Donald Trump is clearly trying to shake things up at NASA
Donald Trump speaks at NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building during his first presidency.
President-elect Donald Trump has made a bold choice for NASA’s new leader.
Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Wednesday that his choice for NASA Administrator is Jared Isaacman — a CEO, fighter-jet pilot, and two-time SpaceX astronaut.
Isaacman is not exactly a traditional pick. For one, he would be the first billionaire to lead the agency. More importantly, though, he’s on the cutting edge of the new commercial space age, where private companies are becoming the biggest actors in space.
Jared Isaacman at SpaceX in Hawthorne, California.
Some past NASA administrators were former NASA astronauts. Others were former executives from the aerospace industry. Many were politicians — including Trump’s last NASA chief, Jim Bridenstine, and the current administrator, Bill Nelson.
Isaacman is none of those things. He has, however, flown to space in a Crew Dragon spaceship, conducted the first-ever commercial spacewalk in a brand-new SpaceX spacesuit, and plans to fly on future missions with the company — aboard its Starship mega-rocket, no less.
The nomination, which still has to be confirmed by the Senate, suggests that Trump wants to shake things up at NASA.
Jared Isaacman stands at the hatch of Crew Dragon during the world’s first commercial spacewalk.
“He certainly has the potential to be a disruptor,” Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut and International Space Station commander who now works in consulting, told B-17. “I think it’s a great pick. It’s much better than just status quo — another retiring member of Congress.”
It’s also another signal that Trump might make a big push to put the next humans on the moon, and even the first humans on Mars.
Speeding up the road to Mars
Isaacman’s enthusiasm for space exploration isn’t his only bona fide. He also has a businessman’s mindset and a close relationship with Elon Musk. The two share the goal of getting humans to Mars.
Chiao hopes Isaacman can speed up the process.
Indeed, in a post on X accepting the nomination, Isaacman wrote that NASA would help make humanity “a true spacefaring civilization.”
“Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars and in doing so, we will make life better here on Earth,” he added.
NASA is already working on it. The Artemis program began as the last Trump administration’s iteration of a multi-president effort to send humans to deep space again. Artemis aims to send astronauts back to the moon for the first time in over 50 years, and eventually to use the moon as a jumping-off point to send people to Mars.
However, Artemis is years behind schedule and billions over budget, largely due to technical and programmatic challenges with the giant Space Launch System that NASA is building for moon missions. Many industry commentators see SLS as a waste of government funds, when NASA could instead lean on commercial heavy-lift rockets like Starship.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“Frankly, we have been at the status quo of this exploration program in one form or another over the last several presidents since 2004,” Chiao said, “and we’re not even close to launching the first astronaut on a new vehicle.”
In fact, NASA just pushed back the launch date for its first crewed Artemis mission, set to fly around the moon using SLS. On Thursday the agency delayed the mission by another seven months, to April 2026, citing issues with the system’s Orion spaceship.
That’s the slow-moving status quo that Trump might aim to shake up.
To that end, efficiency may be a top priority for Isaacman. That could mean reassessing Artemis entirely or cutting back some of NASA’s centers and facilities nationwide, according to Abhi Tripathi, a former NASA engineer and SpaceX mission director who now leads mission operations at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab.
“I definitely think SLS will be on the chopping board,” Tripathi told B-17.
First, though, Isaacman will have to go through Congress.
“He is going to ruffle a lot of feathers,” Chiao said.
Pushing through Congress
Congress can be a formidable wall for anyone trying to revolutionize NASA.
In places like Alabama and Southern California, a status quo NASA fuels the work of legacy aerospace contractors like Boeing and Northrop Grumman.
“The majority of members of Congress want jobs in their district, and they look at the space program primarily through that lens,” Tripathi said.
Plus, he added, “the lobbying arms of all of those big contractors will be basically camped outside their congressional representative’s office, asking them to thwart any big plans that would change the status quo greatly.”
It’ll all come to a head when the Trump White House makes its budget proposal. That’s when Congress will approve or deny any cuts or reprioritizations that Trump and his NASA Administrator try to make.
If Trump wants to put boots on Mars fast, he’ll have to convince individual Congress members to push those changes through.
“I think Jared is a very smart and capable individual,” Tripathi said, “but his ability to wield power will completely depend upon how much his president will back him up.”
