Billionaire Adventurer Jared Isaacman Heads NASA: Here’s America’s President-Elect Donald Trump’s Choice Is it surprising? No. Would this have strong political and strategic consequences for NASA? We can safely bet yes.
A new stage after a new place?
This decision certainly marks a new era for the space. We can also say that the famous New Space, which saw the emergence of private companies competing with historical and state agencies through a more pragmatic approach, is now behind us. At the very least, the stage of competition, and even the stage of alliances between public and private actors seems outdated. Here comes a phase of fusion. Indeed, who would have thought a few months ago that the first private astronaut to walk in space – who was already pretty crazy himself – would then find himself leading NASA as an administrator? A position that would also allow him to become a senior adviser to Donald Trump on space policies.
Yes, this choice seems disruptive to us. The appointment of a NASA leader is the result of a strong political decision and some former administrators have left their mark on history, such as James Edwin Webb, whose mandate was dedicated to the creation of the historic Apollo missions. A testament to his work, his name was then given to the most powerful space telescope (file to read here). Under Barack Obama, NASA Director Charles Bolden, for example, redirected a large portion of the agency’s budget to monitoring climate change on Earth, partially abandoning the space “dream.” The appointment of Jared Isaacman is therefore a strong political choice.
Will Elon Musk and SpaceX have a free hand?
Of course, that’s the big question that comes next. Jared Isaacman is a personal friend of Elon Musk, who also became an astronaut thanks to the Tesla and SpaceX boss. So there is indeed collusion between them. So we can imagine, just to establish a small point, that this will not put a brake on Kasturi’s ambitions.
Questions about the future of Artemis, the North American manned lunar program, and especially its superheavy launcher SLS, now in competition with Starship, will not stop. Elon Musk’s ultimate dream, which is to lead humans to set foot on the land of Mars, and even settle there permanently, today seems closer than ever. A horizon nevertheless practically very, very, very far away.
We still don’t know how to send astronauts outside of Earth’s protective magnetic field, and we’ll typically have a failure rate of more than 50 percent for Mars missions. We probably won’t have to count on it before the end of the 2030s, but the next tenant of the Oval Office wants to lay the first political brick, just as he put Artemis on the path to the moon during his first term. .