, you cannot like Viper and hate promise and send it into the PSRs, really low cost. And then what does that enable me to do?

I can go to OMB, I can go to Congress and say, look, for a lot of money that was already invested by taxpayers, we put a win up and it's great for science. Now, trust us to do the next great thing.

We're doing that with X planes. We're doing with science missions.

We're going to do it for human spaceflight and moon base and NASA should keep doing that.

Keep balancing the quick winds with the long -term plan that you build up to doing the hard things. I love that.

So give me a little rundown though on when you're talking about eventually using nuclear electric propulsion for things like, you know, Mars transfer vehicle, do we have, what's like the logistics of that with human spaceflight?

Like being that close to your reactor, are there some pretty big challenges about radiation shielding and things like that being 10 meters away from a fission reactor. These are all very solvable problems.

We keep a small city going on an aircraft carrier, right?

Now I get it that there's a little bit of a different mass budget between the two on this, but these are solvable.

That's why there will be a boom on SR1.

It will not be a boom to keep humans safely on, but it'll be a boom to keep the avionics for Skyfall and PPE safe, right? And we will learn from that and we will get good data.

We will get really good data on autonomous reactor operations, which right now is not permissible in the United States.

You have to co -locate reactor control rooms with the reactor, which is actually a real problem for the small module reactor industry, which is why, again, I love us doing the hard things that make life better here on earth, because we are not going to strap a human to SR1. Right? You know, controlling the reactor.

Yeah, we've been dialing that thing in.

Yeah, so we will solve a lot of those problems, but the idea is do an SR2, SR3, SR4, get your boom dialed in even more, get to higher temperature materials. There's a lot of components that have to come together on this.

We want to run the reactor really hot, we want the radiators to be really hot, but not too hot because we want good power conversion from the close Brayton cycle power conversion unit get that dialed in and then what you'd probably have is an on -orbit assembly of this Mars transfer vehicle it will almost certainly be chem augmented too for just kind of abort capabilities and such and you will you'll probably send an ascent and descent stage out to wait for it in Mars yeah you'll launch on a conventional crewed vehicle maybe Ryan who knows you'll transfer over to your your your chem augment in any P vehicle it'll make its way to Mars transfer over to the ascent descent vehicle come back this can be done yeah yeah and along the way we get to send cool missions to Enceladus Europa and who knows elsewhere we might have unbelievable breakthroughs in our own solar system and this is the thing of like you know there's always that like well why don't you just and Buzz Aldrin himself had the Aldrin Cycler idea of basically doing this with Moon and Mars and developed a way to be able to have a trans high efficient transfer vehicle this has been talked about for 50 years now you know it's like when you You just break it down to, well, why aren't we doing it that way?

And it sounds like you're kind of going back to that basic question of this is actually what makes the most sense long -term, and you're aiming for that by starting with those small wins.

This is honestly all of this comes back to resource allocation, right?

Nuclear for as long back as I've looked now, it's 100 million a year and inside a $25 billion budget that gets divided between two, maybe three centers at time. At best, you're keeping the lights on.

And as a result, you wind up having this huge debate between NTP and NEP and the result is it goes nowhere We have not put a reactor in space since 1965.

That's a problem The other problem by the way is we're in the midst of a space race code of the moon And I absolutely guarantee you that you know China is thinking about their Neil Armstrong moment on Mars Not the moon they went either way on the moon by the way like whether they get there before us or after it's still an extraordinary accomplishment the real prize is going to be is going to be Mars and they know they're going to have to leverage NEP as part of that is part of that equation now we can come in here in two or three years and make some changes and increase our probability of success to get to the moon you cannot have a Mars program come together in two and three years and hope for success it ain't going to happen so we got a parent you got to make your investments accordingly you got to start with where do we waste money every year it's like every cancel probably it's like shrink in a retailer like we got to drive this is close to zero so like let's stop having programs that get canceled where we where we waste money let's concentrate our resources on the needle mover get to the moon parallel bigger and progressively bigger investments in nuclear so you can get to Mars and back and if you do that properly and you resource it right then you have less time spent debating whether it should be an ntp or anyp thing and you start building hardware and fly it so so it's not like if you magically double NASA's entire budget Is there, if you did double NASA's budget, is there like enough overhead that like doubling the budget would give you five times the output or is it not even like, it's not necessarily like a budget constraint thing?

Well, I think even within our current budget, you know, you could double triple the output if you resource accordingly, right? You focus on the needle movers.

Again, the taxpayers lost $2 billion on Mars sample return. There's nothing that left on that.

There's programs like OSAM 1, like a billion dollars approximately.

don't know I'll cite exactly but believe me I'm not off by like big big magnitude here you don't get that back right right that happens like all the time so you can just like responsibly managing your 25 billion believe me you can get more output if you double the 50 would you get a lot more out of it yes but what I but but you can't do that if you don't fix the resource allocation problem if it just turns into make everybody happy across the spectrum right you're gonna have horrible outcomes and you're just going to waste a lot more money.

I mean, we're down to one X -plane right now. Now we have two with X -70, but we were down to one.

We were, and I put my slides out deliberately on some of these points of like, I was very annoyed when I got in the job and X -59 flew for the second time and we put out a press release.

And that's why I showed some of the past X -planes last night, I was like, flew 499 times, guys. Okay, like that should just be normal, right?

So you take that environment and you just double the budget is a lock and a change?

probably not you have to fix what's broken and that was kind of my whole point is like you start by showing you can do more with less or in our case we never got less we did more with a with the same amount under our CR and you earn the right to do more with more yeah and and we're doing we're doing a lot of that right now so let's talk about explain for a second x70 yes you announced last night pretty pretty brief for now yeah and I I had to say I don't get it so Like what you can like swap the wings out and stuff like what's the what's the innovation?

What's the thing that NASA is going to be doing with x70 that industry hasn't and isn't doing right now?

We're we're going for very advanced flight controls That haven't been certainly have never been demonstrated on a crude spacecraft before and and there's a lot of reasons why you would want to do that And that's why you'd want interchangeable wings and tail planes that are that are on it And you can get a sense from just looking at the lines like it is already a has low observable characteristics on it And that's important, right?

We we the NASA has always had contributed to civil commercial and national security applications since the get -go I mean we flew our first astronauts on missiles and ICBMs, right?

We had classified shuttle missions you that we our purpose is always peaceful But you want to attract the best engineers, you know of the best technicians and operators.

And there's not always something going on, especially in a world where you'd one X plane going right now to keep them busy and what happens, their skills atrophy or they go somewhere else.

So you do things where 60 % of my time is advancing things that are gonna make commercial airlines safer, GA airplanes safer, right?

But also has maybe some carryover national security, it's supplements or it's helpful for our budget.

Those are all things we used to do for a very long time. And clearly with X70, you can see some indications that that is coming back.

But that should not be a surprise to an organization that flies f -15s f -18s that pioneered things like thrust vectoring Controls which have yet to make their way into you know GA, which would be very cool But obviously you see it on display with the f -22 right so It's it's a subsonic plane though, isn't it?

It is so so you're working on specifically like aerodynamic control services in a subsonic regime Are there any like it stays subsonic it never will go supersonic and work on not this design Well, I mean look you can change you can change the wings out.

So it's this will be more of a power plant issue I think for, you know You know height transonic and supersonic flight But yes, it is an area of research that is extremely worthwhile and like a lot of things too you're rebuilding muscle memory, right, you know and we We lost a lot of our flight test capabilities and so we have You know we certainly have retained at least our test pilots, but a lot of Armstrong's technicians operators the ground teams all outsourced over the years not gonna work that way That's when you get really slow outcomes.

So, you know again, you put some wins on the board you rebuild muscle memory It's the same thing with Artemis 3.

It's like, well, why don't you just wait longer until you can do a full -up Apollo 9 mission and do a grant, you know do a full separation of the lander and whatnot because we need to fly every year You have to do that or else we're going to lose technicians and then we're going to have to bring back new people and train them again and we're going to lose time and we're going to make mistakes again.

You have to have some muscle memory in what you're doing and you're not going to be at the most optimal desired state day one.

My most optimal desired state in aeronautics is I got a crude hypersonic plane going moxics across the country.

I got to build up to that and just like we're building up to landing on the moon.

So I guess that kind of brings up that the cadence and stuff kind of brings up the There's an interesting conundrum here coming up with Artemis 3 will will maintain like the MO1s launch tower and existing umbilicals But with Artemis 4 at some point there's an actual decision has to be made between whether you're Outfitting for like a stretch Centaur to build a rendezvous and work with Blue Origins lander Or you might fly something like this or with an ICPS or something again with the same MO1 4 to launch with Starship and Roddy with Starship. So what's that decision -making process look like?

And those modifications would probably be like a one -way, one -time thing, right? But you also only have one ICPS yet.

So like the whole like, oh, once the modifications are done, ICPS is finished. One, there's one left, all right?

So we still have, if you love, you know, the big orange rocket, which a lot of people do, then you want us to get to stretch Centaur because that means lots more launches.

So like I'm like totally scratching my head on like they may never use the ICPS. There's one left.

So what we're doing is just preserving the option for as long as we possibly can based on Lander because yes you don't want to commit to a major structural modification of ML1 if you're going to need that that ICPS.

But we have time to do that. So what have we already done?

We already have the designs. We've already put in the the orders for the hardware.

We will build the hardware immediately for the Centaur modification for ML1 on the sidelines.

And then we will start installing it right up to the point of where it actually has an impact to Artemis III or completely removes the ICPS.

And as soon as the more comfort that we gain and we are working very hard to drive outcomes here, that is kind of a new concept I feel like for a lot of people following NASA's space of late.

But we are embedding hundreds of people across the supply chain to drive outcomes.

We are not waiting for ULA to deliver us this and say we accept it right now.

We're not doing that with blue We're not doing any of our vendors right now on that So we have great insight daily as to the progress of that program and once we're sure like Santar is gonna make it we would do that even like for sure by the end of 28 We would do that regardless of the lander because it you still have the optionality at that point So we will do everything in parallel build up the hardware alongside it when the time comes And we'll start modifying right up to again, it has any impact on Artemis 3 and as soon as it clears the pad, if you're confident it's available, you'll start making the rest of the modifications.

So right now the kind of the plan going forward is we're pushing towards potentially being able to get Orion all the way into low lunar orbit and potentially rendezvous there specifically with Blue Origin's lander.

So the talk right now is that Centaur, a stretched Centaur would be able to give it the oomph at least to get on a TLI. Yeah. Now, correct me if I'm wrong.

By my estimations, it looks like there'd actually be plenty of prop leftover if it doesn't boil off to be able to do the insertion burn.

And I know that for a little while, ULA has had their mission extension package, or their ACES concept. The concept of it. The concept of it.

Could that be an option to put it into low -lunar orbit, or are you specifically looking into a separate kick stage?

So just to give you a little bit more of the story here.

And again, because I don't want people to think these are all decisions at my whim here.

NASA was studying alternative upper stages long before I ever got there from the New Glenn upper stage to basic centaur to stretch centaur again just didn't have didn't have the uh you know kind of the political air cover to do what was what needed to be done.

Also the resource I mean bear in mind you know everybody budget cuts no NASA's budget never got cut period we did get 10 billion more from Working Family Tax Cut Act that is a fact without that 10 billion this rocket isn't here right now you did not have the money for an extra mission.

You did not have the money for all the other things we are doing to increase our chance of success. So you needed that 10 billion, you needed the political air cover to do it. There was a development along the way.

Initially it was, okay, we've got our two landers.

We'll do everything we can to help drive the outcomes.

Our safest, most affordable, that when I say safest, it's from a schedule perspective, not like a crew safety one, is to substitute in kind of your standard Centaur. And a Centaur Yeah, I was gonna say yep.

Yeah, where we convened a conclave. There's no politicals here on this.

NASA leadership Was after the Blue Origin anomaly and said look we'll do everything we can to help them recover and they are They're setting records out there.

I hope you get it if you get an opportunity to go out there You should you should see how much progress they've made they are they are working with a fire No one's ever seen before said no matter what they're probably a year I mean maybe they'll pull in a little bit before that of not flying and that's not gonna work That's why we came out publicly and said you're going to separate launch pads and rocket from lander that lander needs to progress Right, and then we asked ourselves what more can we do?

Yeah, and the answer of what more we can do is get a Ryan to low lunar orbit And that's when we went back and said we got a we got to revisit our second best option here Which was which was the stretch centaur?

Okay, which again whether in a world where you've got blue origin and SpaceX taking us to the moon you You're still gonna use the stretch centaur right, but but the the advantage now is other people will buy it and that will drive down costs. It has a lot of DOW applications.

When, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chief, SecGap, all came out and said, we are fighting from the, or war -fighting domains are from the seabed to CIS Lunar Space.

You're going to want to stretch Centaur in that context, and you're going to want it for Moon Base build -out, and you're certainly going to want it for this.

Now, the extended mission kit, we traded that against a kick stage, and I think we're going to land, we're landing at a kick stage.

We'll give you some more details on that soon, but we're going to use the kick stage for Lunar Orbit insertion.

And like a stretched European service module to have just more Delta V isn't really an option either, because they're probably the fixed tankage and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I can't really give you specifics on that.

I think long -term for the Orion program, and Orion will clearly live on beyond SLS, clearly.

It's going to have its place for crew deep space missions.

you should be constantly looking for ways to increase performance from ESM.

When I'm talking about Lunar Orbit insertion, I would not look to initial missions to enhance ESM within the time frames available. That totally makes sense.

Even with a stretched Centaur, would that be used then for even if a Starship were on debut?

Because they're talking about doing that potentially in a pretty elliptical orbit.

Let Orion get a good amount of the work done, And then have Starship kind of do the final little TLIs that kind of the Yeah, I mean right now the two conups we revealed were You know a lunar orbit and a and a high Earth orbit, you know rendezvous You know Earth orbit rendezvous for first Starship every one of our partners in this would would probably welcome the news That would you like to meet Orion and low lunar orbit, right?

So again, we're making a belt You know you're trying to get to the a lot of like government services again You're you can't really just change out ingredients easily you just try and reformulate them to make a better tasting meal That's what we're doing a lot of with the ingredients that are available to us today But the story changes if you get into low lunar order low lunar orbit for both our partners. Yeah.

Yeah So if you don't mind me asking oh, we actually have some some motion going on that's awesome So if you don't mind me asking what was the status like when you came in of the exploration upper stage you know it sounds like it was you know the OIG saying it was pretty far over budget and pretty far behind schedule like was it what was the status of it and what was that decision -making process to say hey we this isn't gonna work on our timeline yeah I mean that was very easy there was a lot of frustration inside NASA already on on this one there was I mean you know you had everything that touch that upper stage was a problem.

I mean, stage adapter was like way behind schedule, way over budget.

The universal stage adapter on that one of like, what is going on here in this one?

Obviously ML2, you know, NASA can be a very good partner at time and advance payments to help partners.

I think that is not limited to Artemis.

You see that in some of our, you know, crude space programs as well.

And the problem then is they spend the money and you don't necessarily have what you thought you'd have.

ML2, that's been looked at so many times of is that in any way an option to help us right now? It's not. There is no plumbing in there. I'd love to let you crawl around that and take a look. There's no plumbing everywhere.

There's no elevator in that has done nothing for pad integration work at all. That doesn't meet any timeline even into 2029 at all.

So it's like you You continue down the US path and what's your biggest issue out of it? You can't ramp core stage production. You can't. Look, core stage five is broken to schedule right now. We had to do so much to pull core stage four into this.

When I said before, everybody needs NASA's help.

Everybody needed NASA's help. Orion, we've come in and helped them think through problems with suppliers.

We've attached TPS experts to this just to try and pull in to meet our Artemis three timeline.

And they knew back in February of this year that we were going for Artemis 3 in summer. Everybody needed help.

There was no way you were going to get the production at a core stage.

You would be, if you love SLS, you would be sacrificing this program to try and keep that going in parallel for a stage nobody wants for a mission that doesn't exist with co -manifesting that did not put Orion into lunar orbit.

So like, that doesn't make sense. Let's get ULA ramped up on that.

We'll attach personnel. We'll get it where we need to go. We're going to dial in ML1.

There is still a lot of room for us to get to optimize and get efficiencies out of schedule out of this to be able to turn it really fast.

I've heard like, you know, eight months for sure we could get to on that possibility to get to squeeze to potentially two more months out of that.

You can get to anywhere in that six to eight month cadence at ML1. You're in a great spot for this rocket.

Not budgets aren't getting that good. Get ULA focused on delivering a stretch centaur.

Bowling's got to crank out core stages right now to give us potentially two opportunities.

In 28, certainly need it in 29. If you need it in Artemis 5 then.

And Orion, there's a lot of work to do there.

So that was making that was that comes back to again the point of good resource allocation decisions.

And yeah, there's other than a few people that have an affinity for it, there's no one here at NASA that thinks that was the wrong move. So what like what has actually changed?

Like what I'm trying to figure out the mechanism Because I feel like it feels like you're helping to, you know, get NASA back to its roots.

Like what is the actual mechanism and almost the legality of NASA saying, hey, we're actually, we're just going to manufacture this because we can in -house.

Like that relationship with the contractors, what's that like actually looking like to make that happen? There is, there are no rubs, right?

Like just to be clear on this, it's a whole thing too when people get like really passionate about something like EOS or ML2 or anything like that of like Where's the walkouts?

Where's the picketing?

Where's the great bowing lobby trying to shut this down?

They've got pressure to ramp up F -15 EX, F -47, they just got the contract for the Navy.

They're building one course stage a year versus making the next six -gen fighters for 40 years.

There's a priori difference. They got the contract for the replacement of the T -38s.

They got to build hundreds of those. Lockheed's got to build Patriots and fads on this.

Like they don't want all these other things going that are high priorities, you know, to come at the expense of returning American astronauts to the moon before China. They know the consequence on this. So they want to help.

There was no one on Boeing and it was like, no, no, no, we got to keep them in the U .S. So like we got to give you as many core stages as we can. We get it. Let's do that. Let's do that together, right?

And then it's, we need more people here. They are frustrated too with suppliers on subcontractors on this.

This guy's not giving me my vows. Again, TVC actuators.

We go out in the field, I go out in the field, Amit goes out in the field, where are the TVC actuators? Give them to us now, we're gonna start building ourselves.

Or you might see a truth social post wondering why you're holding up America's Return to the Moon. This is what you want your NASA to be doing.

Now I'll say, empowering people to just start doing things, making hardware and whatnot. It took a little bit to say, you are allowed to do this. These contractors work for us, not the other way around.

and then like now now there's no restraining the effort like people are thrilled to just be doing stuff so yeah these are making decisions and empowering the people that know what needs to be done and your contractors they're on board right they want this to happen.

So I actually heard a story for Artemis 2 that you know with the the hydrogen seal valves an extra set was basically in California and the supplier said something along the lines of yeah we can get it out to you it'll be three days or something and I heard that someone's like no you're going to give that to someone and they're getting on a flight in two hours, and that happened, and someone took a red eye to help the schedule. A spare seal.

It's to be able to go from a three -day scrub to a 24 -hour scrub or something along those lines. Is there some truth to that, or is that just a...

Now that you've clarified, yes, that is true for the existing QD, not the replacement, but I will tell you the replacement one, the workshops were going in parallel to build the better QD and seals alongside it.

But yes, we've got people now that are just showing up in the lobbies of some of our suppliers saying, I'm not leaving until you give me what I need. And it is working.

And look, honestly, none of this is enough, because this is all like I said when we first started talking like aspiring to reach the sealing that Apollo set for us instead of meeting it and exceeding it, right? So there's still a long way to go. But yeah, that muscle memory is starting to come back. So, NASA's in charge.

So, when you talk, we'll kind of wrap up on Apollo, because I feel like this is obviously paying tribute to the work done by the Apollo program.

But when you talk to people that were involved, you know, Gene Kranz, you mentioned you had a conversation with.

And I know you spoke with Charlie Duke and a handful of other astronauts.

What do they want to see out of this, or what do you think you're taking from them and what do you think they're proud to see leading up to now in the Artemis program?

Well I'll tell you we learned a lot from them you know when I was you know the whole like Athena plan coming out there was nothing in there about big workforce insourcing or what because quite honestly I didn't know the extent of the problem I didn't know we outsourced you know 75 80 percent of our workforce which creates a nightmare of contractual issues between partners I mean even going into Artemis 2 of one contractor not sharing you know vehicle schematics with the other we had to set up a virtual machine just craziness is on some of this.

Like I didn't realize that until I started Visiting Centers. I spoke to Jerry Griffin about it. I asked him, I was like, you know only one person in Mission Control is a civil servant?

And he's like, I've been talking about this for 20 years. It was not like that during Apollo, right? I mean, and I was like, all right, this is enough. Like we're gonna fix this.

And then I was with Gene Kranz twice this past weekend and he's like, I am just so happy that you brought Mission Control back to life again. You know?

They, I mean, I've given them all, they all have my cell phone and I'm like, if we're screwing anything up, you know, don't hesitate to reach out.

Gene Kranz said, he's like, you know, when you got confirmed this job, I wrote a letter and I didn't send it to you yet, but 90 % of what was in it, you've already started implementing. Wow.

And it means, it means a lot, but that's not a me thing, right?

That's what everybody here knows is the right thing to do and they just now have the freedom to be NASA again.

I don't think we can end on a better note than that so thank you so much for your time and oh man I just can't wait to see this actual rocket fly and to see more of these I mean Artemis 3 is going to be incredible probably one of the most ambitious Missions we've seen in a while getting three massive rockets together and and then Artemis 4 is just around the corner after that Yeah, imagine some of those rendezvous footage.

It's gonna be so cool Hey, everyone's gonna it may not be going to the moon, but people are gonna tune in to see that mission. It's so true Well, thank you so much and keep it good work. Thanks for all you do.

Thanks for getting everybody educated and inspired and energized about what we're doing at NASA and across industry It's just very grateful for I think you brought you brought a lot more fans into the community. Well, thank you. Sweet.

Go Artemis Holy crap Thank you so much to NASA and to Jared Isaac and the administrator for making all of this happen It's been a dream of mine since I first started coming out here over 10 years ago to go inside that building see a rocket stacked and talk all the details.

I mean, what an actual dream come true. So thank you so much to making that happen. And I also owe a huge thank you to all my supporters.

So those of you on Patreon, a patreon .com slash everyday astronaut, as well as ex subscribers and YouTube members, you guys all make this stuff happen. So thank you so much for your ongoing support.

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