‘Further and faster’: Why Trump’s NASA pick is sending shock waves through the space community

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(CNN) — President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for NASA administrator — tech billionaire and spaceflight trailblazer Jared Isaacman — is sending shock waves through the space community, eliciting excited responses from industry leaders who view Isaacman as a changemaker as well as concerns about conflicts of interest.

Isaacman, who has twice traveled to space on private missions and has close ties to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk but lacks experience in government or academia, is an unorthodox selection.

NASA administrators are typically selected from a pool of scientists, engineers, academics or public servants.

Isaacman’s association with the space world, however, derives mostly from his extensive partnership with SpaceX, as a customer and collaborator.

Those ties are notable because NASA is relying on the commercial sector — and SpaceX specifically — more than ever, as the federal agency is drastically increasing the amount of work it contracts out to companies.

Some industry professionals hailed Isaacman’s selection as a “perfect pick,” as Isaac Arthur, the president of the nonprofit National Space Society, which advocates for human spaceflight, put it in a statement.

“He brings a wealth of experience in entrepreneurial enterprise as well as unique knowledge in working with both NASA and SpaceX, a perfect combination as we enter a new era of increased cooperation between NASA and commercial spaceflight,” Arthur said.

Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who is now a SpaceX senior adviser, also applauded the selection, calling Isaacman an “excellent choice” who will “push NASA to go further and faster.”

If Isaacman’s nomination is confirmed by the US Senate, he will take over the agency at a crucial time as NASA gears up to attempt the first crewed moon landing in more than five decades under its Artemis program.

“The next 4 years at NASA are going to be real interesting!” said Reisman, who has also openly voiced his opposition to Trump.

Though Isaacman’s rise in the space world hasn’t been traditional, his record may offer some clues as to what could lie in store should he land the space agency’s top role.

Who is Jared Isaacman?

Isaacman, 41, is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which he founded in 1999 at the age of 16. An experienced jet pilot, Isaacman also founded and ran a defense contractor company, called Draken International, that aided training for the Air Force in the 2010s.

In recent years, however, Isaacman has garnered international attention for his focus on space.

Isaacman and three crewmates from various walks of life spent three days in 2021 flying aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for a mission dubbed Inspiration4 that Isaacman self-funded. It marked the first spaceflight crewed entirely by civilians — or otherwise nongovernment astronauts — ever to venture to Earth’s orbit.

Isaacman has since expanded his partnership with SpaceX to include a development program called Polaris. The first of three missions planned under that effort — Polaris Dawn — took flight in September. The mission made history by sending Isaacman and three crewmates, including two SpaceX engineers, on the first-ever commercial spacewalk.

If confirmed, Isaacman would be only the fourth of 15 NASA administrators to have actually traveled to space.

Isaacman’s relationship with SpaceX

Isaacman’s close ties with SpaceX and Musk are likely to raise questions about conflicts of interest. At the helm of NASA, he will oversee billions of dollars’ worth of contracts that the space agency holds with SpaceX and the company’s direct competitors, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

Isaacman would also likely preside over the review and certification of SpaceX’s Starship, the gargantuan rocket and spacecraft system that NASA plans to use to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface under its Artemis program. Isaacman also plans to ride aboard the vehicle himself as part of his Polaris program.

Notably, Isaacman also has a financial stake in SpaceX. His company, Shift4 — in which he personally owns a 30% stake — purchased $27.5 million worth of SpaceX shares in February 2021, according to financial documents. As of June, Shift4 reported $10.8 million in gains from the investment.

In an email to Shift4 employees, Isaacman said on Wednesday he plans to “retain the majority of my equity interest in Shift4, subject to ethics obligations” if he is confirmed to the NASA post.

Trump, Musk and Isaacman’s vision

Despite Isaacman’s close relationship with Musk, the two have adopted starkly different tones regarding politics.

Musk, who campaigned for Trump and is slated to lead an effort to slash government spending and regulation by co-leading a presidential advisory commission called the Department of Government Efficiency, has taken a strong turn toward conservative politics and routinely makes incendiary comments on social media.

Isaacman, meanwhile, has aimed to position himself as a more neutral party.

“I respect people’s passionate views on emotionally charged topics like politics, but I am anchored in the center and will always aim to be a unifier rather than a divider,” he wrote in a November 6 post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that Musk purchased in 2022.

Isaacman, however, has also been known to defend and praise Musk on social media, asking people to overlook Musk’s more controversial positions and appreciate the work that SpaceX has done.

“I don’t need to have a public opinion on his politics because there is much more to the man and his companies,” Isaacman said of Musk in an October 11 post. “What I care about are the enormous world changing problems Elon and his companies are working to solve and generally, how I can help.”

Isaacman’s efforts to convey an apolitical agenda aligns with how NASA administrators of the past have sought to position themselves. Effectively leading the $25 billion agency — and securing funding for projects NASA hopes to accomplish — routinely requires the agency’s chief to work with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Isaacman in charge

Still, Isaacman’s position at the head of NASA would no doubt spur critics who may paint Isaacman as a Musk crony, installed to advance SpaceX’s interests as the federal agency doles out lucrative contracts.

For his part, however, Bezos said on Wednesday that he did not believe Musk would use his proximity to Trump or position within the president-elect’s transition team to give SpaceX an edge over Blue Origin.

“They’re (SpaceX) certainly very good competitors, no doubt about that. … I take at face value what has been said, which is that (Musk) is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors, I take that at face value,” Bezos said Wednesday at the New York Times DealBook Summit. “Again, I could be wrong about that, but I think it could be true.”

Bezos did not directly address Isaacman’s nomination.

But Isaacman has shared some of his ideas about NASA policy and how the space agency should dole out contract dollars — and some of them directly involve Blue Origin.

On social media, Isaacman has criticized NASA’s decision to invest in two companies to develop two separate lunar landers: SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon.

NASA’s goal in paying for the private sector to develop two competing vehicles that can accomplish the same task is to provide a safeguard for the space agency’s goals of putting boots on the moon amid an international space race: Should one lunar lander or the other malfunction or get bogged down in development delays, the space agency is not left without an alternative option.

Isaacman has criticized that approach, however, and advocated for keeping only one lunar lander provider to save NASA money that could be reallocated to other science missions.

“Spend billions on lunar lander redundancy … at the expense of dozens of scientific programs,” Isaacman posted in March. “I don’t like it.”

Current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a news conference Thursday that he did not believe Isaacman would or could cancel a lunar lander contract.

“We have contracts with two companies for landers,” Nelson said. “As long as we’re a nation of the rule of law, those contracts are going to be operative, and we expect those companies to perform on their contracts.”

Nelson also said that he has a positive view about the relationship between Trump and Musk: “Understand that I am an optimist by nature. But in this particular case, I think that the relationship between Elon Musk and the president-elect is going to be a benefit to making sure that the funding for NASA is there.”

Further speculation has questioned whether the new Trump administration may opt to cancel NASA’s Space Launch System, or SLS — a rocket that has long been over budget and plagued by delays. SLS is designed to launch astronauts from Earth before they are later transferred to a lunar lander — i.e., Starship or Blue Moon — to touch down on the moon’s surface.

Isaacman has not publicly addressed those rumors, though he has called SLS “outrageously expensive” and the result of a “government (that is) lousy at capital allocation.”

More broadly, Isaacman has described his overall vision for the future of humanity in space as one that aligns closely with that of SpaceX: permanent extraterrestrial settlements that allow people to visit, live and work on other worlds such as Mars.

“I think SpaceX is on — for our time — the most incredible adventure imaginable,” Isaacman told CNN in an August interview. “It’s not just about Mars. … It’s actually the possibility of unlocking life’s mysteries. Where did we really come from? What is our purpose?”

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