Cleveland, Ohio — September 15, 2026
NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya
At the American Astronautical Society’s 2026 Glenn Space Technology Symposium at Cleveland State University, Amit Kshatriya sat down with AAS Vice President of Finance Dave Radzanowski for a wide-ranging fireside chat that touched nearly every corner of NASA’s current portfolio — a freshly launched flagship telescope, the countdown to a crewed lunar landing, a bet on nuclear power in space, and the harder-to-see work of rebuilding the agency’s own engineering muscle. Kshatriya, who marked one year as NASA’s Associate Administrator the week before the conversation is, as Radzanowski noted, the highest-ranking civil servant at NASA.
Roman’s first light
The conversation opened with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which had just launched aboard a SpaceX rocket. “I do thank SpaceX for putting us down the middle,” Kshatriya said, noting the precision insertion should help extend the observatory’s operational life at the second Lagrange point. Early checkouts, he said, have gone well: the wide-field instrument’s mirrors and detectors are cooling down properly, connectivity checks are “green across the board” on all eighteen sensors, and preliminary tests of Roman’s coronagraph — technology that will feed directly into the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory — have been “remarkable.” He expects the telescope to reach its final orbit around December, with first light to follow. Kshatriya, who worked years ago on transferring and grinding the telescope’s mirror when the program was first taking shape, credited Roman deputy project scientist Julie McEnery for explaining the mission’s significance: a leap in observational scale he compared to the revolution in physics at the turn of the twentieth century.
A year in the chair
Reflecting on his first year as Associate Administrator, Kshatriya said his background running the Space Station and Artemis programs had prepared him for the breadth of NASA’s footprint across centers and industry partners, but not for everything. The science side, in particular, was new territory. “I am kind of a lab scientist in a different life,” he said, praising the passion he’s seen in the Science Mission Directorate under Nicky Fox and in NASA’s aeronautics engineers. His central takeaway from the year: “The jewel of the agency is the workforce” — not just the hardware NASA builds, but the generations of engineers and leaders it forms along the way, lessons the agency then shares “freely” with an industry it helped create. He also credited close collaboration with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman for sharpening his own thinking about the agency’s direction.
Closing in on Artemis III
Turning to Artemis III, Kshatriya described a deliberately incremental approach rather than a leap straight to a lunar landing. NASA and its partners — SpaceX’s Starship, Blue Origin, and the SLS/Orion team — are working toward a rendezvous and docking demonstration in Earth orbit, an “Apollo 9-style” proving flight designed to retire risk before attempting anything similar near the Moon. Hardware is moving: the SLS core stage is expected to roll out of its assembly tool into High Bay 2 within about a month, ahead of a tanking test to validate propellant-loading procedures.
The technical center of gravity, he said, is cryogenic fluid transfer and storage — “a massive development” that unlocks everything downstream once it works, from orbital propellant aggregation to a lander’s ability to reliably launch itself off the lunar surface without a ground crew standing by. Precision landing and surface operations are the next frontier of the unknown: NASA still doesn’t fully understand how lunar dust and terrain reflect and hold heat, which is why every robotic mission NASA sends to the Moon going forward, under the agency’s incremental “Moonbase” surface effort, will carry sensors to characterize that thermal environment. Logistics, he added, will be the quiet challenge behind all of it — NASA proved it could keep supply chains and maintainability working on the International Space Station for decades, but a lunar base multiplies that problem “by two or three.”
The nuclear bet
Kshatriya was most animated discussing space nuclear power and propulsion, which he called central to NASA’s long-term vision. He framed the effort — spanning fission surface power and nuclear propulsion — around a flight-control-era axiom he called “burn a common target”: rather than lock in a single reactor or propulsion architecture before the technology and regulatory groundwork exist, NASA’s near-term job is to build the fuel supply chain and streamline the licensing framework so that whichever specific solution eventually wins, the path is already clear. He repeatedly invoked Admiral Hyman Rickover’s 1982 speech “Doing a Job,” and the history of the USS Nautilus — a submarine once expected to run on oil that, within a few years of serious commitment, was operating a nuclear reactor under the North Pole. “That’s not a miracle,” he said. “That’s just the level of discipline required to do it.” Near-term, he pointed to an initial reactor demonstration he referred to as “SR-1,” feeding lessons into a planned follow-on, “LR-1.”
Rebuilding NASA’s own capability
A recurring theme was NASA’s push to rebuild in-house engineering capability it had let atrophy over decades of relying on industry. Kshatriya was direct that this isn’t about competing with contractors: if NASA is going to ask industry to build something as technically fraught as a nuclear-powered spacecraft, with no obvious business case, “somebody’s got to do it, and that needs to be us.” When Radzanowski raised industry unease about the government appearing to take over private-sector work — invoking his own past experience with OMB’s Circular A-76 rules on government versus commercial roles — Kshatriya pushed back gently: “We aren’t taking jobs away from industry… I’m building what we need to build to enable the next generation of this industry to be effective.” He pointed to a recent swearing-in of 180 new civil servants at NASA Ames, held inside the center’s giant 80-by-120-foot wind tunnel, as a small but visible signal of that rebuilding effort — and admitted it was the first time in his own two-decade NASA career, split between contractor and civil-service roles, that he’d been sworn in himself.
Where decisions get stuck
Asked what stands in the way of the agency’s boldest ambitions, Kshatriya didn’t point to technology. “Indecision is worse than a wrong decision,” he said, arguing that NASA’s biggest obstacle is organizational: as the agency scales up, it gets harder to know who actually owns a given risk. He described asking his own systems engineering team, that same morning, to write down who owned each of their top three problems — not a committee, not a board, a person. When no one can answer that clearly, he said, it’s a symptom of an agency “obsessed with checking all the boxes” at the expense of moving forward. The fix, in his view, is a culture of “extreme ownership,” borrowing again from Rickover, where leaders who make the call are also the ones who stand up when something goes wrong.
Two priorities as chief engineer
In his other role as NASA’s chief engineer, Kshatriya named two priorities. First, rebuilding the technical depth behind the agency’s independent technical authority — through NASA’s engineering academy and more structured training at the mid-career and senior levels, so that authority is “graduated into” through demonstrated excellence rather than seniority. Second, revitalizing NASA’s technical standards, which he’s determined to evaluate on evidence rather than reputation: rather than assume standards are slowing industry down, he’s asking contractors directly where the friction actually is — delegated nonconformance authority, government inspections, fracture control, parts qualification — and moving the agency’s engineering practices toward whichever approach genuinely improves reliability. He also wants to bring more hands-on engineering work back into NASA centers, arguing that seasoned program managers are made only by “getting your ass kicked” through real in-house development, not oversight alone — pointing to Richard Feynman’s famous 1986 congressional demonstration, dunking an O-ring in ice water for about a dollar, as his model for the right kind of urgency, as opposed to NASA’s more common instinct to spend a year and a million dollars confirming what a simple test could show directly.
Audience questions
Fielding audience questions submitted live, Kshatriya declined to forecast congressional appropriations language on lunar and nuclear programs (“There’s no upside for me on that question, Dave”), but engaged directly on how many SLS flights NASA expects before transitioning to commercial human launch systems: the number, he said, will be “criteria-based” — driven by having alternate systems ready and ensuring no gap in flight cadence or in the workforce and skills that sustain it, rather than a fixed count set in advance.
Lightning round
Closing with a round of rapid-fire questions, Kshatriya said the biggest surprise of his first year was simply how strong NASA’s workforce is in parts of the agency he hadn’t worked in before. Asked which lunar technology deserves more attention, he said thermal management; asked which single technology demonstration he’d accelerate by a year, cryogenic fluid management. On the workforce skill NASA needs more of, he pointed to the willingness of veteran engineers to see the agency’s current transformation as building on their legacy rather than repudiating it. Asked what he wants young engineers to feel comfortable telling him, his answer was blunt: that he’s wrong. “That culture of silence… we’ve created an environment where the cost of honesty is zero,” he said, “but the standard for honesty should also not be zero.” The federal budget process was his pick for the one thing he’d simplify or eliminate tomorrow, calling it more opaque than any spacecraft he’s studied. And asked to describe, in a few words, the NASA he hopes to leave behind, he circled back to something bigger than the agency itself: “What we’re doing in our country, in our government, needs to be the light that shines on the world… and NASA is the center of that light.”