It might seem that an airfield filled with old planes is a strange place to talk about the future of space flight. But Jared Isaacman, the administrator of NASA, said Atwater’s Castle Air Museum was the perfect setting to talk about what’s ahead.
Isaacman visited the former Air Force base last week to tour the planes and talk with students, including a contingent of more than 30 from UC Merced. The group included undergraduate and graduate students, members of the university’s first nanosatellite team, and faculty conducting NASA-supported research.
Among the faculty were Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Gillian Wilson, an astronomer and cosmologist, Professor Sayantani Ghosh, an expert in condensed matter physics, and Professor Erin Hestir, a remote-sensing scientist and director of CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society & the Banatao Institute at UC Merced. The visit followed a stop at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, where Isaacman met with scientists working on some of the technology to launch with Artemis IV, a moon-landing mission planned for early 2028.
“That’s just the opening act to America’s grand return to the lunar surface,” Isaacman said.
But space flight started with subspace flight, and the Castle display includes a F-100 previously flown by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gus Grissom, the NASA director said in a post on X. “A real piece of NASA and American aviation history.”