After a long career as a politician from Florida, former astronaut Bill Nelson has served as NASA's administrator for the last three and a half years. He intends to resign from this position in about two weeks when President Joe Biden ends his term in the White House.

Several significant events have happened under Nelson's watch at NASA, including the long-delayed but ultimately successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the flight of the first Artemis mission, and the momentous decision to fly Boeing's Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without crew aboard. But as he leaves office, there are questions about ongoing delays with NASA's signature Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon.

Ars spoke with Nelson about his time in office, the major decisions he made, and the concerns he has for the space agency's future under the Trump Administration. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Ars: I wanted to start with the state of Artemis. You all had an event a few weeks ago where you talked about Artemis II and Artemis II delays. And you know, both those missions have slipped a couple of years now since you've been administrator. So I'm just wondering, do you know how confident we should be in the current timeline?

Bill Nelson: Well, I am very confident because this most recent [delay] was occasioned by virtue of the heat shield, and it has been unanimous after all of the testing that they understand what happened to Orion's heat shield. The chunks came off in an irregular pattern from the Artemis I heat shield. With the change in the re-entry profile, they are unanimous in their recommendation that we can go with the Artemis II heat shield as it is.

And I must say that of the major decisions that I've made, that was an easy one for me because it was unanimous. When I say it was unanimous, it was unanimous in the IRT, the independent review team, headed by Paul Hill. It wasn't to begin with, but after all the extensive testing, everybody was on board. It was unanimous in the deputy's committee. It was unanimous in the agency committee, and that brought it to me then in the Executive Council, and it was unanimous there.