NASA head Isaacman tempers Artemis praise with ideas on program's future

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Even as NASA celebrated the rollout of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis II over the weekend, NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman made sure to put an asterisk on the program’s future.

“The architecture you see behind us here with SLS and the Orion spacecraft is just the beginning,” he said Saturday appearing with the four astronauts set to fly past the moon. “Now, over time, launching missions like this, we are going to learn a lot, and the vehicle architecture will change. And as it changes, we should be able to undertake repeatable, affordable missions to and from the moon.”

The second mission for the program could launch as early as Feb. 6, but must first make it through tests at KSC’s Launch Pad 39-B. A wet dress rehearsal, during which NASA will fill the rocket and spacecraft up with propellant during a test countdown run, is slated to occur no later than Feb. 2.

The launch, though, comes more than three years since the uncrewed Artemis I launch. This is the first to fly with humans, which will fly four crew on a 10-day trip past the moon without landing. Its goal is to prove Orion can support a crew safely to set up the Artemis III mission that aims to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo program.

“Now this is the start of a very long journey. Now we ended our last human exploration of the moon, Apollo 17, the 17th mission. I hope someday my kids are gonna be watching, maybe decades into the future, the Artemis 100 mission,” Isaacman said.

Artemis I had also seen years of delays and cost overruns before launch, and Artemis III, which during the first Trump administration was originally targeted to launch in 2024 , is under threat to not fly before the end of Trump’s second administration.

“The cost to undertake a mission like we’re going to undertake with Artemis II is not inexpensive, but where it’ll go, as we learn and gradually incorporate reusability, is what’s going to enable missions like Artemis 100 and beyond,” Isaacman said.

In a 2023 audit by NASA’s Office of the Inspector General that focused on costs of SLS rockets, it stated the Artemis program through 2025 will have topped $93 billion. That’s billions more than originally announced in 2012 as years of delays and cost increases plagued the leadup to Artemis I. The SLS rocket represented 26% of that cost to the tune of $23.8 billion.

Another big symbol of some of those rising costs stood in the background lit up adjacent the VAB as the Artemis II rocket rolled on by. That’s the mobile launcher 2, which is targeting the Artemis IV mission that’s supposed to use a larger version of the SLS rocket.

A September 2024 audit from the OIG said ML’s construction, which was originally awarded a $383 million contract in 2019 for delivery by 2023, could continue to see ballooning costs and delays so that once delivered it will cost taxpayers more than $2.7 billion and not be ready until 2029. Prime contractor Bechtel finished the majority of its construction last year, but it’s still undergoing testing before it gets handed over to NASA.

When originally tapped by President Trump to be the 15th head of NASA, Isaacman cited the costs and delays in the existing Artemis architecture to consider alternatives such as SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets to satisfy the country’s plans for trips to the moon and Mars.

Trump’s initial budget request, which looked to chop NASA funds from about $25 billion to less than $19 billion, echoed that with an intent to halt the use of SLS and Orion after Artemis III and end the planned lunar Gateway space station. It would have also meant the end of NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems group based at KSC and leaving ML-2 with no use.

Those intentions raised the alarm for several members of Congress whose constituencies have contributed to the Artemis program. It led to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz spearheading an extra $10 billion outside the budget that was shoehorned into Trump’s own One Big Beautiful Bill, guaranteeing funds for Artemis IV and V including Gateway.

Isaacman, whose nomination was pulled last spring but then was renominated in November, went through a second round of questions from Cruz and others during Senate confirmation hearings before ultimately being confirmed in December.

Isaacman reiterated support for missions through Artemis III and acquiesced to supporting the SLS and Orion through Artemis V since it was passed into law as part of Trump’s bill.

He noted, though, that if Artemis III sticks the moon landing, it will mean that either SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket coupled with its Blue Moon lander, will have been successful as well.

“There’s a lot that has to happen in between Artemis II and III,” he said.

Artemis III looks to have Orion rendezvous with either of those lunar landers while orbiting the moon before they venture down to the surface. For both companies, it means solving a series of orbital propellant transfers between Earth and the moon using fuel way stations parked along the way.

“When we see American astronauts walk on the moon again, it means one or both of them were successful. So in doing so, after completing the Artemis V mission, which is already contemplated in the One Big, Beautiful Bill, we should have numerous options available to us to have routine and affordable missions to the lunar surface for continuity,” he said.

He’s still a big proponent of leaning on commercial help to get the job done once NASA has figured out how to do it.

“I think it’s going to take the contributions of many to do the near-impossible now. Where NASA can play a role is consistent [with] the past, which is sharing its expertise and talent to help these new companies,” he said. “When NASA does tend to figure out the near-impossible and it’s mature enough technologically to hand it off to industry, where innovation can improve upon the capability and lower cost, that’s a great outcome.”

For NASA, though, Congress opted to keep funding the Artemis program on its current path. Just this month, it passed a minibus bill that covered NASA’s new fiscal budget and mostly ignored Trump’s diminished budget requests by giving NASA $24.4 billion to work with, including funds toward missions through Artemis V.

On Saturday, when asked if his stance on the current Artemis program architecture had shifted at all after a month on the job, Isaacman was steadfast.

“Not a whole lot has changed from, from my perspective, other than getting, I guess, a lot of first-hand account of the people that are, and the effort that goes into, building a vehicle such as this,” he said.

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