What does Jared Isaacman, NASA’s new administrator, have planned for the beleaguered agency? – Jalopnik

After an initial launch failure, billionaire Jared Isaacman has finally been confirmed as NASA’s new administrator, taking charge of the agency at a time of massive change and budget uncertainty. Isaacman was nominated early this year and was originally scheduled to face a confirmation vote in May. At the last minute, President Donald Trump withdrew his nomination, ostensibly because the administration revealed troubling “past associations,” such as donating money to Democrats. Ars Technica. Of course, that was the very same week that Elon Musk ended his stint in Washington on bad terms with the president; Musk is one of Isaacman’s leading supporters.

Losing Isaacman’s nomination was a huge moral blow to the space agency. Without a permanent leader, NASA suffered massive budget cuts that led to the closure of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), employee buyouts, and research halts. In July, Trump gave Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy a second job as interim administrator, but his dual duties prevented Duffy from fully focusing on the struggling agency.

That didn’t seem to bother Duffy, who reportedly didn’t want to give up control of NASA after Isaacman was suddenly renominated in November. Like Ars and Astronomy.com report, he or someone in his camp then leaked a 62-page design plan for NASA that Isaacman had written, called Athena. Duffy also tried to scare traditional space companies by playing up Isaacman’s connections to Musk and, by extension, SpaceX. If true, the piece didn’t work, and now Isaacman is the NASA administrator. But who is Jared Isaacman, and what does his Athena plan indicate about the trajectory he has set for the star travelers?

Tired of Earth, he then started the Polaris program, which leads private missions to space for all citizens. Isaacman commanded the first mission in 2021, and he was one of the first civilians to perform a spacewalk in 2024. Polaris was launched exclusively on SpaceX rockets, but as Isaacman himself explained, only because Musk’s company was literally the only option.

Is he a right-wing ideologue? On the surface, at least, it doesn’t seem that way. Once again, Trump was not happy with all his donations to the Democrats. For what it’s worth, none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy attended his hearing in solidarity; Nye has protested this administration’s cuts to science funding. Isaacman’s final confirmation vote on December 17 was 67-30; the Democratic caucus split more or less down the middle, with all Republicans supporting.

That received a lot of attention, including from Politics (which Isaacman’s post was a response to), Athena talks about ‘science-as-a-service’ for things like Earth observation satellites. He simply wants to buy this data from commercial satellites that are already doing the same thing, rather than building and operating government-funded satellites. He is right that it would be cheaper; the question is whether we as a nation want to hand over all that capacity to the private sector. However, that is exactly the position the Trump administration wants to take on space travel. Isaacman’s post goes one step further, explicitly addressing universities and saying that they should finance space research themselves.

The New York Times has an entire article comparing Isaacman to Daniel Goldin, the technology executive turned NASA administrator in the 1990s. Goldin also made big promises to make the agency more cost-effective and do more with less. And in that case, it really worked: NASA was a mess when he came in, but was in much better shape when he left. You could say that every now and then a government agency needs an outsider to get out of its rut ​​and bring in modern best practices.

On the other hand, you could argue that handing over space to the billionaires is a betrayal of the public interest. Government-funded research is not done for profit, but for the betterment of the country and all humanity. Everything else is just a matter of return on investment. In fact, Isaacman uses exactly this language in his post.

Isaacman himself may still be figuring this all out. In his first town hall with NASAhe sounded optimistic about the agency, its employees and its missions; his speech didn’t sound like an ax was about to fall. But when asked specific questions about specific programs and institutions, he would only say that he still had a lot of catching up to do. In other words, he doesn’t have many plans for the first day; Athena is more about the big picture, not about immediate needs. But if a struggling agency fails to meet its immediate needs, especially when it comes to budget cuts, that big picture may not happen, like it or not.