NASA: Alaska on the frontier of the space economy | Local News

The head of the United States’ space agency said big things are on the horizon for the next great space race, and Alaska has a part to play in it.

Jared Isaacson, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration administrator, held a brief town hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Schaible Auditorium on Monday. He provided updates and encouragement to dozens of UAF undergraduate and graduate students, along with faculty and research staff.

On Tuesday, Isaacson visited Kodiak and talked to Alaska Aerospace Corporation President/CEO John Oberst, toured the Pacific Spaceport and spoke with the local AAC workforce.   

The Working Families Tax Cut Act, (also known as the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act) included a $10 billion supplemental appropriation for NASA on top of its annual budget. The funding was included to protect core space exploration initiatives from budget cuts and provided instructions to further manned space missions.

“We are returning to the moon,” Isaacson said. “It’s been a half-century intermission, but we are back.”

He noted that the Artemis series of missions, which includes sending a manned craft to circle the moon, will eventually accomplish that goal.

Artemis III is under construction right now to conduct a crewed demonstration to test rendezvous and docking capabilities with commercial human landing systems.

Artemis IV will be the mission that sends astronauts back to the moon in 2028.

Isaacson said the Artemis missions are in lockstep with President Donald Trump’s mandate to establish a lunar base before Russia or China. NASA will start sending lunar rovers and modules beginning in 2027.

However, rather than aim for a single “big dream” project, he said NASA will return to the 1960s playbook: small steps and “building up to near-impossible outcomes in a phased way.”

This would allow NASA to test out communications, power needs and surface mobility.

At the same time, NASA is working on a nuclear-powered unmanned vehicle to test nuclear propulsion by sending it to Mars in 2029. The Space Reactor-1 Freedom, Isaacson said, will be the future of space missions.

The goal, he said, is to have NASA’s science directorate test the technology and expand its capabilities as far as it can into the solar system.

“Eventually that technology will get to … your humans-to-Mars mission,” Isaacson said.

Isaacson said NASA will require contributions of several sectors and a new generation of talent to accomplish its goals.

“We are in a space race right now, and that’s not a bad thing,” he said. He noted that Russia and China have their own goals to establish a manned lunar presence on the moon.

He noted the first space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union ultimately resulted in the International Space Station, a collaboration between the U.S. and Russia.

The current competition means trying to beat Russia and China to the moon and mark a claim for water ice and solar generation sites.

Isaacson said UAF research students and faculty can help push that goal. He noted that facilities like UAF’s Poker Flat Research Range and the state-owned Alaska Aerospace Corporation’s Pacific Spaceport Complex-Kodiak are prime spaces to test missions.

Poker Flat is used for various research efforts in partnership with NASA, including study of aurora and other suborbital scientific missions. Kodiak’s spaceport serves as a near-polar launch site for both military and commercial applications, such as RocketLab and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.

Last year, UAF Geophysical Institute and Alaska Aerospace Corp. signed a memo of understanding to jointly develop and offer spaceport services to the booming commercial rocket and satellite industry. 

Separately, they are seeking a commercial launch license for Poker Flat from the Federal Aviation Administration that would expand Poker Flat’s options.

“We’re going to mature some of the technology right here at Poker Flats,” he said. “Not to mention everything we want to do in space, from commercial missions to scientific payloads for orbital data centers.”

He noted that he expects that both Poker Flat and Kodiak will “have an immense amount of demand in the years ahead.”

UAF Chancellor Russ Vander Lugt noted that the goals NASA aims to achieve mirror the university’s motto “Ad Summum,” or “To the Summit.” He noted that the Athabascan people of 10,000 years ago considered that challenge when looking at Denali’s peak, to Congress’s creation of the Geophysical Institute in 1946 and NASA’s goal to aim for space in the 1960s.

Vander Lugt said UAF contributes regularly to NASA and military projects and he anticipates more activity will come to Alaska’s rocket ranges.

“Alaska is ready, and we’re ready to fly far more than all of this,” he said. “Alaska is on the frontier, and it’s on the forward edge of our nation’s defense.”

During a brief media interview after the town hall, Isaacson noted that Trump signed executive orders to bolster the U.S. space mission, including the creation of a U.S. Space Academy and marching orders to prepare for as many as 1,000 launches a year starting by 2030.

“There is no way that is not going to happen without the contributions of Pacific Space Complex-Kodiak and other launch areas around the nation,” he said. “We are going to need the best and brightest from across America, including those that are here in Alaska. People are going to be banging down the door from commercial missions at Kodiak.”

Congressman Nick Begich, R-Alaska, added that he can see “the space economy absolutely exploding and growing for the next several decades.”

“Alaska is going to play a central role in the development of that economy,” Begich said.