We got an audience with the "Lunar Viceroy" to talk how NASA will build a Moon base

At the end of a long day on Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked down at a table littered with microphones and jokingly referred to the space agency's new Moon base manager, Carlos Garcia-Galan, as the "Lunar Viceroy. " It was a bit of humor, but it also seemed to represent affection from Isaacman for a long-time NASA employee so willingly taking on a major new challenge.

Garcia-Galan was, in many ways, the emerging star at the daylong Ignition event in Washington, DC. Heretofore he has largely been an anonymous engineer at NASA who has now been thrust into a very public role of leading the agency's ambitious Moon base initiative. (His official title, by the way, is program executive.

Carlos Garcia-Galan: So change is always hard. But it was not hard from the perspective of having the focus on doing something that's directly related to the objectives we have at hand, which are bringing humans back to the surface of the Moon and building an outpost. So while I do believe that an orbiting outpost has value in the overall exploration goals, it doesn't mean that we can't do it later.