Jared Isaacman wants the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to regain its mojo.

The NASA administrator said the agency has lost its focus and ability to quickly execute in recent years. "We are just trying to get our swagger back here, get back in a rhythm of what we did" in the 1960s, Isaacman said at The Wall Street Journal's Technology Council Summit, calling that period NASA's "glory days."

"This is simply going back to the playbook that achieved these near-impossible outcomes from decades past," Isaacman said.

There is urgency, he said, to breathe life into the agency as the U.S. races China to establish a presence on the moon and secure valuable lunar real estate.

"There is a second space race. It will come down to months, not years. The Chinese will absolutely put their astronauts on the surface of the Moon, do what the Soviets never could," Isaacman said. "And I think the implications of that will be felt around the world."

Isaacman has tried to realize this shift by eliminating "needless bureaucracy" and flattening the agency's organizational structure, as well as by spending more time in the field himself.

He is also trying to bring more of NASA's workforce back in-house, after what he described as an extended period of outsourcing to contractors that contributed to higher costs and slower launch cadences.

Personnel for mission control and rocket designing, construction and launching should be brought within the agency, Isaacman said. And though NASA should continue to act as one customer of many for components and services that have a high level of technical readiness, he said the agency should be more hands-on for more ambitious projects, such as spacecraft fueled by nuclear power.

"We are course-correcting back to center on the balance between, what is the near-impossible--it doesn't have an obvious business or use case--that NASA should be doing, and where can you leverage industry to supplement, just as we did in the early days," Isaacman said. "I think we're getting back to the right balance there."