Merry Christmas Eve, Per Aspera readers. A warm welcome to the hundreds of new subscribers who’ve joined us in the last week, and to everyone else, thanks for tuning in for the holiday-season buzzer-beater. We’ll see you in the inbox once more next week — but for those who have signed off until January, happy 2026!
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At long last, NASA has a new boss. His callsign is “Rook,” a nod to the chess piece that attacks from a distance. At 42, Jared Isaacman is the youngest person to lead the agency: a self-made entrepreneur-astronaut who started his publicly traded payments company from his parents’ basement at 16, built the world’s largest private air force to fly “Red Air” adversary missions for USAF fighter pilots, and logged thousands of hours in the cockpit himself. He circumnavigated the globe in a light jet in 61 hours, shattering the previous record by a day, and for his next act, turned to orbit — purchasing two spaceflight missions from SpaceX, commanding both, and personally testing the first commercial EVA suit in the vacuum of space. Trump tapped him for NASA a year ago, withdrew the bid, then renominated him. Last week, the Senate confirmed Rook 67-30.
Isaacman inherits an agency in transition. NASA has had a tough year, with DOGE scrutiny and a proposed 24% budget cut prompting ~20% of the workforce to take buyouts or early retirement. JPL, the crown jewel of American deep space exploration, laid off 11% of its staff. The agency is facing the holy trinity of bureaucratic malaise: programs bloating well beyond budget, schedules slipping to the right, and patience for the status quo dwindling. Moreover, a year without permanent leadership has left NASA struggling to keep pace with shifting strategic priorities.
Turning a New Page
With Isaacman at the helm, there is great hope that NASA is headed in the right direction. The same day he took his oath, President Trump signed an executive order, Ensuring American Space Superiority, that consolidates U.S. space policy around four key pillars and sets deadlines:
Human spaceflight: Americans back on the Moon by 2028, and initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost by 2030.
Defense: Prototype next-generation missile defense technologies (e.g., Golden Dome) in orbit by 2028.
Power: A nuclear reactor ready for lunar surface operations by 2030.
Commercial growth: A mandate to unleash private capital, targeting at least $50B in new private investment into American space markets before the decade closes (if space-based datacenters truly take off in the near-term, we will easily clear this bar.)
The undercurrent is a philosophical shift in how NASA does business, giving “first preference for commercial solutions," pushing acquisition reform toward OTAs to bypass traditional procurement delays and fast-track new entrants, and requiring that NASA and Commerce flag any program 30% over budget or behind schedule within 90 days. The message is simple: move faster, spend smarter, and let the private sector carry more of the load.
For his part, Isaacman has been explicit about NASA's role in this leaner future: it should focus on what only it and it alone can do — advancing fundamental science and technology, taking risks the markets alone won’t fund, and maintaining American leadership in exploration. But the days of NASA managing every detail of spaceflight operations are over. Commercial partners will handle routine access to orbit and Earth-Moon space. NASA will push boundaries.
History Rhymes
Brian Muirhead (left), Dan Goldin (center), and Ed Stone (right), moments after the successful Mars Pathfinder landing on the Fourth of July — pictured as Vice President Al Gore calls in to congratulate the NASA team.
Three decades ago, another outsider took the helm of NASA facing a similar constellation of crises: Per Aspera cofounder Dan Goldin. He arrived in 1992 amid the post-Cold War “peace dividend” that slashed aerospace budgets, and inherited an agency addicted to “Battlestar Galactica” mega-missions and cost-plus contracts that rewarded delay over delivery. His response was the famous “Faster, Better, Cheaper” doctrine: build smaller, fly more often, accept some failures, learn faster. This cut development time by 40%, slashed costs by two-thirds, and 4×’d mission cadence. Mars Pathfinder landed successfully at a fraction of traditional costs.
The Rook’s Next Move
Isaacman’s challenge is to finish what we’ve started, but under far higher stakes. China is targeting a crewed lunar landing by 2030, as part of its broader ILRS ambitions, and already operates the only space station that will exist if the ISS deorbits before a commercial successor is on orbit. The Artemis program, America's answer to ILRS, has slipped repeatedly. The Long March rocket is advancing, and China’s spaceflight industry is on the verge of cracking reusability. The Mengzhou crew capsule and Lanyue lander are taking shape. Beijing's timeline compression has been remarkable: from first astronaut to imminent Moon landing in barely two decades.
"We are in a great competition with a rival that has the will and means to challenge American exceptionalism across multiple domains, including in the high ground of space," Isaacman said in recent testimony to the Senate. "This is not the time for delay, but for action — because if we fall behind, if we make a mistake, we may never catch up, and the consequences could shift the balance of power here on Earth." This bodes well for the American space program, in our view, suggesting he is fully cognizant of the urgency of this moment.
Godspeed, Rook and Team NASA, we are all rooting for you!
Also of note…
…two other pieces of last week’s Ensuring American Space Superiority executive order deserve a quick spotlight: the space station question, and spectrum.
The ISS succession plan: The EO calls for a pathway to replace the International Space Station with a privately operated successor by 2030. This isn’t news, but the clock is ticking, and the ‘commercial station’ storyline is one we’ll be closely tracking in the coming year (here’s what Dan recently wrote on the matter).
Free the airwaves: Buried in the EO is a priority to “demonstrate spectrum leadership across space applications,” including reapportioning and sharing bands to promote U.S. technology, efficient management, and global market access. Spectrum sure isn’t the sexiest technology topic, but it is super important; we just dropped Who Controls The Air, a whole Antimemo on this, just last week!
Texas Instruments has lit up SM1, its new 300mm wafer fab in Sherman, TX, part of a $60B+ domestic investment across seven fabs in Texas and Utah (and the largest foundational semiconductor manufacturing commitment in American history).
At scale, the Sherman cluster will produce tens of millions of analog and embedded devices per day: voltage regulators, power stages, and control silicon that manage the power density demands of modern AI systems, electrified vehicles, and new industrial gear.
While markets and mindshare obsess over advanced-logic shortages, a quieter squeeze has hit analog and power chips, too, as fab capacity tilts towards higher-margin, more advanced processors.
TI has been telegraphing this shift for years, and tuning SM1 and sister lines around the 800V power stages and multiphase controllers needed for new high-voltage datacenter architectures.
The strategic twist: TI already fabricates the vast majority of its wafers internally and is marching towards an astonishing 95% in-house manufacturing by 2030 — a deliberate, long-standing bet on vertical integration over foundry dependency. As students of history, the last thing we’ll say is this: Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit at TI's Dallas lab in 1958. Sixty-seven years later, the company he helped build believes the future of American chipmaking looks a lot like its past: design it, fab it, own it.
Per Aspera Friends in High, Hard Places
We have kind words for Tory Bruno, who served his last day as CEO of United Launch Alliance (ULA) yesterday, capping a nearly 12-year run at the helm of the Boeing–Lockheed Martin joint venture. Tory took on the unenviable task of welding two defense primes’ heavy-lift efforts into a single launch company and, for nearly a decade, was the only thing standing between the Pentagon and a gap in national security launch. He built an exceptionally reliable service business, protected critical payloads through a fragile transition era, and did it with unusual candor for a defense CEO. A patriot, an American hero, and a leader who deserves more credit than he’ll ever claim for keeping U.S. eyes and ears in orbit.
You may have heard of Freedom 250, the nonpartisan effort to throw America’s 250th birthday in 2026. POTUS recently appointed Keith Krach to lead as Freedom 250’s CEO. Keith’s the former CEO of DocuSign and chairman/co-founder of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue — whose recent Trusted Tech Summit we covered. Congratulations to Keith Krach and the KITDP team, we’re looking forward to that big ole 250th bday party!
Extra Renaissance Rumblings
The Large Hadron Collider. Source: CERN
Physics: Private donors pledge $1B to CERN for Future Circular Collider // A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam 3D-printed a Christmas tree made entirely of ice // New 3D benchmark leaves AI in knots.
Federal developments: Senate passes NDAA, which authorizes Pentagon to spend $900B in FY26 // Navy announces new class of “Golden Fleet” battleships // Dept. of Transportation launches Advanced Air Mobility Strategy to prepare for widespread integration of drones, eVTOLs, etc // House subcommittee votes to advance bill legalizing supersonic flight over the country // The FCC is moving to effectively ban DJI and other foreign-made drones from the U.S.
Manufacturing news: In Germany, everyone is a defense manufacturer now, fueled by the country’s (and continent’s) accelerated rearmament // BYD debuts one-piece, low-pressure-cast aluminum vehicle frame for new electric SUV // Sadly, many such cases: “Liddy’s Machine Shop in Jacksonville, Florida, closed its doors after 91 years. Its relentless search to replace its aging workforce ended with closed doors.” We need to fix our tribal knowledge problem!
Supercycle signals: American firms sold a near-record $1.7T of investment-grade bonds this year, fueled by the AI supercycle // OpenAI compute profit margin reached 68% in October, up 2× from Jan 2024 // Alphabet to buy Intersect, a datacenter/energy infrastructure provider, for $4.75B // Meanwhile, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has a new co — no, not the rocket company, nor the drone company — but a hyperscale datacenter developer that has partnered with a major Texas landowner to build new compute hubs // Ford, despite retreating from EVs, is starting an energy storage business to supply datacenters and industrial grid users.
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