Traditionally, selecting the leader of NASA has not been a top priority for incoming presidential administrations. While nominations for cabinet-level posts are announced well before Inauguration Day, the choice of a NASA administrator can languish for months. President Joe Biden’s nomination of Bill Nelson to lead the space agency took until March 2021 and was rather speedy, relatively speaking: in 2017, Donald Trump waited more than seven months before picking Jim Bridenstine as NASA administrator.
That was one reason why Trump’s announcement on the morning of Dec. 4 — a month and a half before his second Inauguration Day — was so surprising. “I am delighted to nominate Jared Isaacman, an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut, as Administrator” of NASA, he posted on social media. “Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in Space science, technology, and exploration.”
The timing of the announcement was not the only surprise. Isaacman is an outsider to civil space, with few known interactions with NASA. He is most familiar to the space community as the billionaire funder, and commander, of two private astronaut missions on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. His selection suggests the incoming Trump administration is interested in shaking up how NASA operates, with perhaps a greater focus on commercial approaches. That may mean revisiting NASA’s current approach to the Artemis lunar exploration program, one that relies extensively on traditional contractors and contracting approaches. However, any attempt at radical changes to the agency will likely face significant opposition from Congress.
From dropout to billionaire astronaut
Before 2021, few in the space industry had heard of Isaacman. A high school dropout (he later obtained a bachelor’s degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University), he started a payment processing company in 1999 as a teenager in his parents’ basement. That company, now known as Shift4, generated more than $2.5 billion in revenue in 2023 and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020, giving Isaacman an estimated net worth of about $2 billion.
In January 2021, SpaceX announced an agreement with Isaacman for a private astronaut mission on the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. The four-person Inspiration4 mission flew in September 2021 with Isaacman, who has extensive experience piloting high-performance aircraft, as commander. The three-day mission demonstrated that non-professional astronauts could fly safely in Crew Dragon.
Several months after Inspiration4, Isaacman and SpaceX announced a new initiative dubbed the Polaris Program. It called for a series of private astronaut missions starting on Crew Dragon and culminating in the first crewed launch of Starship. The first of those missions, Polaris Dawn, flew in September 2024, again commanded by Isaacman. That five-day Crew Dragon flight included the first private spacewalk, with Isaacman and another crewmember, Sarah Gillis, briefly exiting the spacecraft to test SpaceX-developed spacesuits.
Throughout the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn missions, Isaacman expressed little public interest in space policy or politics in general. Few, if any, people in the industry had his name on a shortlist of potential NASA administrators at the time of Trump’s announcement.
Isaacman, though, has been active as a contributor to political parties and candidates, including many Democrats. According to OpenSecrets.org, which maintains campaign finance databases, Isaacman made donations in 2024 to the Democratic party organizations in Michigan and Pennsylvania as well as two Democratic political action committees. In 2023, he donated to George Whitesides, a Democrat and former Virgin Galactic chief executive who won a House seat in Southern California in 2024. He also contributed to the reelection campaign of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a former NASA astronaut, in 2022. He has previously contributed to Republicans, including Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), chair of the House Transportation Committee.
Isaacman has said little about why he sought to lead the agency or what he would do if confirmed by the Senate. “Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history,” he said in a social media post the day of Trump’s announcement.
In his limited post-nomination comments, he has emphasized the importance of U.S. leadership in space exploration. “I was born after the Moon landings; my children were born after the final space shuttle launch,” the 41-year-old said in his post. “With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place.”
He returned to that topic in a fireside chat at the Spacepower Conference Dec. 11, while staying away from specifics about his nomination. “I know we can’t be second,” he said.
Industry consolidation and saving Hubble
While neither Isaacman nor the incoming Trump administration have discussed their plans for NASA, Isaacman has offered hints in the form of a paper trail of social media posts in the months before Trump’s announcement.
One theme is dissatisfaction with the performance of many aerospace and defense prime contractors. He has frequently lamented what he called the “excessive consolidation” among those companies in the decades since the end of the Cold War, which he argued has made them less efficient.
Those posts often focused on defense contracting — Isaacman, as a side venture to Shift4, co-founded and led for several years Draken International, a military aircraft training company — but are also applicable to space. In October, he appeared to endorse a commentary by Michael Bloomberg that was sharply critical of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign.
“There are government boondoggles, and then there’s NASA’s Artemis program,” Bloomberg wrote, criticizing the cost and effectiveness of NASA’s current architecture of the Space Launch System, Orion and Gateway. “The next U.S. president should rethink the program in its entirety.”
“These points are not new, and I agree with most of them, but it’s great to have someone like Mike, with a loud voice, educating people on topics they may not be as familiar with,” Isaacman wrote in a post about Bloomberg’s commentary. Isaacman praised SpaceX, Rocket Lab and other firms for injecting new vitality into the industry.
“The world needs more companies like these and fewer from the past if we want our children to witness NASA astronauts and other astronauts accomplishing great things on the Moon, Mars and beyond.”
Isaacman’s primary interaction with NASA before his nomination involved a joint NASA-SpaceX study of servicing options for the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA announced the study, performed under a Space Act Agreement, in September 2022, and Isaacman participated in a briefing to announce that study. At the time, he suggested that a Crew Dragon mission to reboost or even repair Hubble might be part of his Polaris Program.
Isaacman became one of the most vocal advocates for a commercial servicing mission to Hubble, one that presumably he would command if it was part of Polaris. After Hubble went into safe mode briefly in late 2023 because of a problem with one of its three gyroscopes, Isaacman made the case on social media for a Polaris servicing mission to Hubble. “A study was completed earlier this year…this should be an easy risk/reward decision,” he concluded. (NASA never released that study or even a summary of it.)
But in June 2024, NASA decided not to pursue a servicing mission even after that faulty gyro went offline permanently. The agency concluded that the risk of a “premature loss of science” from Hubble if something went wrong on such a mission outweighed any benefits from raising Hubble’s orbit or making repairs.
“Had a mission been flown, and I was happy to fund it, I believe it would have resulted in the development of capabilities beneficial to the future of commercial space and along the way given Hubble a new lease on life,” Isaacman said in a post shortly before NASA announced it would not proceed with a commercial servicing mission.
Isaacman has also been an advocate for NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. NASA’s fiscal year 2025 budget request proposed a steep cut in the operating budget for Chandra, one that astronomers argued would effectively shut down the 25-year-old space telescope. Isaacman was among those who leapt to Chandra’s defense.
“The premature loss of Chandra will result in a death spiral for X-ray astronomy in the United States,” he wrote in an April letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, noting the relatively small operating budget for Chandra of about $70 million per year. “It is particularly disheartening to witness billions of taxpayer dollars funneled into the Space Launch System (SLS) and not one but two lunar landing contracts.”
Isaacman has said little about other parts of NASA’s science portfolio, though. At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington a week after the nomination, an air of unease hung among scientists who were uncertain about what Isaacman would do and recalled efforts by the first Trump administration to cancel several Earth science missions.
“We are all aware that we are about to go through a period of change as we welcome the new administrator and new administration,” Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, told an Earth science town hall meeting at the AGU conference. That change, she acknowledged, could be “stressful” but also presented an opportunity. “No matter what change happens, we will still remain fully focused on our mission.”
Passion and experience
Still, many in the space community welcomed the choice of Isaacman to lead the agency, seeing him as a potential change agent for how NASA does business.
“You’ve got an individual who has passion, which is, I think, a critical component,” said Richard DalBello, outgoing director of the Office of Space Commerce, of Isaacman during a panel discussion at the SpaceNews Icon Awards Dec. 6. “You have someone who has passion, who has experience running an organization, who is himself a pilot and an astronaut, and I think that’s a great combination.”
On the same panel, Tim Crain, senior vice president of lunar infrastructure company Intuitive Machines, said he expected Isaacman to draw on his experience in the private sector to refine how the agency works with industry.
“Commercialization is not a binary event and it’s not even a transition. It’s a continuous process. We’re always trying to evaluate where is it right for the government to continue to do things and where do we hand things over to the commercial sector,” Crain said. He added he expected Isaacman and the new administration to evaluate “where to push the government down a little bit or have the government help a little bit more.”
“At this critical time, as NASA and commercial space become inextricably linked toward the success of our nation’s space program and our continued global leadership in space, I cannot imagine a better candidate for this role,” said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, an industry trade group.
Others in industry, though, particularly among the prime contractors that Isaacman has criticized, have been silent on the nomination. The same is true for members of Congress, who have been quiet even while speaking out for or against other Trump administration nominees.
The leadership of the Senate Commerce Committee did send a message about the future of NASA in December with the introduction of a NASA authorization bill. Put forward too late to be considered by the Senate before the end of the 118th Congress, the bill is instead considered a signal of its priorities for the agency and where they might differ with the new administration.
That includes a section of the bill supporting NASA’s current approach to Artemis. “As part of the human exploration activities of the Administration, including progress on Artemis missions and activities, the Administrator shall continue development of space exploration elements” identified in previous authorization bills, such as Orion and SLS, the bill stated.
Another section, titled “Reaffirmation of the Space Launch System,” directed NASA to provide a report on plans to ensure a flight rate of two SLS vehicles a year; NASA’s current plans include no more than one SLS launch annually.
“This bipartisan legislation brings stability and certainty to NASA and the entire U.S. space program,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in a statement. With Republicans in the majority in the Senate in the 119th Congress, he will be chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, which will hold a confirmation hearing for Isaacman’s nomination.
A Capitol Hill source, speaking on background, did not expect Isaacman to run into serious problems with his nomination, but anticipated that he will have to address his apparent criticism of Artemis as well as his relationship with Elon Musk to assuage any concerns about conflicts of interest, particularly given Musk’s close relationship with Trump.
Congress is largely not familiar with Isaacman, who has spent little time meeting with members on space topics. DalBello suggested that Isaacman be paired with someone who is “a little bit more of an institutional person” to help lead the agency. “But I think this is not an administration that’s going to be concerned about tradition,” he added.
At a press conference the day after the nomination announcement, current NASA administrator Bill Nelson said he had spoken briefly with Isaacman, inviting him to a meeting. Nelson declined, though, to discuss any other details about the call.
Nelson sounded unconcerned that Isaacman and the new Trump administration might make major changes to Artemis despite criticism of the efforts and ongoing problems. NASA held the briefing to announce another delay in the launch of the Artemis 2 mission, to at least April 2026, after investigating unexpected erosion of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield.
“I expect that this is going to continue,” he said of the current architecture, saying he didn’t believe “that you’re suddenly going to have Starship take over everything.”
“I’m basically optimistic about the future for NASA under the new administration,” he concluded.
This article first appeared in the January 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine with the title “A Shift for NASA?”
