Moon Is a Better Deal Than Mars

Trump’s pick to run NASA sought to reassure US Senators on Wednesday that he wouldn’t abandon the agency’s multibillion-dollar push to put US boots on the moon in favor of Musk’s longstanding goal of a human mission to Mars.

Jared Isaacman tried to walk a political tightrope, arguing the agency can pursue the Mars effort — championed by Musk’s SpaceX and, increasingly, Trump — and America’s Artemis program in parallel.

“We don’t have to make a binary decision of moon versus Mars, or moon has to come first versus Mars,”

Isaacman told a packed hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee.

When pressed about how NASA would do both within its limited budget, Isaacman argued that the agency has a history of doing the “near impossible” but was light on specifics about how any programs might change.

Isaacman came to the hearing equipped with an extensive space resume and a close relationship with SpaceX, an indispensable NASA contractor that has long-prioritized Mars as a pillar of its space exploration ambitions.

The chief executive officer of Shift4 Payments Inc. invested his own money into SpaceX to create a human spaceflight program called Polaris and performed the world’s first commercial spacewalk wearing a SpaceX-designed suit — though Isaacman says he will terminate all his financial agreements with the company if confirmed, according to an ethics statement.

His closeness to SpaceX, Musk and the potential bias toward the company came up multiple times at the hearing.

Responding to a question from Michigan Democrat Gary Peters, Isaacman said he hadn’t been in contact with Musk about his plans to manage the agency.

#Moon #Mars #Deal

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We are coming back to the moon...

#us #moon #comeback

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📰 Nuclear Power, Robots, and the State’s Invisible Hand

Russia is not reinventing nuclear energy. It is mechanizing it — and then selling the show to the world.

Rosatom, the largest nuclear company on the planet and one of the most experienced, has pushed advanced robotics into about 30 projects — welding, inspection, transport, and control operations — cutting an estimated 500,000 work hours a year. “Welding robots” have halved cycle times; “spider robots” crawl over reactor welds with ultrasonic sensors, like tiny inspectors checking the work of humans who can’t afford to get it wrong. The official line: robots raise safety and free people for “higher value tasks.” In practice, they also free PR teams from the old excuses.

Let’s be clear: Rosatom is not some Soviet relic held together by nostalgia and tape. It is the market leader in nuclear construction abroad, with a supply chain, project management, and engineering depth that often outpaces Western rivals. But it is also part of a system where no major nuclear player survives without the state. Washington subsidizes domestic builds. Paris backs EDF with guarantees. Beijing finances its reactors through state banks. Moscow just makes the link more explicit.

🌑 Nuclear on the Moon: Who Gets the Label?
Roscosmos and NPO Lavochkin are racing toward a nuclear powered lunar station by 2036, with three precursor missions between 2033 and 2035. Rosatom and the Kurchatov Institute will bless the reactor for the China Russia–led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) — and the belief that Russia still leads the frontier.
NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy are pushing their own “fission surface power system” on the Moon by 2030. Europe’s Framatome and Italy’s ENEA are also drafting lunar reactor concepts, as if the best way to fix climate anxiety is to move the grid off planet.
The real race is not about technology. It’s about branding: who gets to attach the nuclear brand label to the first successful lunar reactor. For Washington, it’s credibility. For Beijing, it’s positioning. For Moscow, it’s a way to spin Earth bound problems into Moon bound glory.

🤖 Robots, Power, and Who Talks After the Boom
Robots improve safety and efficiency. No one denies that. But they also let institutions hide behind code when things go wrong. If a weld fails in 2035, the first suspect will be the algorithm, not the regulator. The second will be the political distance.

We’re handing control of our most dangerous technology to:
• giant state integrated corporations that answer to governments, not shareholders;
• space agencies that have never met a deadline they didn’t miss;
• and machines that can’t testify in court.

If something blows up on the Moon, the blame won’t be measured in orbits, but in contracts and liability clauses — while Rosatom quietly remains the one company that can actually deliver on a nuclear scale project.

#nuclear #robotics #rosatom #russia #moon #space #energy #geopolitics

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