Jared Isaacman: NASA's Moon Base by 2028, Optimus Robots on the Moon, The Truth About UFOs | Ep #274

Jared Isaacman, the 15th NASA administrator, is not a career bureaucrat. He founded a payments company at 16, commanded two private SpaceX missions, and now runs a $25 billion agency with a startup mentality. In this conversation with Peter Diamandis, he laid out a concrete, phased plan to get American astronauts back on the moon by 2028, build a permanent base, and use that as a proving ground for Mars—all while leveraging AI, humanoid robots, and nuclear propulsion to do things faster and cheaper than NASA has in decades.

The Moon First: A Phased, Iterative Approach

Isaacman’s strategy for returning to the moon is deliberately incremental, drawing a direct parallel to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo progression of the 1960s. He rejects the "dream state" of designing a perfect, expensive base from the start, which he says gets canceled or delayed. Instead, NASA will enter a "phase one" before astronauts even land in 2028. This involves dropping commercial landers and rovers on the lunar south pole on a near-monthly basis. The goal is to learn how to survive in the harsh environment—where permanently shadowed regions reach -400°F—by failing fast and cheaply. "Phase one is going to leave a lot of debris everywhere... a lot of dead rovers and landers, but we're gonna learn from it," Isaacman said. This data will then inform a "phase two" design for a permanent base, which is wher