The United States President-elect Donald Trump had on Wednesday selected Jared Isaacman to head NASA. Isaacman is a well known close associate of Elon Musk and a a billionaire private astronaut. He will be in charge of overseeing an agency closely linked to the SpaceX founder’s business.
Isaacman is the CEO of payment processing company Shift4 Payments and has flown to space twice in missions organised by his Polaris program, in an attempt to use SpaceX vehicles and the company’s spacesuits to conduct fully private flights in Earth orbit.
If his appointment is confirmed, he would oversee the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s roughly $25 billion budget majorly focused on returning humans to the moon under its Artemis program.
This program is a multibillion-dollar effort that was heavily promoted by Trump during his first four-year term and it will rely heavily on SpaceX’s Starship to maove forward, hence the strategic appointment he made.
Strategic appointment or no, Trump’s pick for NASA came months earlier than former presidential transitions.
Political pundits have said that Musk — SpaceX’s CEO and founder– used his close proximity to the president-elect to discuss missions to Mars and other space exploration matters that could improve SpaceX.
Just last month, Trump attended SpaceX’s sixth Starship test launch in Texas showing how close the two are.
Isaacman, aged 41, is expected upon approval of appointment, to double down on the agency’s mission to rely on private companies for accessing space.
NASA’s last two appointed administrators had been ex-politicians.
Trump’s first NASA chief, former Oklahoma congressman Jim Bridenstine, had launched the Artemis program and coerced Congress to boost the agency’s budget to fund it. For Biden’s tenure, he appointed former U.S. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida to lead NASA.
