At the end of a long day Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked at a table full of microphones and jokingly referred to the space agency’s new lunar base manager. Carlos Garcia-Galanas the “lunar viceroy”. It was a bit of humor, but it also seemed to represent Isaacman’s affection for a former NASA employee who was so willing to take on an important new challenge.
García-Galán was, in many ways, the breakout star at the day-long Ignition event in Washington, DC. Until now he has largely been an anonymous engineer at NASA who has now taken on the very public role of leading the agency’s ambitious lunar base initiative. (His official title, by the way, is program executive.)
Ars had the opportunity to speak with García-Galán about NASA’s plans and, more importantly, how they could be implemented. Here is a lightly edited (for clarity) transcript of that conversation.
Ars: YeahYou were previously involved with Lunar Gateway, which was effectively canceled to build a lunar base, so I’d love to know if this is a difficult transition for you.
Carlos Garcia-Galan: So change is always difficult. But it wasn’t difficult from the perspective of focusing on doing something that is directly related to the goals at hand, which are to bring humans back to the surface of the Moon and build an outpost. So while I think an orbiting outpost has value in overall exploration goals, that doesn’t mean we can’t do it later. We need to focus on the surface and everyone wants to be on the surface. So I’m very excited and I’m sure the rest of the Gateway team will be once they pivot and start shifting their focus toward that.
Ars: I could tell from your talk that you were really excited about this.
Carlos Garcia-Galan: Absolutely. Who wouldn’t be? Yeah.
Ars: I mean, it would be. But I also recognize, as you said, that this is an enormous challenge. What is the most urgent thing you want to do first to address this?
Carlos Garcia-Galan: First of all, one of the things we talked about today is bringing all the power and resources of NASA into this. So I think right away we’re going to work with all the programs and projects that are doing something related to lunar exploration, including Gateway with the architecture above, and try to bring it all together. Because great work has been done so far. Basically, we only need to focus on the things that are most relevant to the critical path.
