Fast Five With NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman took charge of the U.S. civilian space agency on Dec. 18. At his first news conference, he announced that SpaceX Crew-11 was leaving the International Space Station five weeks early due to an undisclosed astronaut medical issue. At a media event the following week, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft were rolling out to Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39B, kicking off the launch campaign for the first human flight into deep space since 1972. Fresh off a tour of all the NASA field centers, Isaacman spoke with Aviation Week Senior Space Editor Irene Klotz about rebuilding the agency’s technical chops, reworking its financial relationships with contractors and maintaining a U.S. human presence in low Earth orbit following the International Space Station.

Between Feb. 9 and Feb. 27, you toured the NASA field centers from Goddard to Glenn. What have been your most important takeaways from those visits? Did anything strike you that you really had not been aware of before? I really enjoyed visiting all the centers. It’s an enormous organization—14,000-15,000 civil servants, tens of thousands of contractors, lots of partners that are contributing across our various major mission areas—so I wanted to gather as much information as I possibly could, as quickly as I could.

We established all sorts of inboxes, if you will, that bypass the chain of command, all the filters, and just go right to the top. In one of my first notes, which was shortly before the new year, I said to send in all the good ideas and all the challenges, too—any of the blockers and problems. So I was already getting some sense of how the workforce was thinking about things prior to hitting the road, but then once you’re there and you’re having coffee and donuts and talking to people, you really get a good sense of things.

A lot of things are going extremely well. We have some absolutely exquisite capabilities here, like the arc jet out at Ames [Research Center in Silicon Valley] and unbelievable thermal vacuum chambers that are pre-wired for next-generation propulsion, not to mention the various launch center complexes. You see the launch cadence they’re supporting at Kennedy Space Center-Cape Canaveral, and then you go to Wallops [in Virginia], and you can just imagine the future: This is going to look very similar to Kennedy Space Center in the next 10 years or so just based on launch demand.

The surprise is that NASA has either outsourced or lost a lot of core competencies over the years. I think this was in part due to artificial civil servant hiring limits that go back decades. By that I mean there wasn’t a statutory limitation but center directors and mission directorates believed that they had a certain cap from a workforce perspective, and if they wanted to exceed that, they had to go to contractors—to such an extent that 75% of the workforce essentially became contractors.

Contractors are key and critical in areas that are not in our core competencies. Take cybersecurity, for example. I don’t think NASA needs to be the greatest at cybersecurity if we can work alongside organizations that are incredibly good at that. But when it comes to aerospace-related engineering, launch operations, on-orbit operations at mission control, flight-test programs from within our aeronautics division, those are all areas where that talent should live inside the organization.

If not, you create a lot of external dependencies, then those external dependencies have to work with your prime contractors, which have hundreds of subcontractors that use different software tools, different systems for exchanging information. When you wind up in that environment, it shouldn’t be that surprising that projects take longer than they should, and sometimes they cost a lot more than they should. So we’re trying to bring that back in-house. We’re going to do it very, very quickly, and it’s certainly in the right direction for NASA.

Do you think the NASA workforce is the right size for the missions on its plate, or are there adjustments that will need to be made, not just in terms of skill sets but actually in the size of the workforce? It needs to be bigger. It’s really just ratios, right? The contractors plus civil servants, that’s our workforce at NASA. What are the ratios there? Should it be 25% civil servants that is the anchor to our operations and what we’re undertaking here? Or should it be flipped the other way—should it be 75% civil servants and 25% supplemented by contractors taking care of things that are, again, not directly in line with our core mission objectives? I think the answer is that it should be flipped.

If you were to ask why 75% of our workforce is contractors, people would tell you it’s because of the inherent flexibility in those contracts. It’s specifically a flexible workforce. Excellent—I’m exercising that flexibility.

Speaking of core mission objectives, now that the budget is set for this year, has your embrace of projects like the Gateway changed at all? Do you see that Gateway in particular is going to stay part of the Artemis initiative? Right now, Gateway is certainly part of it, but I think what I’m most excited about are the objectives [President Donald Trump] outlined in the national space policy. That is:

• Return to the Moon—presently Gateway is part of that architecture.
• Establish an enduring presence, build the Moon base, which is going to require undertaking crew and cargo missions to the Moon with great frequency, and that means it has to be very reliable and affordable.
• Make investments in the next-generation, the next giant-leap capabilities so you can undertake missions to Mars and explore the outer Solar System. That’s nuclear power and propulsion, which has proving-ground applicability on the Moon, and the next logical location for it would be Mars.
• Establish the orbital economy. We have the International Space Station (ISS) today. We’re going to eventually transition by 2030 to a commercial space station. We really need to ignite the orbital economy, and that means maximizing the remaining life on the ISS.
• Launch more missions of science and discovery. The president called me two weeks ago and asked, “What’s the plan for a robotic mission [to Mars] in 2028?” We had a really great conversation about that as well.

To me, the president has established a national space policy. We are resourced accordingly, between what’s been appropriated, plus the Working Families Tax Cut Act—formerly, the One Big Beautiful Bill. We have the policy, we have the resources, and certainly we have the talent and the partners to execute here at NASA. That’s my focus.

I read that China signed its first agreement to fly a non-Chinese astronaut to Tiangong. Where do things stand on the ISS successor program? We’re looking at the entire strategic plan for human exploration and discovery on the lunar environment and in low Earth orbit. It’s unavoidable that you have to review everything based on a national space policy that calls for a written position within a certain time frame. So I’d say probably the first due dates are within the next 30 days.

What I can tell you is we are never giving up our human presence in low Earth orbit. The International Space Station was an unbelievable undertaking and has helped us achieve a continuous human presence in space for the last quarter of the century. We’re not moving off that. We will build a new space station, working alongside industry, as it’s been communicated. There’s a time frame to achieve that. We will communicate, I would say, in the weeks ahead, as to our intended approach. But again, that’s not even that specific to the [Commercial Low-Earth-Orbit Destinations program]. It’s applicable to the entire Moon-based construct.

You recently wrote about finding ways to save more than $1 billion in NASA’s budget. What are the top items on that list? Contractors who work for NASA right now, for all purposes, have individual pay comparable to civil servants. They may not always get the same benefits a government employee would receive, but the companies themselves—the staff, those contractors—have 40% gross margin. Several of them are public, so it’s actually not hard to figure out exactly what NASA is paying to have the contractors at the agency.

If you were to wave a magic wand and every contractor became a civil servant—which I’m not saying is even remotely appropriate because, again, I think it’s the difference between is this a core competency or not—then $1.4 billion a year would be available for additional science and discovery. The math is very simple and very easy to validate.