REDMOND, Wash. — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman came to Rocketdyne’s facility here today to give a pep talk to the space company’s employees — and lay out his vision for the future of America’s space effort.

Isaacman made clear that nuclear power will be a big part of that vision.

“NASA is at our best when we’re doing the near-impossible,” he said. “There is no obvious revenue model or business case for what we’re doing. We’re just out there pursuing the secrets of the universe, and nuclear or fission-powered spacecraft make sense in that it helps us extend our reach farther into the solar system.”

The pathfinder mission for NASA’s nuclear ambitions is likely to be SR-1 Freedom, a Mars probe that’s scheduled for launch in 2028. SR-1 Freedom is designed to carry a fission reactor and nuclear electric propulsion system.

Rocketdyne’s Redmond facility is working on thrusters for the system. “We built here, in Redmond, the Advanced Electric Propulsion System,” Rocketdyne CEO Kristin Houston told GeekWire before Isaacman’s talk. “It’s a 12-kilowatt Hall-thruster system, and that is going to be the propulsion element on the SR-1 Freedom. So, yeah, we’re really proud of that.”

Today’s visit was part of the Pacific Northwest leg of Isaacman’s nationwide “Inspiration Tour,” aimed at strengthening the connections between NASA and its partners. A similar tour in August brought Isaacman to Idaho National Laboratory, which will play a key role in providing the 20-kilowatt reactor for SR-1 Freedom.

In partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA is also looking into the prospects for putting a nuclear reactor on the lunar surface by 2030 as part of its Moon Base initiative. Houston said Rocketdyne is interested in playing a part in that program.

“That’s not as much out of the Redmond site, but as Rocketdyne, we’re doing a lot of investment in the power conversion and the power management and distribution design that could be used for that,” she said.

Over the course of nearly 60 years, Rocketdyne’s Redmond site has played a role in nearly every interplanetary NASA mission — and has gone through several ownership changes along the way. The company’s latest transition, including its rebranding as Rocketdyne, became official last month after AE Industrial Partners acquired a majority stake from L3Harris.

Nowadays, Rocketdyne is arguably best-known as one of the commercial partners in NASA’s Artemis moon program. “We have 21 engines on the Orion spacecraft,” Houston said. “That’s between the crew module and the service module … all built in Redmond.”

The Redmond facility oversees the refurbishment of space shuttle engines for upcoming Artemis missions and is redesigning the spacecraft’s Orion Main Engine for missions starting with Artemis 7. “Our in-space propulsion business, really based here, has the lead on the entire OME program,” Houston said. “So we’re already concurrently doing the design and test of the new engine while doing all the refurbishment.”

Isaacman said the Artemis program is one of NASA’s top priorities, in part due to geopolitical competition. The current schedule targets a crewed lunar landing in early 2028, followed by initial work on a permanent base near the moon’s south pole later that year.

“NASA is very hot,” he said. “But NASA is hot right now because we are in a great-power competition. That’s across AI, energy and infrastructure, and everything you can imagine militarily, but certainly in the domain of space. We cannot take our foot off the gas. Really, if we miss our time by a matter of months, there are only so many good parking spots in the south pole of the moon, where we want to build our moon base. Well, the Chinese want to build their moon base there, too.”

NASA is relying on Rocketdyne and other commercial partners to set a fast pace.

“For all the great companies, the partners that are contributing to our near-impossible objectives, now is absolutely the time,” Isaacman said. “Just as so many of you were probably inspired by the space race in the 1960s and what we accomplished — all those books and movies that came from it — you’re now contributing to that.”

One of the VIPs in the audience, Redmond Mayor Angela Birney, said she was energized by Isaacman’s visit. “I am so excited that Rocketdyne is on the forefront of missions in space,” she said. “For me, as a former science teacher and someone who’s so interested in encouraging innovation and development, this just feels like a fantastic day to celebrate all of that.”

Rocketdyne wasn’t Isaacman’s only scheduled stop on this week’s tour. Earlier in the week, the administrator and other federal officials paid a visit to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Castle Air Museum in California’s Central Valley. In addition to Rocketdyne, today’s visits included stopovers at United Precision Corp.’s headquarters in Washougal, Wash., Seattle’s Museum of Flight and Boeing’s Everett facility. Stoke Space is on the agenda for Friday.

After his talk, Isaacman told GeekWire that Washington state is home to a “lot of industry” that’s contributing to America’s space effort.

“It takes contributions from great talent all across the nation to contribute to our world-changing efforts,” he said, “but it just happens to be that a lot of it is here in Washington.”

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won a contract worth up to $700 million to boost NASA’s telecommunications capability in Martian orbit, using a version of the company’s Blue Ring multi-mission space platform.

The contract calls on Blue Origin to deliver a high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter to NASA by the end of 2028, the space agency said in a news release. Blue Origin would also be charged with operating the Mars telecommunications network as part of NASA’s broader space communications and navigation infrastructure.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the Blue Ring spacecraft for the mission was already in production in Huntsville, Alabama. “Before the first human steps on Mars, we have to build the road. … MTO will enable science, carry payloads, and help lay the foundation for human exploration,” he said in a post to X.

“MTO is the backbone of America’s Mars exploration program for the next decade and beyond, and will provide the reliable communications capacity that will keep future robotic and human missions connected to each other and to Earth,” Tory Bruno, president of Blue Origin’s National Security Group, said in a news release. “This awarded contract is a testament to the Blue Origin team that has been building Blue Ring with exactly this kind of mission in mind. We’re ready, and so is the hardware.”

NASA’s current telecommunications links to Mars rely on an aging set of orbiters, including Mars Odyssey (launched in 2001) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched in 2005). The multinational relay network also makes use of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. In addition to the orbiting relay satellites, NASA’s probes on the Martian surface can communicate directly with Earth to a limited degree.

Plans for a new Mars telecommunications orbiter have been under consideration for more than a decade and a half, but had been repeatedly put on hold due to budget concerns. This May, NASA issued a request for proposals relating to a commercial network for the Red Planet, drawing responses from Blue Origin as well as Rocket Lab.

Blue Origin announced three years ago that it was developing its Blue Ring in-space mobility platform for a wide range of potential applications — and last year, the first flight of the company’s New Glenn rocket included a payload that tested communications and control system for Blue Ring.

NASA said the Mars Telecommunications Network would be managed by the space agency’s Space Communications and Navigation program. The network is expected to be operational at Mars by 2030 to support current and future missions to the Red Planet.

A Seattle game studio is collaborating with NASA to create a new educational video game that challenges players to plan, collaborate, and invent their way to building a virtual lunar colony.

Moonbase Y, currently under development at August Interactive, is a cooperative, exploration-focused online video game that puts players ages 13 and older in the role of the architects and engineers of a mission to return humanity to the moon. Step one is leaving Earth’s atmosphere, while step two is successfully landing on the lunar surface.

Once they’re actually on the moon, Moonbase Y players can craft items, research technologies, build their own virtual colony, and use all the usual collaborative tools found in online building games, all in a game that’s built on source images and data provided directly by NASA. To succeed, they’ll need to come up with their own solutions for the real-world problems that will confront an off-world settlement.

“There’s a whole generation of kids who may very well live and work on the moon,” said Sarah Kneller, August Interactive’s chief experience officer. “It’s imminent.”

Kneller describes Moonbase Y as a way to “not only let people imagine the future, but give them the tools to help create it.” It’s one thing to learn about the sciences and technologies required to construct a lunar colony, but it’s a better educational experience to actually let someone do it themselves.

As a video game, Moonbase Y can be summarized as a crafting-focused collaborative RPG that’s using up-to-date real scientific data. Any and every solution that players will have to come up with to build their colony in Moonbase Y is something that could at least theoretically work under real-world conditions.

According to August Interactive’s CEO Kristin Wood, NASA’s current goal is to have an inhabited lunar base by 2040, as a first step toward a crewed expedition to Mars. In order to do so, Wood said, “there are approximately 187 technologies that will need to be created.”

Moonbase Y isn’t an attempt to crowdsource those solutions. Instead, it’s an educational game that’s made to let players work on specific necessary skills in a collaborative environment.

“We want a 13-year-old to understand they don’t have to be a rocket scientist [to contribute],” Kneller said. “They can say, ‘There is something I’m good at that matters.’” Wherever someone’s talents lie, from hard sciences to soft skills, they could be a part of a project like this. No one is irrelevant.

That’s part of Moonbase Y’s deliberately hopeful tone. From the ground up, the game is being built as a deliberate act of optimism. While it’s possible for a player’s colony to fail, that’s part of the learning process. You can always start again, and this time you’re a little smarter for having had the experience. This is a tough job, but that’s part of the fun.

“As entertainers, it’s really easy to sell the terrifying outcome… this mental model that the future is bleak,” Kneller said. As a result, Moonbase Y is purposefully swinging hard in the other direction.

Kneller used to work for Valve Software in Bellevue, Wash., where she spent more than a decade as an executive producer for Dota 2’s esports circuit. She left the company in 2023 to co-found August Interactive.

Other team members at August include Wood, a former CIA officer turned tech entrepreneur; CRO Mike Ambinder, a former research scientist for Valve who specializes in experimental psychology as it applies to game design; and creative director Jon Pierre Yousef, a Florida-based artist who’s contributed to franchises such as Fortnite and Call of Duty.

In addition to Moonbase Y, August Interactive released its first professional project on July 21. Spire is a “performance intelligence layer” that analyzes users’ style of play in competitive video games and gives players tips on how to improve. The idea behind Spire is to smooth out the onboarding process for multiplayer games like Rocket League or Dota 2, in order to make them more accessible for new players.

Moonbase Y is currently in production at August Interactive, with no stated release window.