Can NASA and Elon Musk get us to Mars and beyond?

Hosted by Ross Douthat

Produced by Victoria Chamberlin

Mr. Douthat is a columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast.

We’re going back to the moon. Well, at least that’s the hope.

God willing, and without any additional delays, NASA plans to launch its Artemis II rocket sometime this spring, sending astronauts around the moon and back for the first time in 50 years. After that, the hope is to actually land again and establish a base for scientific research. And once we have a lunar base, well, maybe it will help us develop the technology to get to Mars and even beyond.

These are the goals of the new NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman. A billionaire entrepreneur and pilot turned SpaceX astronaut. As that description suggests, his goals overlap with figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are trying to make private space exploration work.

I want it all to work. I also have my doubts. An enduring human presence beyond Earth requires more than just ambition. It requires big technological breakthroughs. It requires stronger commercial incentives, maybe mining rare minerals, maybe building orbital data centers, and it wouldn’t hurt to have the evidence of extraterrestrial life that Donald Trump keeps teasing.

I sat down with Jared Isaacman at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to talk about all of this and more, and to let him make the case that we really can explore the final frontier.

This interview was recorded before NASA announced the delay of Artemis II’s launch.

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: Jared Isaacman, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Jared Isaacman: Great to be here. Thank you.

Douthat: No, it’s great to be here.

Douthat: So we asked for a secret test facility buried under the Rockies. We’re not there, but —

Isaacman: We got close.

Douthat: We got close. We’re in the woods of Maryland behind several gates marked: “Don’t pass — Ongoing testing.”

And we’re under this. What is this?

Isaacman: So we’re in this spacecraft magnetic test facility. This is where we calibrate spacecraft, satellites before they go up into orbit, where we need to take extremely precise measurements. Space weather would be a good example of it.

So yes, it is rather incredible. And even though this facility has been around for some time, it still kind of points you toward the future in some ways, doesn’t it?

Douthat: But if this starts up, we both get catapulted into a parallel dimension at some point in the podcast, right?

Isaacman: I was just about to make a joke on that, but I’ll refrain and just say we’ll probably be safely exited out of the room before that happens. [Chuckles.]

Douthat: All right. That’s the safer answer. We’ll see how it goes.

Isaacman: Keep the humor to a minimum these days on the subject.

Douthat: [Chuckles.] Well, we’ll get to some of those questions at the end.

Goddard is also home to NASA’s newest telescope, which has not yet been launched.

Douthat: Tell me about that.

Isaacman: Sure. So the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is in the clean room here.

Now, this is a really exciting mission because, if everybody knows Hubble, and everybody knows the James Webb Space Telescope as well, then people are about to know the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The reason is that it has at least 100 times the field of view of Hubble and 1,000 times the scan rate. So that’s pretty exciting when you think about how much science that instrument is going to be able to do, compared to the assets we already have up there.

Douthat: OK. Well, that’s something to look forward to.

Let’s talk about you for a minute, before we go back to NASA. You’re a billionaire, an entrepreneur — sorry, you looked slightly pained when I said that, but you are. You ran a financial tech company, an aviation defense contractor, and you’re also an astronaut. I think you’re the first private citizen to do a spacewalk, is that right?

Isaacman: I’ve been to space twice, on a Falcon 9 Dragon spacecraft, the exact same way that NASA astronauts and our astronauts [get] to and from space. The first mission was in September of 2021, so I led the first all-civilian mission to orbit.

And then, also, in September of 2024, my crew and I went farther into space than anyone’s gone since the last time we walked on the moon and tested out a new form of communication using satellite laser links. We communicated over a beam of light between our spaceship and the Starlink constellations.

It’s all in the idea of trying to build toward an exciting future where lots of people are living and working in space, we’re going to the moon and Mars, and when you get there, you’re going to probably need to get outside the safety of your habitat and go explore and discover and repair and build things. And you’re going to need lots of spacesuits in order to do that.

So I’ve been very lucky.

Douthat: What is it like to be in space, in 500 words or less?

Isaacman: Well, everything initially feels different. Going into microgravity, there’s no roller coaster here on Earth, no chamber we can put you in to feel what it’s like.

There’s basically a fluid shift in your body without gravity. Fluid in your body kind of gravitates up toward your head. So at first, everybody has this chipmunk thing, where your cheeks all puff out.

But that does other things to you, too. It can impact cognitive abilities, vision, something called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It’s a long way of saying everybody feels different.

And to give you the bookends, your best case scenario for your first call at three to five days in space is you feel like you’re hanging upside down in your bed endlessly. That’s just the best case scenario for your first three to five days.

The other end of the spectrum, which unfortunately impacts about 50 percent of people, is horrific motion sickness. And it has nothing to do with your susceptibility to motion sickness on Earth. You could be a hard-core test pilot, an air show pilot, used to being upside down doing flips and rolls, and you —

Douthat: You were a pilot on Earth, right?

Isaacman: Yes. Still a pilot. [Chuckles.]

Douthat: Still a pilot?

Isaacman: Yeah. I was in the lucky 50 percent that feels like you’re hanging upside down from your bed.

Douthat: That’s good.

Isaacman: But in both my missions, 50 percent of the crew did not feel well. And this has been the case since the beginning of our space program.

But you know what? It’s worth it. It’s worth it for one of the greatest views ever, to see our planet from that perspective and to get a sense of the solar system around us, let alone the galaxy and the universe. I mean, we are a speck of sand in the grandest, vastest desert imaginable. And it’s just such an exciting, extraordinary journey to think about, because we’ve really only just begun.

Douthat: Did it change your perspective on Earth to see it? People talk about that sense of coming back to Earth and feeling differently about the planet. Did you have that?

Isaacman: So what you’re referring to is the overview effect.

Douthat: The overview effect. Yeah.

Isaacman: And I’m sure maybe some of my astronaut colleagues won’t appreciate some of my comments on this, but I believe this was very, very real in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s. I can only imagine when Yuri Gagarin went into space and what he saw had to have just shocked him because we really had no idea what it would look like. Same with the early Mercury and Gemini astronauts.

Look, we have high definition video coming off the International Space Station. I can tell you, sir, it looks just like what you imagine it looks like.

Isaacman: Yeah. So does that mean you need to go to space to appreciate that we shouldn’t fight wars over lines that were drawn on a map a century ago, or not dump toxic waste in our oceans or something? You don’t need to go to space to know that.

To me, what I found most impactful was when I saw the moon unexpectedly rise from around Earth. And it was like, how have we not gone back in so long? We took the first small step on what I think is the greatest adventure in human history, and then we stopped?

Now, thankfully, we’re on the return. President Trump created the Artemis program during his first term. He just created an unbelievable national space policy that said: Go back and build the base and stay, and then press on to Mars.

So we’re getting in the right direction. But when I was up there both times, I was certainly in awe of what I saw, but discouraged in a way that we began this adventure and then stopped. But now, we’re back in motion again.

Douthat: OK. Let’s talk about that. I’m going to try and go from the close-by to the further-out, like the plan: The moon, then Mars, and then bigger questions.

So tell me about the Artemis mission. What is Artemis going to do if all goes well?

Isaacman: Yeah, I think the first thing to emphasize right now — and not to take away from the mission that’s coming up — is the president created the Artemis program, and the Artemis program will live on. It is more than any one mission or one vehicle architecture.

So you see on the pad at Launch Complex 39B, there is S.L.S. out there.

That’s our Space Launch System. And when you look at it, you’ll say: Does that kind of look like a space shuttle? It’s kind of, but not really?

Yes. Why? Because the solid rocket boosters have heritage from the space shuttle program. The center core draws influence from the external fuel tank from the shuttle. Heck, the engines that are on it are from the space shuttle.

So this is where we begin. And that vehicle for Artemis II, when it launches, it’s going to accelerate those four astronauts to near Earth escape velocities, 25,000 miles an hour past the moon, back around safely to Earth. And we’re going to test out our vehicle for subsequent missions that will eventually lead to a landing.

But I’ll tell you, because that program draws on such history — has contractors, hundreds of subcontractors, tens of thousands of people — it’s expensive. It’s not the vehicle that you are going to take to and from the moon a couple of times a year as you build out a moon base the way the president wants, the way the national space policy calls for it. But it’s the way you initially get back.

And we are going to do that on Artemis II. We’re going to do it on Artemis III and IV and V and maybe VI — who knows? We’re going to get our astronauts back to the surface, we’re going to learn, and we are going to gradually roll in some of what you’re seeing today from some of our commercial providers, where vehicles are coming back and landing on ships and landing on land, because that’s what makes it more affordable.

That’s how we take frequent repeatable missions to and from the lunar environment and build out the moon base and actually go there to stay.

Douthat: So what does the moon base do? What is it for?

Isaacman: We have been operating on the International Space Station now, a continuous human presence for more than a quarter of a century. What an accomplishment.

We are hoping our astronauts, many of them very trained scientists and engineers, will crack the code on the orbital economy at the International Space Station. Who knows? Cancer-fighting drugs, biotech technology, maybe we all 3-D print a spare liver or kidney and put it in the fridge someday. Who knows?

Douthat: I want to come back to the orbital economy.

Isaacman: But I want to point out that that is a very different environment in lower Earth orbit than what we may stand to learn on the moon.

So you have a lot of protection — approximately 420 kilometers is the orbital altitude of the International Space Station. You get a lot of protection there from radiation. You get a lot of protection there from micro meteors and orbital debris, because at that altitude, it starts to decay and burn up in the atmosphere quicker. Meaning that we have kept astronauts alive in the incredibly harsh environment of space, but literally in the safest place you could have put them.

The moon changes the game. You’re not an hour and a half away from being in the water if something goes wrong — you’re days away from coming back to being in the water if something goes wrong. There is essentially no atmosphere or magnetosphere there to protect the astronauts from solar events, like radiation that could be really horrific.

So the moon gives us an environment to build out habitation that can keep our astronauts alive in a far more demanding environment. It gives us the opportunity to work with resources away from Earth, for in-situ resource manufacturing and refining. We can make propellant out of ice — things that we’re going to need to do to get to Mars someday and bring our astronauts home from Mars. So it’s a next-level proving ground.

Douthat: Does it have to be underground? What does the moon base look like physically?

Isaacman: OK, so this is a good question, because people ask me this and sometimes we have a habit of jumping to the dream state. You know, this amazing dome, with all this vegetation being grown inside of it, right?

It’s going to look like a junkyard for a while. Just set expectations here. We are going to land lots of low-cost rovers and landers and set up common antennas. Those rovers are going to burn out after maybe a single lunar night. And that’s OK, because we have to learn and we have to learn in an inexpensive way to get the data to inform our future architecture.

So, yeah, you know what? For the first, maybe, I don’t know, 10 years, it’s going to look like a pretty cool futuristic junkyard with lots of landers and rovers around. But someday — someday — that will evolve as the cost to put mass on the lunar surface goes down, into some pretty cool infrastructure.

Douthat: So over those 10 years — just help me imagine it — it’s something where there would be a continuous human presence in that world, but it’s a few astronauts going back and forth constantly?

Isaacman: That will evolve. It will not start that way. And certainly not in the early Artemis missions, when we are using an architecture that is extremely expensive. But over time, yes, we will be able to undertake repeatable, affordable missions to the moon. That’s what the president envisioned with his enduring presence. So there will be some crossover point where I can almost guarantee you that there will be astronauts living and working in lunar environment continuously.

Douthat: So maybe five to seven years, hypothetically?

Isaacman: I........

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