Newly minted NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman put his early stamp on the space agency with his announcement of “NASA Force”—a program he said will recruit “top aerospace, software, systems, and other critical technical talent” from the private sector to work at the space agency for two-year stints.
Speaking at Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism Summit on Tuesday, Isaacman said the injection of private sector talent will “provide mentorship and training and help season and rebuild the core competencies within the NASA workforce.” The space agency has estimated that more than 4,000 of its civil employees departed in 2025 due to deferred resignation and early retirement programs, as well as natural attrition.
Isaacman delivered the speech just days after NASA announced an overhaul of its Artemis moon mission program, adding a new mission between Artemis II—a 10-day trip around the moon and back that is expected to launch in the coming weeks—and the program’s first lunar landing with human astronauts, previously slated for 2027.
Now, the plan is to attempt two lunar landings in 2028, aligning with President Donald Trump’s December executive order to return Americans to the moon before his second term ends. Isaacman believes doing so will require some outside assistance.
“These are professionals from across America’s most advanced technological corporations that say I want to serve my country, I want to make a difference, I’ve got a year, two years, three years, term-based appointments, I want to come in, help elevate the talent within the agency,” he told CNBC.
Force Multiplier
NASA in a news release said the NASA Force is a partnership with the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Per the space agency, it creates a “dedicated talent track” within OPM’s U.S. Tech Force—a two-year, White House-backed program to recruit engineers for federal agencies, launched in December at Trump’s direction.
NASA said the new program will be “tailored to the unique technical demands of space exploration and aerospace research,” with temporary employees working on exploration, research, and advanced technology. The space agency will also be able to assign its own personnel to private companies.
NASA Force is not up and running just yet, but the space agency said applications will soon be live.
The NASA Reauthorization Act of 2026, passed by the Senate Commerce Committee Wednesday, contains further details on NASA Force, which it describes as a “public-private partnership program.”
Temporary assignments will be between three months and two years. They can be renewed, with a cap of three years total. If NASA’s civil workforce exceeds its prescribed limit, no further assignments will be allowed.
A contract between NASA, the private sector company, and the employee would prohibit temporary personnel from accessing information that could benefit their employer. They would be barred from “inherently governmental” work. Companies would also remain on the hook for pay and benefits.
No more than 2 percent of NASA’s civil workforce at a time would be permitted to participate in “regular work assignments” at private companies. The space agency would have to ensure it can continue normal operations without reassigning or transferring resources. Upon their return to NASA, employees would be required to serve double the length of their assignment.
Isaacman will also need to provide Congress with annual reports on the program.
Why Do We Need a NASA Force?
Isaacman began his speech on a positive note. He praised Trump’s establishment of the Artemis program in his first term and the December executive order, issued on the day he was sworn in. He noted the space agency’s more than $24 billion budget for fiscal year 2026, as well as the $10 billion for Artemis programs allocated by 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
But NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS)—the launch vehicle for Artemis missions—has flown just once despite billions of dollars spent. In January 2024, officials predicted it would launch astronauts to the moon by September of this year. They later revised that target to mid-2027, and now 2028.
“We have the presidential mandate, we have the resources, we certainly have the historic experience,” Isaacman said Tuesday. “We have plenty of hardware, we have domestic and international partners. So why does it all take so long? Why does it cost so much, and what are we gonna do about it?”
The answer, he said, is that NASA has “lacked real competition for decades” since the Space Race. Instead, it has spread itself thin with international partnerships, “broad-based science,” and “sidequest projects.”
“We outsourced a lot of our core competencies,” Isaacman said. “Industry consolidated. We let stakeholders set the priorities to serve constituent interests and adopted policies in the attempt to make everyone happy…As a result, you get moon rockets that fly only every 3-plus years.”
Isaacman had plenty of criticism for the SLS, which he said is “obsolete by the time it’s delivered” and has the “worst cadence by far of massive design rockets.” SpaceX’s Falcon 9, by contrast, can be refurbished after a flight and returned to the launch pad within weeks, or even days.
Beyond the expensive rocket, NASA continues to study the Orion crew capsule, which suffered damage to its heat shield following Artemis I in 2021. It is also waiting on Axiom Space to develop Artemis spacesuits and the delivery of a human landing system (HLS)—the module that will actually land astronauts on the moon—from SpaceX or Blue Origin.
Isaacman painted a sense of urgency to return Americans to the moon before China, which aims to land its own astronauts by 2030—“and they might be early,” he said.
“Maybe this was tolerable to some, when there were no geopolitical rivals capable of challenging America in the most important strategic domain,” he added. “But that’s not the case anymore.”
NASA Force will aim to reverse some of NASA’s losses in 2025. In addition to the 4,000 departures, 550 personnel were laid off at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget request called to trim its workforce by more than 5,000, or about one-third.
The president had aimed to shave NASA’s budget by about $6 billion, or nearly 25 percent, which would have been the largest single-year decrease in the post-Apollo era. Trump ultimately did not get his way, with Congress electing to restore most of the funding amid outcry from science advocates, commercial space organizations, and current and former personnel.
Combined with the $10 billion allocated by Congress, the space agency’s official fiscal year 2026 budget is about $27.5 billion, which by the Planetary Society’s estimate is its largest since 1998, adjusting for inflation.
The 2026 NASA Reauthorization Act calls to increase the budget by about 2.5 percent in fiscal year 2027, giving Isaacman even more resources to fulfill Trump’s mandate.
“We have international partners, we have commercial industry, like many of those in this room,” he said Tuesday. “But we also require the scientific, the software development, the engineering, technical, and operational talent to execute on the mission.”
