From: Administrator Isaacman
Date: Sunday, September 20, 2026To: Agency-DL-All-Users
Subject: Lengthy note
NASA Team,
It has been a pleasure getting around to so many of our Centers and visiting with all of you. At this point, I have been to most Centers at least twice, and I try to host a town hall and congratulate you on your contributions, recognize top performers, take questions, and receive feedback. Those conversations are beyond helpful, and I am grateful for the time, the honest feedback, and everything you are doing to deliver on our world-changing missions.
And what a year of progress it has been. You have all been working incredibly hard, adapting to change, and putting wins on the board. There is so much excitement out there… from the President calling into a science mission press conference, to bipartisan support from Congress, and the public getting energized by our rockets, our missions, airshows, and the latest inspirational engagement at NFL games.
On human spaceflight, we brought Crew-11 home early, pulled Crew-12 forward, and we would have made our roughly six-month turnaround goal if not for a prop system issue that had to be addressed. We are now less than two weeks from watching Commander Jessica Watkins and Crew-13 get underway.
When it comes to Artemis, you all captivated the world with Artemis II, so much so that President Trump presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the crew and delivered a message of appreciation to the NASA workforce, contractors, and partners who made it happen. But we did not slow down after Artemis II. We accelerated, quickly turning ML-1, standardizing where we can, and I am sure you have seen the progress updates and pictures as Artemis III comes together ahead of a year-end tanking test. The Artemis III crew has, of course, been named, is in training, and is already visiting the sites where their mission hardware is being assembled.
We have also been committed to driving outcomes to meet timelines. That means getting our NASA teams into the field, and Matt, Amit, Jeremy and I are out there putting pressure on the suppliers, the subcontractors, getting the valves and TVC actuators we need back on schedule. We are accelerating OME production, even building components ourselves when necessary, lining up laser comms for A‑III, helping rebuild the Blue Origin pad and working their anomaly investigation, and making sure both test landers are ready to support Artemis III in mid-2027. We are not sitting on our hands waiting for others to deliver; we have the talent and expertise to make things happen!
In parallel, we are making sure that when America returns to the Moon, we can actually stay. You pivoted remarkably quickly from Gateway to Moon Base, and that urgency matters and those resources now matter. Had we stayed the course with Gateway, China was positioned to advance landers equipped with rovers and hopper drones, drone capabilities we ourselves did not have in development until recently, and potentially deny access to the most desirable locations on the surface. We now have the resources, talent, and industry focused on delivering CLPS landers, LTV rovers, and drones into one of the most important regions of the Lunar South Pole for science, volatiles, and ultimately mastering the skills necessary to live and work on another world before continuing on to Mars.
Because of your effort, Moon Base hardware and missions are coming together for an incredibly busy 2027. And along the way, we are once again bringing the world along with us. There are now 72 Artemis Accords signatories (more to sign in the weeks ahead), with opportunities for our partners to contribute scientific payloads and technology demonstrations to future Moon Base missions. You have embraced not a new way of doing things, but an old way–the way of so many of NASA’s past successes. We will take Moon Base in phases, put hardware on the surface, learn from it, improve it, add capability, increase complexity, and build toward extraordinary, hard outcomes that permit long-term surface habitability. That iterative approach is how we should attack any of our near-impossible objectives, just as we did during the first space race.
On that note, we are making progress on SR‑1 Freedom, America’s first nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft. When the mission launches in late 2028, she will carry the first U.S. space reactor since 1965, and it will be an imperfect spacecraft akin to USS Nautilus, and that is okay! We will learn from the mission as we give birth to a “Nuclear NASA,” with SR‑2, SR‑3, and many more missions to follow that will mature the technology, increase capability, and take us farther, and when we get there, we can do more. We will explore the moons of the outer solar system under fission power and continue building toward the day when NASA and American industry can take that next giant leap and put astronauts on Mars–and bring them back safely to tell us about it.
The Nuclear NASA is so important because it answers the question of what comes next and ensures the third space race is never in question. NASA, our people, and our Centers should always be working on problems that few, if any, other organizations or nations are capable of solving. This fission-powered effort can and should grow from barely being funded into one measured in the billions–enough to support NEP, NTP, bimodal and chemically augmented designs, leverage our Centers and people, and extend American leadership much farther into space.
And we are still doing the other things. We are getting our X‑planes going again, and X‑59 is just the start. We are rebuilding the X‑plane portfolio to fly faster and higher than we have in decades. Goddard, with the help of many other Centers, launched Nancy Grace Roman. The great telescope is healthy, and what we have already received from the startup process has been incredible to observe. There are more flagship-like missions to come with Dragonfly, MoonFall, SkyFall, NEO Surveyor, and what I hope will become an exciting pursuit of life and great discovery in the outer solar system under fission power.
Through all of this, you have continuously adapted as we pivot, consolidate, and flatten the organization, rebuild core competencies, and get our swagger back at NASA, and I am grateful. We are making big decisions that affect tens of thousands of people, and we will not get every detail perfect on the first attempt, but I believe what emerges will be a better model. For example, every Center should have funding to sustain the capabilities where it is truly excellent, and across the agency there should always be organic expertise to design, test, build, and operate real hardware, whether that means rockets, spacecraft, ECLSS, valves, propulsion, flight test, mission operations, specialty materials, or the next flagship science mission. Ideally, you are excited to finish whatever great project you are working on today, like Dragonfly, because you know with certainty what comes next will be even more incredible and inspiring.
During some of my recent Center visits, I encountered a few questions about the pivots happening and why there is uncertainty around some of our plans. A lot of those questions came in the context of Artemis IV, the lunar landing, so I wanted to take the opportunity to address some of it directly.
First, we have a best-case scenario to launch Artemis III in the summer of 2027 and preserve as many as two opportunities for lunar landings in 2028. It is certainly possible we launch Artemis III and only Artemis IV in 2028, if that is what gives us the best chance of success, but we are going to fight every day to protect those timelines because we should push hard, because our culture requires it, because we are capable, and because we do not know today that we, alongside the rest of our partners, cannot be ready. Right now, we are ~90 days broken against the Artemis III schedule, but there are still a lot of decisions to be made, problems to solve, and opportunities for the schedule to recover. We will never launch until we are ready, but where we are sitting today is far better than where most imagined we would be even a few months ago.
Second, some have assumed the changes we are implementing are simply designed to make up for schedule issues with the landers. I would invite you to speak with civil servant leadership across the organization. Early this year, very little was on schedule–be that core stage, Orion, suits, or landers, for that matter. But unless people are simply looking for acknowledgement, what should matter we have been doing about it. As I said many times, we are not going to sit idly by, sit on our hands, and wait for others to deliver. We will get in a rhythm, assemble and launch our big rocket as often as possible, solve problems and drive outcomes that reduce risk and help achieve our national space policy objectives safely, affordably, and on schedule. That is why we are working alongside our partners to ensure readiness of the lunar suit and advancing the ‘sortie suit’. It is why we pivoted EUS to Centaur V alongside an expanded tank size, that benefits SLS, benefits Vulcan, that will enhance performance for crewed missions, Moon Base build-out, and other national objectives. A high-performance Centaur V will have a lot of customers, and that is a good thing for NASA programs and for the nation.
Third, we will preserve optionality right up until the point where we cannot. We are in a real space race. Schedules can slip, setbacks can happen. So if that means preserving an ICPS option while driving Centaur V in parallel, we will do so. If it means having ML‑1 pad modification hardware ready to move immediately after Artemis III launches, we will do that too. If there are parallel paths that give America another way to accomplish the mission, we should preserve them until the data tell us otherwise. The pioneers who came before us understood this. Apollo 8 was pivoted into a lunar mission with months of notice. NASA launched 12 uncrewed and crewed Gemini missions in roughly the same span of time between Artemis I and Artemis II. They used the time and ingredients available, made the decisions that needed to be made, and so shall we.
We will use every bit of time available to us, the full resources of our budget, and the additional $10 billion provided to NASA under the WFTCA. We will preserve options and execute, because perpetuating the status quo is not an achievable strategy in this race. There is simply too much on the line: the scientific potential of the Moon, Mars, and the worlds beyond; the economic opportunity; America’s leadership in technology and the standards the world will follow; the confidence of our allies and partners alongside the broader national security implications; and the inspiration of the next generation—the children who will someday have a United States Space Academy waiting for them and missions worthy of their talents when they graduate.
This is what the public expects of the world’s greatest space agency. We have extraordinary people, facilities, industry, and capabilities built over generations. If we concentrate that talent on the major objectives ahead, maintain a bias toward action, and refuse to accept that difficult means impossible, there is no question we can deliver. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but look at what you have already accomplished this year.
Keep pushing, don’t let a problem slip to tomorrow that could be solved today, keep putting wins on the board, and never stop believing.
We are going.
Jared Isaacman
