Honest Real Time Answers From NASA

Keith’s note: Space Twitter has a lot of noise. Mostly noise. Lots of snark. Some times an obvious question emerges. This was directed at Jared Isaacman:“What launch cadence do you have the budget to support? Once every 2.5 years? How about a little transparency? We all support what you want to achieve, yet we’re leery of the implementation”. Full conversation. — Unlike the usual NASA PAO response mechanism which takes hours or days, required meetings, approval cycles, and talking point insertion, this new guy just puts out commentary and direction – in near real time – in the actual fora where people converse – and many times in response to people who make clear points from an account with only a few followers. Small questions can yield important answers. Refreshing. See Isaacman’s response below.

“NASA does not have a top-line problem. We receive roughly $25 billion in annual appropriations, including more than a $10 billion plus-up from President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. If that is not enough to run a lunar exploration program and do all the other things across science and discovery, then what is the right number?

We don’t need to blame budgets or continuity of decision-making as the common excuse, as if a billion dollars is somehow not a billion dollars and troubled programs should perpetually stay troubled programs. NASA, like the federal government, cannot spend our way out of every problem, nor can we perpetuate bad decisions.

That means not getting spread thin across too many imposed endeavors or jumping straight to the “dream state,” which is how everything becomes over budget and behind schedule.

Instead, we concentrate on the needle-moving objectives, the reason NASA exists in the first place. We execute with urgency, in an iterative and safe way, and empower the workforce and our partners to get the job done.

That is how we changed the world on July 20, 1969, and it is how we will do it again. Expect more from NASA and start believing again.”