NASA's Moon to Mars Roadmap: Charting the Next Year

This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on February 24, 2025. Watch the full video here.

Clayton Swope: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the in-person audience today. Thank you for coming to CSIS for this event. To those online, thank you for joining us. My name is Clayton Swope. I’m the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project here at CSIS. And today we’re going to be talking about “NASA’s Moon to Mars Roadmap: Charting the Next Year.”

With me today is the Deputy Associate Administrator for the Moon to Mars Program Amit Kshatriya. Also Tom Culligan. He’s the president of Ascent Public Policy and Strategic Communications. And then John Neal, the executive director for space policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

So we have about an hour together. We’ll have a discussion on stage, then we’ll take audience questions. So if anyone is interested to ask a question, if you’re in the room you could scan the QR code. If you’re online you can look at the event page and find a link to ask a question.

So just kind of to frame what we’re going to be talking about today, we’re going to be talking about the Moon and Mars. We actually did find Amit. He is an official at NASA that does have both of those words in his title. So we thought that would be an appropriate person to have today for this discussion. And we’re going to learn a bit about the state of Moon to Mars at NASA, and what that even means, what that encompasses, what the challenges are that the program is facing, seeing how maybe that looks different today than it has in the last few years, and just looking on the horizon what kind of speed bumps and what kind of issues are on Amit’s team. We’re going to get, I think, a perspective from industry from John. And Tom’s going to bring a little bit of perspective from industry, but also his time on the Hill. Maybe he can shed some light on what kind of discussions are going on right now in Congress about Moon to Mars.

So with that, I think I’ll just kick it off with a question. Actually, I’m sorry. How about we go around? I’ll just ask everyone to just give a little bit about themselves first. So, Amit, if you don’t mind, just maybe tell us a bit about what you do at NASA and your role.

Amit Kshatriya: Sure. Yeah, I’m happy to be here. Really great to talk to this community, too. It’s been a long time coming, I think. I’ve been in the agency 20 years. I started right after the accident – the Columbia accident. It was a pretty harrowing time for all of us. My first assignment was actually to read the Accident Investigation Board Report. But, you know, that – since then, you know, I worked – you know, the agency has, you know, recovered incredibly well.

We finished the space station. I was part of that. And then – I was part of that program over there, and then was asked not to – about three years ago to come over and help the team working on exploration. So most of my career has been, in 18 years, building the space station. But since I’ve been able to be a part of this thing, it’s been just incredible. You know what I see that’s common, and also, you know, what’s different. So it’s great.

Mr. Swope: Tom.

Thomas Culligan: Tom Culligan. So I spent about a decade on Capitol Hill, most of that time working for the chairman of the subcommittee that funded NASA. So I was there as we sort of stood up what’s now the Moon to Mars, you know, elements, a lot of those, as well as the commercial crew program and kind of getting ISS into operations mode. Then I spent time working with a lot of startup companies in industry doing government relations for them, and then led government relations for Boeing’s NASA space programs during some eventful years. And then spent the last couple years at RTX, the company formerly known as Raytheon, working on space and aviation. And now back out working with a range of stakeholders.

John Neal: Afternoon, everyone. John Neal. I’m the executive director for space policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. So I represent all the chamber’s aerospace and space companies. And really what we think about the chamber is being an advocate for industry with the government, both on the regulatory side, the legislative side, as well as the customer side. And thinking about how we can create more opportunities for our companies to work with the government, grow, and create jobs for Americans.

Mr. Swope: OK, yeah, thanks. So back to the discussion. So, Amit, I mean, my thought right off the bat was just, you know, for the audience –I’m sure a lot of folks are knee-deep in this and know, but for those that aren’t, what is encompassing of the Moon to Mars Program at NASA? What all falls into that bin specifically? And then kind of just, I guess, just give us a sense of where you’ve been, and then maybe where you’re going to go, you know, in the next year and into the years to come.

Mr. Kshatriya: OK. Yeah, the agency’s approach to the Moon to Mars kind of objectives and the overall architecture is not just limited to exploration systems. In fact, as we speak today there’s a(n) American spacecraft built by Firefly that’s doing orbit insertion around the Moon, hopefully is going to land here at the weekend. We’ve got another one that’s launching here on Wednesday that’s, again, destined for the Moon. That’s a couple of things. They’re Intuitive Machines, of course, their mission, but then there’s a Lunar Trailblazer, which is an amazing satellite that’s built out of and run out of JPL by Bethany Ehlmann and that whole team that’s really going to investigate, you know, volatiles and the composition of the Moon.

You know, the Moon is a witness to the early Earth. It doesn’t subordinate itself to any other processes. And so learning about what that looks like teaches us about the origins of the solar system. That’s just happening just this week. And then, you know, at the end of the week hopefully our partners at SpaceX are going to get another flight test off the ground. You guys have seen the amazing achievements they’ve done with booster reuse, even just in the early days for their – for those missions. So that’s fantastic. And, again, just this week. And then at the VAB, which is where, you know, kind of the – we’re getting ready for the Artemis II mission, we just topped off the boosters – the booster segments that we started stacking just a couple months ago.

So the activity is there. Your question about, like, what is encompassed? I mean, you know, the agency’s approach is very integrated in a lot of different ways. Specifically for this particular program, though, you know, what they’ve asked – what Congress asked us to do and kind of integrate strictly is the, I would say, the VI Artemis. You know, we have our ground systems program, SLS, Orion, the landing system program, Gateway, as well as suits and mobility kind of into one big enterprise, in order to achieve the Artemis test missions, which is basically the first phase of this – kind of our Moon to Mars evolutionary approach.

And that as we use those and develop those components and test them – because, again, it is a test activity more than anything – then we’ll kind of evolve the architecture to, you know, foundational exploration, and then beyond that. Because, really, that’s always been the goal. The goal of the entire kind of process was to build a foundation for deep space exploration, to expand our range of action. And so that’s what those – the test activity now is focused on. How it evolves, you know, like you said, we’ll see. You know, we’ve got new leadership. And hopefully they’ve got, you know, new ideas about how to make those things more efficient. And I want to talk about that a lot.

One of the reasons I was excited about coming here is so much of what we’re working on and so much of what on a daily basis we deal with are very common problems across the board, in defense and in overall industrialization across the country. And so to me, our focus really this year and then kind of – you know, is going to be working on those problems that are, in my mind, invariant under, kind of, these bigger architectural policy decisions that are going to come. And then when those come, we can adjust. But the invariance of our supply chain problems, of all the technical development we’re doing, all of that is just in front of our face now. We’re knee-deep in development. We haven’t done this much development as an agency in many years.

You know, you asked a few years ago what we were doing. And we had – you know, we had the rockets in production, we had some of these things. But we did not acquire, you know, new landers, new suits, you know, new additional capabilities. So that acquisition activity has kind of been really aggressive over the last three or four years, since we got the original mandate, you know, put boots on the Moon in 2024. And so since then we’ve just been, you know, turning stuff on, trying to get things framed up, working the integration exercises. You can imagine, trying to integrate six programs that were acquired over a 20-year period is also challenging. You know, the standards change, the approaches change. And so kind of getting that all together and getting that working has been just a huge effort for us.

Mr. Swope: So it’s more than just Artemis.

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah. Yeah.

Mr. Swope: Is it more than the Moon right now? Is Mars too forward looking?

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah. No, no. In fact, we have a – we have a Mars campaign office inside of the program, actually. And what that’s a derivative of is work that we’ve been doing on Space Station for 10 years. You know, the space station was always an exploration test bed. And one of the biggest – the biggest problem we have to solve, and this is something that has really, really been challenging – fortunately, I was able to be part of it – is the evolution of the space station life support system and what it can do. Right now, based on – based on the way we’ve augmented the systems and the improvements we’ve made on that vehicle, we can reclaim 98 percent of the water on board. I mean, that’s everything that leaves the crew goes back to the crew. The entire air stream – we can revitalize the whole air stream.

Those sorts of – and we built them in a way that to – and we’ve augmented them to the way – to a design reliability of three years, which is kind of your nominal, you know, with some fuzz, Mars transit time. So we have been very serious about building Mars-grade hardware in the agency for six, seven, ten years even, if you go back to the when we – you know, we finished ISS assembly, we had all the systems up and running, and then the first move after that was, like, hey, we’re done. We got it. Like, no, no, now it just starts. So now we got to use this vehicle for these things. And so through investments in ISS, through investments in cutting some of those technologies into even Artemis components, we’re giving ourselves the kind of nonrecurring engineering and all of that stuff that we would ordinarily – if you wanted to start from scratch, you’d have to do. We’ve been working on that throughout, and infusing that into our programs the whole time.

Mr. Swope: So I have two toddlers now, so this analogy might not make sense to you. But so, to me, you know, I see a child learn how to do things – you know, tell the alphabet, say the letters, spell words, spell their name. Do you view ISS, Artemis, are these all steps along that development?

Mr. Kshatriya: Yes, 100 percent.

Mr. Swope: You mentioned deep space too. And so even beyond Mars is – are we just kind of early in that journey?

Mr. Kshatriya: You know, I mean, to me, it’s like you – in fact, this goes back to Apollo. What a lot of people don’t realize is the architects of Apollo – Gilruth, von Braun, those guys – what they wanted to do before they went to the Moon was they wanted to build a low-Earth orbit space station. They wanted – because, again, the approach is organic, right? It was, you know, we have duration requirements, we have these freedom of action requirements. We have all these other things we need to do. What they really, really wanted to do was learn how to live in space for a long time, before they then committed to lunar exploration, just because of all the reasons you’d expect. The logistics are more contested. Access is harder. All of that.

But they weren’t able to do it because there were other reasons why they had to go fast. And so they went and they did those missions the way they did it. But then when we were done, we then fell back to what I would consider to be a more organic development process. We started talking about reusability, right? It was very clear to us after Apollo reusability was super important. Which is why we built the space shuttle, right? That we – you know, we tried to do it in a way that made sense. Of course, you know, you could argue how effective that was, but at the end of the day, you know, the vehicle sitting in Udvar-Hazy flew into space 39 times – you know, it was reused 39 times. And so, like, that was the thing that we recognized as that evolutionary approach.

Then we got to, OK, well, we have this capability, reasonable access. Let’s start aggregating large hardware. Let’s learn how to do that. That’s what space station is about. So it’s kind of interesting, now we’re at a point where the original architects of Apollo would have felt comfortable doing what we’re doing and expanding our range of action out further. And so that – but it’s always been there, you know? At some basic level we’ve all sort of understood, you know, what it’s going to take, how harsh the environments are, how complicated the reliability of these systems are.

All of them are must-work functions. You can’t have a life support fault half the way – halfway to Mars. I mean, you’re done for, right? So you have to have all of that potted, shakedown, reliability super high, vendor support, all of that there. And that’s where we’re trying – build a capacity, right? I mean, to me, like I said, what we’re working on is really invariant under those decisions. We can have a discussion about one versus the other, how we prioritize it. I think it’s important that we do that. But right now what we’re really focused on is just spreading that capacity and building it across the country, because we really need it, you know?

Mr. Swope: Maybe, John, this is a good opportunity. So what’s the role of U.S. industry? You know, Amit talks about building capacity. You know, I’m sure, when it comes to bending metal, coding software, that’s companies, in a lot of cases, doing that, all the way down to the companies making the bolts or the screws. So how do you view that? What are you hearing from your members? How do they feel about Moon to Mars? What do they – what do they see as challenging?

Mr Neal: I mean, I think clearly, if you look at the list of companies that are involved in the program, I mean, there’s a lot of excitement, right? I mean, this is a new growth opportunity for U.S. and international companies to participate, you know, in the space industry. I think, you know, as we were talking earlier, the challenge is, you know, some of those technical capabilities that maybe those companies never had because they’re new companies or they’re heritage companies that, you know, supplied, let’s say, the Department of Defense, NASA previously, and a lot of those capabilities of atrophied, as Amit was saying. You know, that muscle memory has been lost because, you know, that – the assembly line has, you know, stopped, or been halted, for one reason or another.

And worse off, you know, we’ve lost a lot of those hands on people who, you know, built valves, built those small components, that are critical to a lot of the projects that Amit’s running. And I think – you know, I think what industry really needs to think about is how do they resurrect, you know, those assembly lines, and how to partner with government. You know, obviously, these companies, there’s concern that, you know, budget – will the money be there, you know, in ten years, as we, you know, develop this program, to fund, you know, all this investment that they have to make up front? And how do they go out, again, and identify this new talent to, again, resurrect these capabilities?

So I think – you know, I think these opportunities like this are great. NASA coming out and talking more, and talking more to industry, so industry has a better understanding of what, you know, the government needs. And I think, you know, we talked also about some of the problems NASA has, DOD also has. Whether it’s a submarine or someone else. And I think if we could aggregate some of those problem sets industry can, you know, have more confidence that it can invest and solve some of those problems.

Mr. Swope: Is some of the issue that – effectively, is the finite amount of resources tied to some of these activities? And since that customer really is the government, in this case, trying to do something new, is part of it that there aren’t that many companies that are building things that also have a commercial application, they have to design something specifically for NASA or Moon to Mars?

Mr. Neal: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think software is one problem. Hardware is a completely different problem. Software, you know, talent, there’s a lot of people. You know, you have a much higher capacity workforce. I mean, if you’re building ships, if you’re building complex, sophisticated hardware – satellites, spacecraft – you know, again, everyone here in this room is probably familiar with all the capex requirements there. A lot of risk to companies to take that, knowing that, you know, there’s one or two or three customers, and if something changes – budget or, you know, whatnot – that company is going to be, you know, in a world of hurt.

So I think it’s really interesting to think about – you know, I think NASA’s problems are not that dissimilar from, you know, large weapons programs in the Department of Defense. And how do we aggregate those problems and needs that industry then can go and address and, again, have more confidence, bigger budget, better, hopefully, economies of scale for the whole government, that each of the stakeholders gets more value from.

Mr. Swope: Tom, I kind of want to get your perspective just on the Hill. What are you hearing on there? How are these issues talked about? You know, Moon to Mars, I like that. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe I’m just, you know, not on the in-crowd. I just always thought, you know, Artemis. I thought specific missions that are going to Mars. I think of Mars sample return. I didn’t think about it in terms of a campaign. So I’m just – from your perspective, how is it viewed on the Hill? Is it viewed more in that discrete buckets of activities? Which, admittedly, that’s, you know, how I viewed it, which I think isn’t correct. Or is it viewed as this kind of continuum of activities, like – you know, like raising a toddler to get to this final goal sometime in the future?

Mr. Culligan: Yeah, I think if you go back and look at the authorization appropriations bills going back all the way to the start of Constellation, and the vision, Mars has been the end state goal. And we’ve called it a bunch of different things. It’s been journey to Mars during the Obama era, and then – you know, but really, if you look at the roadmap of what needs to happen and how we were going to go about doing that, it’s largely been, I mean, everything Amit just said. And I think even the name, Moon to Mars Program Office, that wasn’t an administration or an administrator. That was Congress that named it a couple years ago in their authorization bill.

So I think, you know, it’s interesting to me. It used to be, go back 15 years, there was a are you a Moon person, or a Mars person, or an asteroid – I don’t think anybody talks that way anymore, at least on the Hill. It’s really, I want America to go and return to the Moon, first, and stay in some manner, and then I want to be the first to go to Mars. And so I don’t think the Hill largely – on both sides of the aisle – views that as an inconsistent position.

Mr. Swope: So and your thought is that that continuum of activities that builds up to deep space, that hasn’t really changed? That’s kind of what it’s been for the last few years on the Hill, it’s probably what you’ll see in the future?

Mr. Culligan: Yeah. It’s that constancy of purpose. And, again, you’ve seen that message in all of the NASA authorization bills, all of the appropriations bills. It’s kind of remarkable because you have to go back to probably shuttle era to see a development program that has stayed as stable for as – I mean, you think about this, this started during – the current kind of architecture – during a Democratic super majority in the Senate and majority in the House, and Obama White House, and then survived through Republican majorities in both chambers, the first Trump administration, the Biden administration.

I mean, it’s really been Congress, I think, and credit to, I think, President Trump in his first term and President Biden, for not looking to do major disruptive things, that’s allowed us to get as far as we have. Because we’ve been through sequestration. We’ve been through how many shutdowns during that time period? And yet we’ve seen this progression because of that constancy. And I think Congress has really led on that. And so as much as it’s in vogue to knock Congress, they deserve a lot of the credit for keeping the – keeping the focus.

Mr. Swope: Again, I don’t want to put you on the spot on this one, Tom, but do you think that that, you know, marching in step between Congress and the administration – do you think we’ll see that going forward? Do you think it’s a time where maybe there’s an opportunity to really say the case for why things should continue the way they are, things should change? Or do you feel like that’s not necessarily what we’ll see? We’ll see kind of maybe a continuation of the past, that kind of alignment?

Mr. Culligan: I think you’re already seeing – I think people in general were thrilled to hear the president mention a civil space destination in his inaugural address. I think – but what you saw from the Hill, almost immediately from the chairs and the ranking members, is, yes, we want to go to Mars, but we’re going to go to the Moon first. And we’re not going to lose focus on that. And similarly, as we – you know, people speculate about architecture changes, you’re already seeing kind of key stakeholders on the Hill going, yeah, but we’re going to go to the Moon first with what we have today. And as new capabilities come online, we’re going to pursue that too. So I think you’ve seen the Hill has been burned so much through disruptive events that they’re going, we came this far. It’s like, we’ve done Apollo 7. We want to get to Apollo 11, and then 12, and 13, and beyond. We’re not looking to stop at seven.

Mr. Swope: I think I may weave in a question from the audience, and maybe this one could be for you, Amit, because it does relate to something that I was thinking it was worth asking. So, you know, Moon to Mars program in its entirety, this is a huge development of space hardware, maybe even bigger than ISS in some ways. Maybe be on the scale of Apollo, but in some ways not – that’s even too small to really think about it, when you think about the reach of Moon to Mars.

You know, this question is from Gina Sunseri at ABC News: What is the most complicated technical hurdle, she says, to land humans on Mars? So I think, you know, looking out, you know, if that’s the ultimate goal, landing humans on Mars, there’s a lot that’s happening now. So maybe there’s an opportunity for you to just kind of tell us – walk us through, if that’s the goal at some point in the future, what do you see now as, you know, right on the immediate horizon, right on your radar, pinging on there that this is – this is a hurdle? And then maybe, if you could kind of think about mapping that into the future, you know, what else are you going to be thinking about? What are you going to be thinking about in a year that’s a big – or, if you were on stage again in a year here, if you decide to come back –

Mr. Kshatriya: I’ll be – I’ll be saying the same thing, I’ll tell you, because – you know, so that – you know, the Mars landing problem is complicated. The transit problem, super complicated. You know, the radiation environment is very severe. The life support problem. The reliability has to be super high. The propulsion capability is not – you know, we got to get better in all those areas. All of those things are hard. They’re all hard technical problems. But, you know, we’re Americans. We can solve those problems. We know how to do it. We just need time to do it. And we need the right sort of, like, you know, test bed to go do it, right? So that’s true. And, you know, it’s going to take, how long it’s going to take.

Now, I think part of the aspirational goal of saying, hey, we’re going – we’re going to this place that’s super far, I mean, 400 kilometers for LEO, 400,000 kilometers for the Moon, and 400 million kilometers from Mars, like, they’re – you know, these are – these are large step functions in terms of the geometry of that. Occupying that space around there, doing all that work is – you know, it’s really complicated. But what I would tell you is the real problem, the challenge, the absolute challenge for all of this, is having an industrial base and having a technical base in this country that can do that.

Mr. Swope: So it’s technical challenges, but really you’re looking to the industrial base to help solve those?

Mr. Kshatriya: It’s capacity. It’s capacity. And what I feel our job is right now, through the destination we picked, the missions of record, regardless, no matter what we have to do, a mission that ambitious is not achievable with the industrial base that we have. We don’t have the resiliency in the supply chain. We don’t have the dissimilarity. We don’t – and, by the way, you talk – you guys talked about money before, and budget support. And we talked about, you know, changes, maybe we don’t want to change. What I would tell you is we have to change. We have to change the way we do business inside the program in order to make any of this work.

And what I mean by that is focused on the way we are using the programmatic investment as a catalyst for reindustrialization in these industries. That’s what we need to be doing. And that’s not a – that’s not necessarily a money thing. Like, a lot of it is, like, us getting better, the government becoming a better customer, about acquisition reform actually happening in a way that’s logical and we can actually get – you know, get things done, removing a lot of extraneous design and construction and reporting and other requirements. Like changing the way we do, you know, rapid acquisitions and prototyping, defaulting to commercial acquisitions when we need to do it, when it makes sense, when there’s support for it.

All of that has to happen in order for our agility to go up. Because the way we’ve been – like you talked about old, classic weapon system development, classic large system hardware development has been the government is a single buyer saying, go build this. And what’s changed – and what’s different now between what was going on before is that the capability in industry in a lot of different areas that I can’t classically access has now eclipsed the government’s ability to do some of that. And we need to transition our approach into, like, taking advantage of that as part of this whole, you know, approach to doing that. We need that capability everywhere.

And so what we’ve been working on, like, honestly, is, like, you know, inside the agency. You know, one of the – one of the advantages – Tom talked about the program. You know, increasing the decision velocity in the program is super important. And the Congress gave us the authorization to do it the way we did it, which was incredible for us to be able to actually manage risk across those lines and to sometimes reprogram dollars if we need to, as we see things happen, that’s not normal in the rest of the government. The amount of oversight required to do reprogramming the way that the budgets are kind of laid out, the way the lines are nonconsolidated, we have this morass of, like, how that all works. And the program PEOs and whoever it is that’s working on are held to extremely tight constraints in terms of how they manage risk.

The agency was able to give us – we were able to get more flexibility from Congress because they like – they liked what we’re doing, they liked the risk approach we were taking. I think we need to do that everywhere, right? We’re trying to get more agile with the way we acquire things. You know, we’ve been talking a lot about – and I think it’s important we do talk about supply chain, because that is the most important problem that I have, and also it’s the most dominant intersection in this community that cares about all of security and all of what we’re working on with where the capacity is in this country, right?

It is – there are – all I do is I’m on the road. I go to second- and third-tier suppliers all over the place. Everywhere I go everyone is super passionate about their program. The program means something to them, to their kids. But they tell me – they’re telling me all the time they don’t – they need certainty. They need some understanding of what we’re doing. They also need relief in the ways we build and acquire things, the way – kind of the way we’re levying bespoke specifications on them versus commercial specifications. They need relief. And if we want them to – if we want that capacity to grow, we have to recognize that us as a customer, we’re not – we’re not – we’re not being the best customer.

And we have to – we have to make that change, in addition to beating the drum for, hey, we want certainty. We want – you know, we want alignment here. We want to be able to work with the interagency, and with industry, and our partners across the world to get these things done too. So that is what I’ll tell you next year when I come back, is that the same thing we’re working on is what we’re working on today, which is building capacity across the country to enable – sustainability in space exploration is not about keeping people in space for a long time. It’s about building production systems and having a production capacity in this country where we can tailor and do the missions we want to do when we want to do them.

And people always say, well, how do you – you know, we’ll give you examples of this. Low quantity runs, highly bespoke products. How do you do that? Well, there’s lots of ways we can approach that, right? I mean, we could make advancements in how we do additive manufacturing. And we could make that – but the government’s got to give industry relief on specification. We can’t say we have to do the things we normally do when we validate the structural capability of a piece of hardware. We’ve got to – we have to do that. And that’s all upfront work. That’s all upfront work that I could just say, hey, I don’t want to buy things like this anymore. I don’t want to set this program office up like this. I want relief on these parts of the FAR that are – really, we did to – we do to ourselves. I want to change – we get to change all those things too.

I mean, efficiency is the thing. So let’s talk – let’s talk about how to do that. I mean, because it’s really important that – and there’s been a lot of, I think, really important discussion about it already. But that is, to me, in five years from now if I walk away from this program, I will not be happy if we did – if we reached a destination. I only be happy if when I go across this country I see these metal forges, I see, you know, these teams building, you know, electronics components, avionics, valves. If we have that, I think we will have done our job. And then, you know, industry and everyone else can take advantage of it. If you have the certainty of it. You have all the – and we’re really moving the ball forward in terms of our competitiveness internationally.

Mr. Swope: And I think this ties into a question from Alicia Brown from CSF. So I’m going to ask the question, but I’m going to kind of add my own thought to it too. But so when designing acquisition strategies and procurements, how does NASA ensure that multiple companies can compete and win NASA contracts? So maybe this is a question too for you, John, in a way. But is the – so the question is, how do you design it to do that? But I also would ask, is that the goal? Do you want more companies involved in this supply chain? Or do you want to just strengthen a smaller number? Or is this too in the weeds to really kind of suss out the right way on stage?

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah, I don’t know that you can – it’s a one-size-fits-all solution. What I will tell you, though, is that, in order to really get – we want competitiveness. One hundred percent, competitiveness over everything. That is how we’re going to win, right? That’s always been how we won. I mean, you know, other countries in the world can out produce us, but they’re not going to out-innovate us. And the innovation comes from living in free and open societies, and having these conversations, and being able to, like, challenge each other on how we do that kind of thing.

But when we – when we buy stuff and when we’re putting on acquisitions, there are inherent acquisition biases that occur. Even if you’re totally above board and you’re doing everything the same way, you’re always thinking about a particular reference design and you’re thinking about – and that always impacts the way you think about the initial statement of work on a procurement. And there’s ways we can get around that. There’s ways we can fix that by, you know, doing, you know, buy before build, or we can do prototyping. We can enable prototyping in different ways to allow companies to propose innovative solutions that are separate from unique government specification, and then demonstrate equivalency. And if it works, great. Then we can – then we can provide some production certainty and we can get to the end item.

We need to be flexible in how we do that, as opposed to, like, front loading all of these procurements. Of, like, well, if you do this now you have to show up and do this big design review with us, and you have to show up and do this particular thing with us. That’s not what industry is doing. That’s not the agility that they have. They don’t do classic kind of waterfall development in the way that we’ve laid it in, in the agency. Those things have become – you know, they’re good for us. And each one of the processes we have – you have to understand, like, the way that these things aggregate over time, it was – it was always a good idea at one point to do a particular thing, put a reg in, put a process in, do a thing. But then after ten years you’re, like, I’m just doing the thing because people are doing it. We’re not constantly evaluating the reasons why we have those things.

And that’s why the specifications get so big. That’s why our processes and procedures get so big. Because we don’t know the root of why these things came from. Invariably, there was some problem that led us to that point. But we have to systematically evaluate and start dialing those things back, because a lot of what we do in terms of stockpiling, sustainment, you know, acquisition capability, all of those – some of those things that are baked into our acquisition regulations can be changed. A lot of them can be changed by the agency. And we have – we have even supplements where we just – we do things a certain way.

We have to – we need to go through those. If we want to get that kind of competitiveness, you know, where you get really – unlock real innovation, we have got to allow people to propose, you know, really innovative solutions. We can’t force them into, you know, even though we think we’re being fair sometimes we still force them into our design or thought model about how things are done, as opposed to letting the competition play out early, you know, letting that – letting some of those new ideas come in, and then boxing folks into a particular design solution.

One of the things that – you know, that’s happened in our industry that’s been really good is you see kind of the work of some of these vertically integrated companies, how they do things. We need to do things like that from the standpoint of how we specify, and how we – how we actually write down what we want hardware to be. What we need to do is we need to prototype and build development hardware, and then we need to back ourselves into specification. We don’t need to write upfront and do all this work, and then all of a sudden we realize, at, you know, four years into the process, by the way, this thing can’t get built because we didn’t think about this nitnoid (ph) thing, and then you can’t get to manufacturing, readiness. Now you got to redesign the whole thing, you get into overruns.

Mr. Swope: You know what you want, you don’t care how you get there.

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah, exactly. You just care about the end. You care about the end item. And so that’s a huge part of that. But that is creativity and flexibility in how we acquire and how we specify.

Mr. Swope: John, how’s that resonate or not resonate with you?

Mr. Neal: I mean, it resonates very well. I loved what you said, Amit, about relief on specs. I mean, if you think, you know, any RFI/RFP that, you know, a company you’ve worked with has responded to – I was at a semiconductor company years ago. The chip for the passport, we must have had over twenty people working on just the proposal for that, completely over-engineered, over-thought, over-analyzed. And it took years and years and years for the government to make the decision. And I think, you know, to your point, Amit, it just would make a lot more sense to have that engagement with industry. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve for? And, again, let industry come to you with solutions. And I love the idea about, you know, some opportunities for prototypes. You see what works, what doesn’t work, and then, you know, iterate on that. And you fine tune what you really need and what’s going to solve that problem.

You know, I mean, I think most industry – and we represent some of the biggest companies and some of the smallest companies. And I think everyone agrees that the process is – takes too long, is frustrating, over –you know, compliance goes way overboard there. And they’d like to see changes. And as I think about, you know, this – you know, where we are right now in the government thinking about efficiency, yes, you know, I’m sure we’ll find a lot of money and budget to save. But I’m particularly excited about how can we make these processes more efficient, particularly on the acquisition side?

Mr. Swope: Tom, do you have any thoughts about that, making acquisitions different, more efficient, better?

Mr. Culligan: Oh, a lot of thoughts. (Laughter.) You know, I think it’s interesting. You’re seeing a lot of energy in the Armed Services Committees and House and Senate around acquisition reform and procurement processes. And I think there’s a sense that, you know, look, the cost of compliance – and having spent time working with both small companies and big companies, I think there’s this misnomer, the big companies, they love all the FAR 15. They actually don’t. They’re just required by all their customers to carry it. So what they don’t like is when other people don’t have to go through what they have to carry with all the compliance costs. But, you know, the government has a range of tools, and it’s remarkable how little it uses them, existing today.

I think about the FAR 12, commercial acquisition. So I get the benefit of the FAR, with all the compliance stuff, but I can buy it like I’m buying a commercial item. And I can save about 20 to 25 percent in compliance cost. And the big guys can absorb that cost. What you’re really into is the tier two, tier three suppliers, where they go – they’re going to choose not to participate in the supply chain for the government customer, which means that’s how you get down to single-string supplier with that higher cost, because of that added compliance. And there’s no bad intention here, right? It’s everybody’s learned from past problems and challenges and CYA stuff.

But in reality what you’re doing is the government’s collecting a ton of data that goes into a file and never gets looked at. And I wish – I think about in the ’90s you had the Paperwork Reduction Act and those things that put a cost of what does every form take you in time and money. I would really love to evaluate the compliance costs to the industry and to the customer, the government, of when we’re required to put those things out. What are we buying, and what’s the real value of that? And can we offer some relief or flexibility there in exchange for going faster or bringing more suppliers in?

Mr. Swope: And it does feel like now in Congress and the administration there is an appetite to look at a lot of these issues, and maybe an opportunity to address them. And you mentioned the defense community, national security reasons, but also for NASA and other agencies and departments that are doing cutting-edge work that maybe have a little more different spin than if you’re buying pencils or –

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah, those sorts of things are logical to have that. And, you know, we want to be – I think the intent, right? That’s the important part. Is, like, when you – when you think about these things, and I think about the – you know, the people that it’s their job to enforce these things. Again, these people are being told what to do, and they do their jobs well, and they’re really, really trying to protect, you know, the taxpayer, right? But really, the root of a lot of the reporting and the compliance stuff is transparency, that people want their government to be transparent. Which, OK. One hundred percent, like, if I could tell you everything I’m doing.

The problem is, you know, that, in fact, I get balled up because of the compliance stuff. Actually, it prevents transparency in some cases. And there’s a lot of different ways, if we use commercial software and other insight tools, et cetera, where you could see everything that we’re working on, and I’m happy to show my math because you guys would love the math that we’re doing, right, because we’re building – we’re building crazy things. I want to be able to share that every day. I would love to be able to tell the Hill every day what we’re working on. All of our – I mean, that, to me, is super important.

But you could – there’s a way to be transparent to kind of people understand what you’re working on, and also not, you know, subordinate yourself to – the comical thing is there you get so much compliance paper, you get so much acceptance paper, and you get so much other things that provide me the illusion that I have some control over the thing that I’m buying, that I can’t actually look at it. I can’t actually study it anymore. There’s just –

Mr. Swope: You’d have to put it in ChatGPT.

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah. Like, get a tool to help me figure out what’s going on, which is not – I mean, let’s just use the tool to start with, is my point, right? If there’s a – if there’s a tool that shows me this thing works, let’s use those tools, you know? You know, and, again, everyone that’s working on, you know, even software inside and trying to provide that insight, again, they’re trying hard. But they’re handcuffed, right, by the – kind of our procedures and how we do things. But I think it’s super important, when people hear me talk about, well, this guy doesn’t want to – he doesn’t want to audit proof the agency. He wants to relax all the reporting requirements. Just go – you know, just get crazy and go. That’s not what I want. What I want is everybody to know what we’re doing. I just want that to be a kind of natural consequence of the fact that we’re out there all the time talking to, you know, the public, and our taxpayers, and our customers about what we’re doing.

Mr. Swope: And I think there is a lot of contracting procurements that are done in more of a commercial way already.

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah, absolutely.

Mr. Swope: I think Tom mentioned a few. So that idea that you’re doing something more on a fixed price basis, that’s not new. And the paperwork requirements look a lot different.

Mr. Kshatriya: No.

Mr. Culligan: But I’ll tell you, Clayton, one of the things I noticed is that if you’re getting more flexibility and reduced requirements, there should actually be more transparency. And right now what we have is carveouts in the system. So we have OTAs, we have BAAs. We have all these things that all have their unique restrictions, protections, and things like that. So ironically, the most expensive form of contracting gets you the greatest transparency, and the most flexible form of contracting gets you the least amount of transparency.

And I think that’s one of those things that if we could level the playing field for everybody, say let’s reduce the requirements, let’s increase the transparency. And there’s a way to do this. You think, we haven’t done Federal Acquisition reform holistically since 1994. And we really haven’t done it since the 1980s. And you think about how much all of our business practices have changed, how we even pay bills, how we do accounting, it’s radically changed. There’s a way to do this.

Mr. Swope: Yeah. I have to say, before we started this discussion I didn’t think one of the main issues would be too much paperwork for going to the Moon and Mars. (Laughter.) But that’s –

Mr. Kshatriya: I mean, that’s real.

Mr. Swope: I appreciate learning something.

Mr. Kshatriya: That’s real. And it’s really just the – you know, it’s all those things that, you know, like we talked about acquisition reform needs to be there, right? We really have to do that. And, by the way, there’s been a lot of smart people that have provided recommendations on how to do this. You just got to go do them, right? I really need to not just reform in terms of compliance, but also more innovative, you know, more acceptable, fast acquisition processes, also super important. Encouraging competitiveness across the supply chain, and really in prime competition but also supplier competition, is absolutely mandatory. And that doesn’t mean, you know, asking people to compete. It means, I’m building large, complicated systems, right? They need to be sustained over decades. So I need to recognize that that’s true. And I need to recognize that those systems need to be upgraded, that they obsolesce, that suppliers go away sometimes.

And so I need the ability to have default, you know, manufacturing rights capability. I need to be able to multiple source where I need it, where I have these, you know, regions where I’m, like, I’m waiting on three parts in a 10,000 part assembly, which is all the time. But I need to be able to bring new entrants in and make it in their interest to, hey, why would I want to go build five hydrogen valves for you? I can go do something else. Well, here’s why, right? Here’s a way that we can do it. Here’s a way we can help subsidize that and/or also provide certainty in other areas. That has to happen. The decision calculus has to happen. The government’s got to change the way we – kind of the single buyer mentality, and thinking about that single buyer mentality, and how it propagates into how it’s changed – how it’s impacting innovation.

All of the budget, the way we do the budget, the way – and there’s been the commission on PPBE that’s put a lot of, you know, great recommendations together on how to go do that. All of that is that we can do. All of it is in the trend towards efficiency and more efficient government. And also, none of that costs money. That’s just things we can do to be better. And we just got to go do those things. Now, it’s a – nobody wants to sit there and think about what it takes to mod the FAR, I mean, and to do these – I mean, it is not – it’s hard work. It’s very tedious. There’s a lot in there. But we can go do that. I mean, and I think that there needs to be a really animated kind of approach there because, at the end of the day, what you will see is American businesses start rallying behind it.

And they’ll start investing in different ways when they start seeing that their government’s actually thinking about, you know, when I’m buying valves for Artemis, they also could be used in other areas. It’s revitalizing these towns that have been – you know, where their primary industries have been offshored. All of that will start happening. And that that, to me – like I said, that’s the end state that I really care about at this point.

Mr. Swope I think, you know, this question kind of relates. This is from Marcia Smith at Space Policy Online. You know, to increase the decision velocity, her question is – so it’s related: So why did it take two years to figure out the Orion heat shield problem? And what does that say about that desire to increase decision velocity?

Mr. Kshatriya: OK. Well, that’s a good question. I mean, I think there’s multiple reasons why we – and it’s worth talking about – why that investigation took the time that it took. First of all, you know, the system itself is pretty complicated in terms of its interactions, the chemical changes that are going on between it. What was going on while we were working on those problems was two things. First, do we really understand the issue? And this is something from the agency’s past. You know when things work, and they work really good – like, we dropped the vehicle, like, right on top of the fleet. Guidance converged perfectly. We had no issues. Bottom line temperatures were down the middle.

In an earlier version of NASA, we would have said, hey, you know, we’re good. We flew it. It’s good. We’re done, right? That’s the version of NASA that then normalizes foam strikes, that then normalizes booster blow by, that normalizes – so we’re very careful about that, because, you know, it’s usually a generation when those lessons get lost, and then we relearn them again, with ultimate consequences. So we don’t like that. So we were very careful about making sure we understood the fundamental physics of the interaction. And we basically engaged on a – it wasn’t just a, let’s figure out how this happened. Let’s figure out how this design is interacting with the environment. Because we knew we had multiple ways to mitigate it. We just needed to understand the total interaction of it, right?

Separately, what I really, really wanted to do – and I’ve seen this a lot in other programs – you know, program managers will say, well, if you do this, you’re going to have to change the design. We’re going to be down for umpty-ump years because it takes that long to go fix something like that. A, reject the premise. B, I don’t care. Get started, right? Get started on fixing it. Because we’re in a test activity, if we know exactly what happened – it’s worthless if I can’t apply lessons learned and go do it. So half of what we’re working on then too was getting the production line up and running for that ablator material to make sure that if we decided to accept it, or if we didn’t, we could cut it back into the design, right?

So it was a lot of, A, doing the work. The test activity took a long time because of – you know, we don’t have a lot of high-velocity arc jets in the America anymore. We only have a few. We don’t have a lot of capability to stamp out this particular material. A lot of it’s protected. So we were in parallel investigating the interaction between the hardware and the environment and also coming up – once we realized, kind of halfway through, what was going on, how to invoke corrective action to then go come in. And then, at the end of the process, what we did was, said, OK, listen. We have two options. Both of them are safe. One is, fly as is. One is fix and change. Because we knew, you know, just fixing something itself, in and of itself, is not – you can introduce other unknown variables.

So all that together, in parallel with the normal development and build of the – of the spacecraft, the ML, everything else we’re doing – kind of converged to that point. So I understand the optics of it. It looks like, hey, we’ve been – we were pencils down for two years. It took us that long to get all those things pounded flat so we could make – we could take a calculated risk at the end. So now, when I’m confident because I know exactly what that – what that assembly can do. I know exactly the environments it can tolerate, and the ones that can’t. I also know that if I have a problem, I can put in the new one. But all of that had to – they had to convince me that it was safe to go do that.

In fact, I was one of the – you know, at the end of the process I was kind of, like, OK, we could do this, we can change the environment. But I really – you know, at the end of the day, I would have much preferred to cut in the new design as fast as you can, because generally that’s better from a development standpoint. But I also recognize that waiting longer and not putting the vehicle in the flight environment again, you know, in a test activity the pacing item is not something – it’s the unknown. It’s the things you’re going to find when you go in the relevant environment. There’s things you just have to go do.

And so at some point we – you know, the risk on risk. We said, OK, we know how to control this. We really need to go fly, because it’s – you know, we got to get the rest of the data on life support, the rest of how the vehicle is going to work. And so that’s where we got to. And, you know, I think it’s fair – these things – if they could have gone faster, you know, that’s on me. But, I mean, I thought we pounded it pretty flat, though.

Mr. Swope: I’ll give you a break for the next question, Amit. (Laughter.) Plus, I want kind of a bystander view on this. So Moon to Mars. How does that view – how does that fit into the broader geopolitical considerations, like with competition with U.S. and China, or tensions with Russia? Just John or Tom. Just curious your thoughts on that.

Mr. Neal: Yeah. I mean, for me, you know, was it last year or the year before Intuitive Machines went to the Moon? I mean, I think CNN and all the cable news networks broke into coverage. I mean, what unifies America more than a hockey game or something going on in space, right? I mean, I think with all this polarization we’re seeing in the country, you know, space is one of the things that everyone gets around and supports. So I think having this program, and, you know, as Amit laid out, there’s a plan, there’s a framework, there’s processes in place.

Maybe not, you know, directly get to where, you know, it was expected when this first was started, on the timeline, you know, as it was articulated at. But there’s a lot of energy behind that, and getting up to the ultimate destination, to the Moon, and then to Mars. And I think it’s something that’s a rallying point for America and for industry. And I think, you know, industry and the country is really, I think, invested in its success. And we need to have more of this dialog to explain to people what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how we’re going to get to, you know, our objectives at the time that we’ll get there.

Mr. Culligan: Yeah, I’d just say, you know, I think one of the maybe most silly political things I heard was 10 years ago President Obama, when he cancelled Constellation said, why do we need to go to the Moon? We’ve already been there. But you think about it, of the, what, 7 or 8 billion people on the planet alive today, about 6 billion and change were not alive when that happened last time. So for them, we really haven’t been there to witness it. It is the thing we look up in the sky and see every night that we relate to.

Mr. Swope: Are you saying it didn’t really happen?

Mr. Culligan: Well, I take it on Amit’s good authority that –

Mr. Kshatriya: We checked.

Mr. Culligan: We checked. (Laughs.) We checked. So I think – and I think in the eyes of the members of Congress, and I think, quite frankly, most people in government, they understand the geopolitical stakes here. Set aside national security. The soft power stakes of, you know, you think about during Apollo we were so behind the Soviet Union on just about every step along the way. And then, you know, you get the lunar landing. And then we go back and do it again, so it’s not just a one off. And it was a clear vindication, I think, quite frankly, of the American leadership model, innovation model, capitalist system, open system. We didn’t hide our launches and failures. We showed them live on TV.

So I think that’s at stake. And I think intuitively most Americans and our allies around the world get that, which is why we’ve seen so much support for the Artemis Accords and our partners on Gateway and the astronauts. It’s great that we have the Canadian astronaut on Artemis II, and Japanese astronauts. I think it’s an incredible tool of geopolitical influence and leadership. And I think that’s why you see the members so defensive of doing this. Look, the Moon and Mars, it’s not for rich guys who can buy rides.

There’s something inherently American about people like us who become astronauts, who – smart people like Amit his team put on these amazing systems and send it to do the most challenging things. I think it’s just in the fabric of who we are, for better or worse. I think certainly for better, but that’s why I think the idea that we’re just going to skip it, or we’re going to say, well, we’ve been there, it just doesn’t – it just doesn’t fly.

Mr. Kshatriya: President Kennedy said it serves to measure us. I mean, he was very clear at Rice when he said, it does what it does. To do something like this, it measures our capability. It measures what we can do. And, you know, like you said, I mean, if, at the end of the day, like, what we really need is the kind of reform I’m talking about, OK, great. But try and explain that to a kid, right? A kid who wants to be in the program. You know, a kid that thinks the program is awesome. Well, the kid’s going to think, OK, that rocket’s amazing. They got that rocket. They did this other thing. Wow, that’s crazy. I want to be a part of that. And eventually they’ll be a part of it. And then at the end of the process, they’ll realize that studying acquisition reform is probably the way to make this work. (Laughter.) But you’re not going to get them at the front end with that. You’re going to get them on the back –

Mr. Swope: Yeah, that’s not a good hook.

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah, that’s not a good hook. You want – it’s fundamentally cool, right? It’s amazing. And I don’t care if they come work in the program or if they work in other things. What I care about is that they believe that, as citizens, we can work together on big things and solve big problems together. That’s what I care about, because that’s a gift we’re giving to that generation. We’re giving it in a way that – through something so inherently motivational that shines the light on the world that America is, right, with our leadership on the area, that’s what it is. You know, I mean, like, and we got to – there’s so much potential for exploiting that.

Mr. Swope: And we are working with international partners.

Mr. Kshatriya: Hundred percent, we have been for 40 years.

Mr. Swope: Yeah, and this ties into a couple questions I’ll just kind of rapid fire to see if anyone’s got any thoughts here.

This is from Joel Graham at MBI: How can the U.S. replicate the success of the International Space Station, working with foreign partners on Artemis and Mars goals? In my head, I immediately think of Gateway.

So I’m tying it to this next question, is from Stephen Clark at Ars Technica: What tangible benefits does Gateway offer for Moon to Mars? So they’re looking at it from a flip side, but –

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah, no, it’s right. I mean, the international component of it is huge. It is very true that one of the great advances – and, to me, one of the great results of the station program is that partnership. And so – and cultivating that and making sure it endures. And it’s not just the partnership of, hey, we all believe in these shared values, but we developed common engineering techniques. We developed, you know, interoperability and other ways to live and work in space together because of that. And so extrapolating that to any aggregation platforms, Gateway, or on the surface, et cetera, it enables and continues to expand that capacity worldwide.

And at the end of the day, for really big, ambitious deep space missions, who knows the Jovian Moon, wherever you go, we need that. We need – no single country can foot the expense of that. And we need to make sure that the entire world is – the entire world of spacefaring, and then we have – and so building those norms and standards, developing that, curating that, through the partnerships we have in the program now, on Space Station, in the future, on the existing ones, that’s the critical piece of it.

Mr. Swope: And so is it more about that partnership and the value to working together, or is there a capability, in the case of Gateway?

Mr. Kshatriya: There is. I mean, Gateway expands our endurance in these in these orbits, right? And also, having presence in cislunar space is – like, people think about, you know, the gap between the Earth and the Moon is, OK, there’s just space there. No, there are parts that are more valuable than others, right? (Laughs.) Like, parts that are, that are determined by orbital mechanics that are useful for lots of things, right? And we want to – we want to – we want to have freedom of action and visibility in those areas, right? And so part of the idea of aggregating anything in cislunar space teaches us how to go do that. We have to transit the belts. We have to do a bunch of other things there. We have to have largely autonomous operations.

So it changes our technical thought process about how to do that. But at the end of the day, cislunar space is filled with all sorts of important places, you know, that are in equilibrium points between, you know, Lagrange points, that – places where you can do low-energy transfers between different orbits. We want those things. We want – we want to know how to do that. We want to know how to navigate in those areas. We want to know how to exploit those capabilities for other terrestrial and surface application, too. So there all of that is good – in the direction of goodness in terms of, like, picking out those areas that we know are going to be competitive, right? Because if we don’t go then, OK, people aren’t just going to be like, it’s fine, let’s just leave it alone. It’ll be competitive for other reasons.

Mr. Swope: Thoughts on international partnerships, Gateway?

Mr. Culligan: I’ve got a lot. I mean, I don’t really get the Gateway hate. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the years. It’s not a program that I’ve ever had in my portfolio. But to me, if you think about – at some point ISS will retire. Gateway, with its international presence on it – and NASA’s done a phenomenal job of bringing in the international partners on it – it is that extension of that international platform out there. I see it’s – you know, in the grand scheme of Artemis Moon to Mars spending, fairly minimal part of the architecture cost, fairly maximal part of international partner contributions and involvement.

And guarantees – you know, one of the critiques after Apollo is we went and then we stopped going. And you know, a pretty good hedge against that is having Gateway there to have a presence, just like ISS has been a great hedge to have a reason to keep going back to LEO and stay up there. So to me, there’s the – it’s a continuation of those intergovernmental agreements that we started with space station, but pushing into the deep space environment. And to me, if you can continue to leverage those into the 21st century and beyond, that’s going to be an incredible geopolitical tool for keeping this coalition of the willing going.

Mr. Swope: And, not to totally be the devil’s advocate here, but I seem to do that sometimes. I’m a skeptic. But so, Gateway. You know, we knew how to do ISS with international partners. Was it just like, oh, well, we could do that in a lunar orbit? I mean, what’s your thought on maybe a criticism of Gateway like that?

Mr. Culligan: I think – I think the international partnership element was probably emphasized because of the White House’s lack of substantial interest in investing in it. But I think it actually worked out great because it asked the partners to come to the table with things like air locks and with other modules. And I think it’s actually been a real asset of the Gateway thing. So you think about it, we’re getting the first-ever lunar or deep-space space station for a fairly affordable value, in the grand scheme of the architecture, with a number of international partners, that doesn’t distract at all from any of the Moon or Mars capabilities that we’re developing. That just seems like good value to me.

Mr. Kshatriya: And 60 percent of it’s paid for by our partners too, which is important. I think it’s – I think that’s important that that’s true.

But I think, just to pull a little bit on what Tom said earlier, though, I know that – sorry to jump on this – but building destinations, right – building destinations in exploration in general is not just a 20th century thing too. And it’s not – and it really – the evolutionary approach is something we did. I mean, in the West we built forts so the railroads could be there. I mean, this is what we’re doing. Nobody thought at the beginning of space station that because we built space station we would have basically now captured the entire domestic launch industry. That that was a corollary benefit of that, right? Because we built a destination. That destination enabled, you know, the private sector to come and say, hey, there’s a place we can go. There’s a service we can provide. We can go do this and give them the ability to innovate, to give them that – a way to test that early market for their hardware.

I mean, that’s what we’re – we’re doing the exact same thing. We can talk about commercializing low Earth orbit now in a fulsome way because we’ve had commercial partners that have been helping us provide and sustain low Earth orbit destinations now for 15 years. I want to do the exact same thing with lunar exploration. It’s the exact same concept. Give us a place to go. Let the government socialize the risk with our partners about how to go build those things. You know, we’ll learn how to do these things, you know, that are unique about charge environments and, you know, comms or whatever. We’ll learn all those things. We’ll give you surface access, et cetera. And then we’ll move on.

And then when there’s a thing to go to, you can go to it, if you want to. And people can go there and they can take advantage of it. If they don’t want to, then fine. But the whole point is we’re building forts, right, everywhere we go. And if you want – and the roads come afterwards. The industry comes afterwards. And where we expand our range of action – doesn’t matter out of the cave, across the ocean, up the mountains – every time we expand our range of action, there’s economic benefit that results – every single time. Doesn’t matter what we do. And so that – we’re just continuing what I consider to be the role the government has played in in manifest destiny for – you know, since the beginning of this country.

So, like, that, to me, is a very logical way to just think about, you know, OK, there’s better ways to do it. I’m all ears about how to how to make things different, how to make things better, how to change things around. I’d love to have that conversation. But just not doing something is not – you know, I don’t know what to do with that, when I – when I see the implicit benefit of, you know, what we’re preserving as a part of it, and also, you know what we’re really trying to do in aggregate, which is, you know, lead the world. So, I mean, I think it’s fine to have the conversation, but let’s do it on the merits of what’s it doing for us? What’s the real business case for it? How are we working? Where do we think the investments are going to go?

Actually, part of the reason why it’s there in that particular orbit is because you can get out there relatively cheaply. Like we have, you know, commercial launch access in different areas. It takes a long time, you got to spiral out there, but you can get there, right? And all of that access, all the transportation capability, is part of what we want to build, too. And our partners are doing the same thing.

Mr. Neal: Hey, Clayton, if I could just add one thing, you know, a small, but, I think, important issue here that’s preventing, I think, you know, market from growing. And we want –the chamber wants more buyers and sellers in the market, both domestically and internationally, participate. And that’s, you know, I think a hindrance is the ITAR and export control issues that we have. And so we’re very excited that the government opened up several rule makings at the end of the year. We’re very eager to see what changes are made.

There’s a lot of modernization updates that we believe, talking to industry and the government, could be made that would allow for, you know, again, more buyers and sellers on both sides to come to the market, to come to NASA, and our international partners, and provide new, innovative solutions. We really need that to happen quickly. It’s taken too long to get this rule making out to the public. And you know, we’re, you know, again, eagerly hopeful that we’ll see some substantive changes out of this process.

Mr. Swope: Yeah, that’s a really good point, and something, I think, you know, it’s easy to forget how much of a barrier that can be sometimes to collaboration.

Mr. Neal: Well, we were in the gulf. We took several companies at the end of last year to the UAE, and heard time and time again that, you know, there are partners in that region that may want to do business with the U.S. government or U.S. companies, and just as soon as they hear the word ITAR, you know, they just realize it’ll never happen. It’s a dead – it’s a dead end.

Mr. Swope: Well, we’re about at time. I think I’ll just kind of toss out one last question for everyone, maybe end a little hopeful, what we should be looking for in the next year, what we want to see? So I think my question would just be, what do you want to see happen with the Moon to Mars in the next year? And I’ll say hope. I know it’s dangerous to hope for things. But what do you hope to see? And maybe, Amit, we’ll start with you.

Mr. Kshatriya: Well, I think we will see – I think we’ll see the new leadership team come in. I think I’m very – I’m very, very optimistic about how passionate, you know, the team is about this area, you know? I really think it’s going to be – it’s going to be awesome to have that, to have the leadership, to have the president backing it, to have the Congress backing it, to give us that direction, whatever it might be. I think we can be flexible, but at the end of the day I think we’re going to get – you know, what – we’re going to get more energy behind trying to get these things done, and then it’s just about our performance. And it’s about collaborating with the rest of – you know, everyone that’s involved In these programs to, like, really focus on – like, I don’t want to have any discussions about, you know, everything we’re doing is great. Just leave us alone and let us do our work. That is exactly the wrong answer.

We have – there is so much room for us to get better, to get more efficient, to get smarter, to bring in more capability, to spread the capacity all over the place. So I think you’re going to see it because we’re going to be running around. You’re going to see a lot of industry kind of pop up and say, hey, you know, we’re building this stuff for these missions. It’s great. And you’re also going to see a lot of progress. You’re going to see test flights at Boca Chica. You’re going to see test flights at KSC. You’re going to see hardware coming together at, you know, all over the country.

Mr. Swope: I mean, Artemis II.

Mr. Kshatriya: Oh yeah. It’s coming. And we’re going to stack. And we got – but what we want – again, what we really, really want is we want an armada of American vehicles going to the Moon and going to Mars. That’s what we want, right? That’s what real capability looks like. And that’s what I think we can do uniquely that none of our competitors can do. They can stand up, you know, one shot. They can stand up a thing to try and replicate what we did 60 years ago. But only we can do what we’re trying to do, which is about markets. It’s about competition. It’s about bringing multiple entrants in, and bringing every – the entire force of American industry to bear, not just, you know, specific pieces of it. And so that I’m very, very hopeful is going to be the, kind of, the energetic, kind of, spike that we get this year with the new team coming in.

Mr. Swope: Tom, what’s on your mind?

Mr. Culligan: Well, being an old appropriator, I always like to go back to the numbers. So I look at the value of what we’re getting right now. We’re spending, like, one-fifth the amount of money, inflation adjusted, on all the Artemis architecture than we did on Apollo. And, granted, we have a lot of learning from Apollo. We gained. But if you go back even more recent in modern human space flight history, if you go back 30 years, we were spending, inflation adjusted, about $12 billion a year on just shuttle and space station. So just to LEO, one platform, one mode of transportation. Today, we’re spending less than that, inflation adjusted, for three cargo vehicles to LEO, two crew vehicles to LEO, a very mature and robust space station.

Mr. Swope: A partridge in a pear tree.

Mr. Culligan: A partridge – and a crew – a soon to be crew-validated deep space exploration rocket and spacecraft and ground systems, a lunar space station, multiple lunar landers, space suit, you name it. It’s an amazing bargain we’re getting. And I hear all this conversation – gosh, this program is so expensive. You’re, like, we got to go back and look at the numbers. We are getting incredible value compared to even 30 years ago. So that’s my biggest takeaway. I’m very hopeful about it. I just wish – maybe it’s an American tradition that we’re always very self-critical of our government, and our spending, and our programs, and our plans. But, man oh man, we’re doing really well. And we have a lot to be excited about.

Mr. Swope: John, your thoughts.

Mr. Neal: Yeah. I think, you know, Amit just talking about, obviously, some efficiencies in our processes. But I grew up in Buffalo, New York, a manufacturing town. And to see a rust belt city like that resurrected because, you know, that skilled labor comes back, there’s more opportunities for people. You know, you don’t need a four-year masters in aerospace engineering. You need to have a trade and a skill that’s incredibly important. And the pride you take that you built a valve that went in a spacecraft, or a submarine, or, you know, another piece of – you built something.

I think it’s wonderful, coding and software and whatnot, but I think there’s something really special about building a product that goes to a national goal. And I’m really excited to see how that evolves over the next few years, particularly with this administration’s focus on bringing back manufacturing to the United States.

Mr. Swope: I’m going to ask myself that question, what I’m most excited about. I’m excited about all the activity. It’s a really unique time to be –

Mr. Kshatriya: It’s not dull, yeah. It’s not dull.

Mr. Swope: No. I mean, to your point, we have Firefly lander, we have Intuitive Machines, we have Astrobotic. We have a lot of other companies too that are doing baby steps, you could say, on the way, plus the big steps coming up. So all of that just seems like a really exciting time to be involved in space. And I think kind of having that ultimate goal as Mars is super – I’m super jazzed about that too. And it sounds like that’s what it’s always been.

Mr. Kshatriya: The nominee – the nominee said it. You know, he’s, like, he said it during one of the commencement addresses he gave recently, that it is a golden age, that he’s just so excited that that’s where we are. And that’s what you’re talking about.

Mr. Swope: Exactly.

Mr. Kshatriya: It is a golden age. And I think he’s right. If he brings that energy, then it’s going to be awesome when we talk next year.

Mr. Swope: Jobs around the country. I mean, it’s just a really exciting time, I think, for people, not just in D.C., not just where NASA centers are, all around the country who are involved in this.

So I think, you know, ending on that hopeful note, hopefully, if you do come back, Amit, in a year, we’ll be talking about all the cool stuff that’s happened in the last year.

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah, I’d love it. I’d love to.

Mr. Swope: So thank you, everyone, for being in person and for online. Really appreciate your time and thanks for joining us.

Mr. Kshatriya: Yeah. Thank you. I enjoyed being here.

Mr. Swope: Thanks. (Applause.)

 (END.)