President-elect Donald Trump has chosen billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman to be the next administrator of NASA.
"Jared will drive NASA's mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in Space science, technology and exploration," Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Isaacman made headlines earlier this year when he became the first private astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. The five-day mission took place using a capsule built by Elon Musk's company SpaceX. During the flight, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis donned space suits supplied by the company and floated briefly outside the capsule.
It was Isaacman's second trip to space using a SpaceX capsule. He has declined to say how much he's paid the company for the two flights.
Isaacman is a friend of Musk, and his online payment company, Shift 4, has extensive financial ties to SpaceX. According to financial disclosure documents, Shift 4 had invested $27.5 million dollars in SpaceX as of 2021. That same year, Shift4 announced a five-year partnership that would make it the payment platform for Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX.
If confirmed as NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee billions of dollars in contracts that the government has awarded to SpaceX. He would also be in a position to funnel more money to Musk's company.
"Isaacman is likely to favor ambitious and innovative commercial projects," says Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, which analyzes the space business. "Many of those projects could well be executed by SpaceX."
In fact, in previous posts on Musk's social media platform X, Isaacman appears to have shown a strong preference for SpaceX. He has supported allowing SpaceX to increase its launches out of California, after lawmakers there voted to restrict its flights from Vandenberg Air Force Base. He's also been critical of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) to carry astronauts to the moon, as well as the agency's decision to award a lunar landing contract to Blue Origin, the spaceflight company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Blue Origin award came after NASA gave a multi-billion dollar contract to SpaceX for the same mission.
Spend billions on lunar lander redundancy that you don’t have with SLS at the expense of dozens of scientific programs. I don’t like it.
— Jared Isaacman (@rookisaacman) March 13, 2024
Farrar says Isaacman would not immediately be able to restructure NASA's large programs, such as its Artemis mission to deliver astronauts to the moon. That's because many aspects of those programs are dictated by Congress, which sets the budget for the space agency. "The real question for NASA is whether Congress will permit it to abandon legacy projects like SLS so the budget can be redirected to SpaceX," he says.
SpaceX did not immediately reply to NPR's request for comment. Through a spokesperson, Isaacman declined to speak to NPR, but in a statement posted to X, he said he was honored to receive the nomination: "With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this," he wrote. "We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place."
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