Isaacman pitches Apollo-era 'playbook' for NASA overhaul

Administrator reverses staffing-agency reliance he pegged at 75% of workforce

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, the two-time company founder now leading the U.S. space agency, told the Wall Street Journal’s Technology Council Summit that his approach amounts to dusting off a half-century-old playbook rather than reinventing the agency from outside government.

“I’m actually just trying to restore NASA back to its kind of glory days,” Isaacman said at the WSJ Leadership Institute event, according to a Journal account. “The lasting impact is to transform the organization, to empower the workforce, to lead the bureaucracy, to do incredible things like we did in the 1960s.”

Isaacman framed the work as erasing decades of drift rather than introducing private-sector habits. “It’s not about trying to bring the entrepreneurial spirit of a company to it,” he said. “It’s actually just to dust off the playbook that works so well from decades past and course-correct all of the misdirection, the external impositions that have taken NASA off its course and get back to doing the things that caused the world to pause and take notice, like we saw, you know, during the Artemis II mission, like we saw on July 20th, 1969.”

Isaacman noted that the 1960s focus was “beat the Soviets to the moon.” His own focus, he said, is “getting back to the moon, building a permanent base and then Mars.” “Distractions are out,” he said. To enforce that focus, he canceled a planned space station orbiting the moon. He described the canceled station as a place where “we could look down and watch the Chinese having all the fun on the surface.”

Isaacman also said he is reversing what he characterized as a decadeslong shift to staffing-agency contractors at NASA — one he said reached 75% of the agency’s workforce — as part of rebuilding “core competencies.”

He said he spends time “in the field” to understand what is and is not working. “I think it’s imperative to have a pulse on as many aspects of the organization as possible,” Isaacman said.

The Journal’s Micah Maidenberg, who covers NASA, said in his reporting he has encountered skepticism about NASA’s goal of launching Artemis III next year and Artemis IV, which is scheduled to land on the moon in 2028. Asked about the schedule, Isaacman said that “all the ingredients that need to come together to put astronauts on the surface of the moon are being changed to get to the outcome.”

On the readiness of new human-landing systems being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin, Isaacman said the only major exception is SpaceX’s system for what he described as “basically the equivalent of air-to-air refueling.” Beyond that, “every other component, including the Blue lander, leverages capabilities that have already been proven before in space,” Isaacman said. “So, like, we will get this done.”

The summit was hosted by Alan Murray, president of the WSJ Leadership Institute. The account of Isaacman’s remarks was written by Erle Norton, the institute’s managing editor for C-Suite content.