Trump picks billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman to head NASA

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday announced billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, who has twice orbited the planet on private spaceflights, as his pick to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Isaacman, 41, is a major customer of SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk, who has been at Trump’s elbow throughout the transition and has been tapped to lead a government efficiency commission. Isaacson flew on a SpaceX rocket to the highest orbit since the Apollo era this year and, along with a crewmate, became the first private astronauts to perform spacewalks.

“Space holds unparalleled potential for breakthroughs in manufacturing, biotechnology, mining, and perhaps even pathways to new sources of energy,” Isaacman said on social media post after the announcement. “There will inevitably be a thriving space economy - one that will create opportunities for countless people to live and work in space. At NASA, we will passionately pursue these possibilities and usher in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilization.”

As a NASA outsider without government experience, Isaacman fits with many of Trump’s picks for Cabinet and high-level government positions. Although Isaacman has been to space twice with private missions using SpaceX rockets and capsules, he is not part of the NASA astronaut corps and has closer ties to SpaceX than to the $25 billion government space agency.

In a post on Truth Social announcing Isaacman’s appointment, Trump described his pick as an “accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot and astronaut.”

The choice was enthusiastically applauded by proponents of the commercial space industry.

“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 if I had the opportunity to choose one myself,” Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, an industry group, said in a statement.

John Grunsfeld, a former NASA associate administrator for science and an astronaut who flew five times on the space shuttle, including three trips to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, said Isaacson is “definitely an out-of-the-box candidate.”

“He doesn’t have government experience, he doesn’t have previous NASA experience, he doesn’t come from the NASA contractor or the science side,” Grunsfeld said. “But it makes perfect sense when you think of President-elect Trump and Elon Musk.”

Grunsfeld noted that Isaacson has many parallels with Musk. Both made fortunes in financial transaction software before pursuing a passion for space travel. Isaacson is a highly accomplished pilot, which is not irrelevant to NASA, given that the first “A” in the agency’s name is “Aeronautics,” Grunsfeld said.

And he noted that Isaacson not only risked his own fortune to advance commercial spaceflight but risked his own life by going into space.

“One question is,” Grunsfeld said, “how do you go from risk taker to risk manager?”

Among the big questions Isaacman is likely to face during Senate confirmation hearings is whether he favors the current NASA strategy of sending astronauts back to the moon in coming years under the Artemis program, or would funnel more resources toward a human mission to Mars, amplifying the long-standing ambition of Musk.

NASA already has invested tens of billions of dollars in the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion capsule, and is working on a lunar space station called Gateway, but a strategic pivot could cast doubt on the future of those major programs. Critics have said the architecture of the Artemis program is ungainly and overly complex, the consequence of many compromises over the past two decades as NASA has tried to develop a plausible human spaceflight strategy.

A major shift seems unlikely, however, as NASA in general and Artemis specifically have enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress. The Biden administration continued the Artemis program that had begun under Trump in 2017.

Isaacman has expressed support for sending humans back to the moon and Mars in the past. At a Washington Post Live event in 2022, Isaacman spoke about the goals of private spaceflights as “a series of tech demonstration missions.”

“It’s doing things that either have never been done before or haven’t been done in over 50 years, and the idea is to build upon these things. So we continue to open up space for others to get back to the moon and get to Mars and beyond,” Isaacman said at the event.

“When we get back to the moon and we get to Mars someday, it won’t be just, you know, two people at a time. You envision a potential colony on Mars at some point, a permanent presence on the moon,” Isaacman added.

Congress would also probably probe any potential conflicts of interests involving the ties to SpaceX.

Isaacman is the founder of Draken International, a defense aviation company that he sold his majority stake in to Blackstone in 2019. The company has received about $429 million in government contracts over the years, according to usaspending.gov. He is also founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, a payment processor, and has spent considerable portions of his fortune on nongovernment air travel.

In 2021, Isaacman commissioned what was known as the Inspiration4 mission, a three-day flight with SpaceX of four private citizens. He later announced that he had purchased three more missions in an ambitious effort known as the Polaris program that is designed to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight. The first of those launched this year, when Isaacman and his four-person crew spent several days in orbit.

Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, one of two SpaceX engineers on the mission, performed the first spacewalks by a private citizen. For the next flight, Isaacman had wanted to fly to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and raise its orbit in an effort to extend its life. NASA, however, had frowned upon a private citizen working with such an expensive and significant national asset.

Isaacman told The Post this year that he hoped NASA would still allow him to perform the mission, which he said could save the space agency millions of dollars. It’s not clear what will now happen.

Grunsfeld said he had communicated with Isaacson about his Hubble proposal, and was pleased that he cared about NASA science.

“The fact that he was interested in that was incredibly encouraging,” he said.

Isaacman is also slated to fly the first crewed mission of Starship, SpaceX’s next-generation rocket, which NASA intends to use to land astronauts on the moon as part of its Artemis program.

Trump said that Draken International, which Isaacman founded in 2011, has long supported the Pentagon and U.S. allies.

“Jared’s passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new Space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era,” Trump wrote.

It was unclear Wednesday what role Musk may have had in the decision to tap Isaacman. Musk announced his endorsement of Trump in July and campaigned for him fervently, warning that a victory by Vice President Kamala Harris would end any chance of reaching Mars and would doom humanity.

Trump verbally endorsed getting to Mars quickly, and during his first administration expressed frustration that NASA was going to the moon but not yet to Mars.

SpaceX and NASA already are intricately connected and dependent upon one another. NASA, as Musk has acknowledged, played a critical role in giving a cargo contract to SpaceX at a time when the company was a struggling start-up in danger of bankruptcy. Since then SpaceX has launched astronauts to the International Space Station and benefited from billions of dollars in NASA, military and national security contracts.

Musk has chafed at the pace of regulatory approvals for the launch of his Starship rocket, which continues to be tested and has yet to launch with a crew. Starship is needed by NASA to ferry astronauts to and from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface.

Isaacman is a graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. If confirmed by the Senate, he would succeed former senator and astronaut Bill Nelson.

Recent NASA administrators have had closer ties to NASA. Nelson flew on a space shuttle as a Florida congressman and was a key NASA ally during his long tenure in the Senate. His predecessor, Jim Bridenstine, was an Oklahoma congressman who served on committees funding NASA. He succeeded Charles Bolden, a retired Marine Corps Major General who served as a NASA space shuttle pilot and commander and flew four missions to orbit.

“He’s an excellent choice with the kind of technical, business and management skills that NASA needs,” Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said of Isaacman. “Plus he’s put himself on the line with his own spaceflight experiences.”