NASA Administrator Nominee Would Shift Future of Space Exploration
Ahead of Jared Isaacman’s renomination for the position of NASA’s administrator, a dispute between him and its acting chief Sean Duffy spilled into the open, with potentially profound consequences for the U.S. space agency
Jared Isaacman testifies on April 9, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
In the latest turn in a battle over NASA’s future, on Tuesday President Donald Trump nominated billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become the agency’s next administrator.
Trump had first nominated Isaacman last year. This past May he suddenly withdrew the nomination and complained of Isaacman’s past campaign donations to Democratic politicians. Isaacman, now age 42, is closely associated with SpaceX’s Elon Musk and has flown to space twice via the company, including in a 2024 mission that achieved the first-ever commercial space walk. Musk and Trump were when the president pulled Isaacman’s nomination, but that political relationship is apparently now on the mend.
“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,” wrote Trump in his announcement of the renomination on his Truth Social platform. Isaacman, who had taken pains to avoid any public hint of conflict with Trump after the withdrawn nomination in May, thanked him and the space community in a social media post in response to the renomination.
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The announcement came amid recent news reports that Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who is NASA’s acting administrator, was maneuvering to move the space agency into his Department of Transportation and remain its chief. On Monday Politico reported a 62-page “Project Athena” memo outlining Isaacman’s vision for NASA, which had allegedly been shared with an undisclosed senior administration official this summer. That document advocated for radically reorganizing NASA centers across the country, outsourcing some of the space agency’s science efforts and canceling the jumbo Space Launch System (SLS) rocket after the third Artemis mission to the moon. The memo also recommended that NASA pursue an ambitious program to develop nuclear-electric rockets for future human voyages to Mars, as well as cultivate more public-private partnerships to launch more lower-cost interplanetary science missions.
In a lengthy response, Isaacman pushed back against critics who portrayed the memo’s call for “science as a service” as removing NASA from the Earth-observation responsibilities that are found in its charter. Instead, he said, the memo merely laid out a plan for augmenting NASA’s Earth studies using the wealth of remote-sensing data available from commercial satellite firms. He said he stood by the memo, which he described as an evolving document outlining reform plans for the agency, which has long been subject to critical Government Accountability Office reports.
“I think Isaacman captured it best when he said that he got caught up in someone else’s political argument,” says space analyst and former NASA employee Keith Cowing, who runs the website NASA Watch. Congress and the space industry had remained interested in Isaacman’s nomination over the summer, keeping his chances alive, Cowing says. “Most importantly,” Cowing adds, “he was not a sore loser and thanked everyone for the opportunity and then went back to what he had been doing.”
Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator under the Obama administration, who has reviewed the Project Athena document, notes that while it offers plentiful “grist for the mill” for Isaacman’s potential political opponents, it nonetheless “is very similar to what we had in our own transition plan” for NASA after the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
“Would it break the rice bowls of big contractors who currently get a lot of money [from NASA and] who maybe don’t deliver as efficiently as they could? Absolutely,” she says. “Will Congress allow that? I don’t know. Right now Congress seems to allow everything the president wants—except for cutting big NASA programs.”
The core concern for NASA’s next leader, regardless of who that shall be, Garver says, is that they will work at Trump’s behest. “This president doesn’t want NASA doing any climate-change research—and that means Jared or whoever else will have to go along with that,” she says. “And that’s a problem because this sort of research is in NASA’s charter; it’s absolutely something for which the agency plays a critical role.”
The renomination comes amid governmental furloughs and widespread cuts at NASA centers, including multiple rounds of layoffs at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and reports of lab and building closures at its Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. (NASA representatives did not respond to a request for comment on the legality of these shutdown closures from Scientific American.) NASA has fallen behind in a self-declared moon race with China, prompting a recent agency request for alternative lunar landing proposals from SpaceX, Blue Origin and other aerospace contractors.
Jack Kiraly, director of government relations for the Planetary Society, says that the Project Athena document and Isaacman’s public remarks suggest that, as administrator, he would seek to boost NASA’s scientific return on investment by outsourcing more work to commercial or academic partners. In principle, this would allow the agency to focus on riskier, more ambitious activities—such as building nuclear rockets or sending probes to the outer solar system—that are typically seen as beyond the reach of the private sector.
“But the thing is, NASA is already very commercialized,” Kiraly says. “Previous administrators have said about 85 percent of NASA’s work is done with industry. So of the 15 percent that’s still done within NASA, you want to reduce that even further—while also somehow making NASA more about doing bold things only it can?”
Several agency initiatives, such as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program of robotic moon landers and the Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx), already rely on off-the-shelf components and the leadership of industry or academic partners. Four out of the five CLPS missions to date have failed, Kiraly notes, as have all three SIMPLEx missions that have launched so far. (A fourth, the Mars-bound Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer, or ESCAPADE, mission, is set to launch as early as next Sunday.)
“So Jared’s saying NASA needs a higher tolerance for risk and needs to do more missions for less money that have a greater rate of failure,” Kiraly says. “Well, is an 80 percent failure rate like for CLPS or a 100 percent failure rate like for SIMPLEx an acceptable risk posture or not? Commercialization is not necessarily a panacea, and if the plan is to repackage what NASA’s already doing—just with less funding and staffing—that would fail to address the fact that NASA’s workforce, and future, is under an immense amount of strain.”
Privately, some former space agency officials say that Isaacman seems as good a pick for NASA as the Trump administration could deliver. While calling parts of Isaacman’s Athena strategy naive or unlikely to survive contact with the space industry, one former NASA official notes that “people love that he has a strategy.” In contrast, there has been no shortage of criticism for Duffy during his brief tenure, with Musk going so far as to publicly question the interim NASA chief’s intelligence.
Isaacman must still face confirmation from the U.S. Senate, where influential Republican senators, such as Ted Cruz of Texas, have resisted calls to kill the SLS rocket or may question his links to SpaceX and Musk. In 1999 Isaacman made most of his fortune from founding a point-of-sale payment processing firm now known as Shift4, which serves hotels, resorts, restaurants and other leisure businesses. Shift4 made a $27.5-million investment in SpaceX in 2021, and Isaacman has spent undisclosed sums (likely hundreds of millions of dollars) on his spaceflights with the latter company. After his initial nomination, Isaacman resigned as Shift4’s CEO and became its executive chairman, and he has said that, as NASA administrator, he would recuse himself from any space agency decisions involving SpaceX.
“Jared coming in could, I believe, be truly transformative—and I support that,” Garver says. “But for those who don’t want that transformation, it’s going to be really difficult. There’s no question that, with his renomination, the fight for NASA’s future is now upon us.”
Additional reporting by Lee Billings.
Editor’s Note (11/5/25): This story has been updated with additional reporting.
Dan Vergano is senior editor, Washington, D.C., at Scientific American. He has previously written for Grid News, BuzzFeed News, National Geographic and USA Today. He is chair of the New Horizons committee for the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a journalism award judge for both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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