Can billionaire space tourist Jared Isaacman save NASA?

For more than 60 years, NASA has been at the forefront of space exploration with interstellar probes, martian rovers and the most powerful telescopes scanning the universe for clues to the history of Earth’s origins budget cuts, bureaucracy and aggressive private industry.

“NASA is moving beyond a business strategy,” Casey Dreyer, head of space policy at The Planetary Society, told Gizmodo.Earlier this week, news of billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman’s nomination as NASA administrator was met with welcome surprise, when the space agency community members realized that the space agency needed a new perspective to keep up. the fast pace of space flight. But can Isaacman lead NASA to a more adaptive future, or will the space agency be swallowed up by commercial demands?

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday chose Isaacman to lead NASA, pending Senate confirmation The tech entrepreneur and pilot served as commander on two private SpaceX space missions, Inspiration4, launched in September 2021 with the first all-civilian crew. in September Isaacman led a crew of four aboard the Dragon spacecraft For the Polaris Dawn mission, which saw two crew members jump from the capsule to perform first commercial space.

“Isaacman wasn’t on the short list, I think, for a lot of experts who speculate about that kind of thing,” University of Colorado Boulder astrophysics professor Jack Burns, who served on NASA’s presidential transition team in 2016, told Gizmodo said to “He’s certainly a different candidate than we’ve had in the past as NASA administrators, coming from the commercial side, being an entrepreneur, and coming from a different background than others who have been in the job.”

The last two NASA administrators appointed were former politicians, while others came from more traditional space industry roles. added Burns.

A day after Isaacman’s nomination was announced, NASA held a press conference reveal further delays in its mission to return astronauts to the lunar surface. The news was disappointing, but not a surprise to those who have been following the development of the Artemis project report published in May 2023 found that NASA’s total contribution to its Artemis moon program It is projected to be $93 billion between 2012 and 2025, with the Space Launch System (SLS) alone costing $23.8 billion through 2022. That’s $6 billion more than the Moon ” preliminary calculations of the rocket.

NASA’s giant moon rocket, SLS, is a major point of contention for the space agency, with speculation that the Trump administration may choose to abandon NASA’s lunar plans altogether will only launch once every two years,” Keith Cowing, an astrobiologist and former NASA employee and author of the NASA Watch blog, told Gizmodo. “Somebody’s got to make a decision… and now would be the perfect time… if you’re going to get rid of something, just get rid of it and start over.”

Lately report Titled “NASA at a Crossroads,” the report highlights the space agency’s crumbling infrastructure, stagnant budgets and shrinking talent pool, a sentiment echoed by experts interviewed are Gizmodo, who agree that while NASA’s role will always be important, the agency must adapt to a changing environment.

“NASA has to decide what it wants to do when it grows up,” Cowing said, adding that the agency is no longer the only organization capable of building rockets that can fly people into space, with private industry examples such as SpaceX’s Starship , and (eventually) Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. “Before, only NASA could do something like this,” Cowing said. “But now there are three or four generations of people, who build NASA’s rocket technology.”

Instead, NASA can focus on the seemingly impossible endeavors of space exploration and deep space. “A public agency provides the public with a unique set of opportunities that commercial organizations do not,” Dreyer said. You’re not making money doing it, you’re gaining knowledge and reshaping your sense of the world.”

Isaacman is more familiar with the commercial side of things, having made two private trips to orbit, and there are fears that Isaacman’s commercial allegiances will take over NASA, affecting the direction of the agency’s future spaceflight.

“As an entrepreneur and a private spaceflight client, (Isaacman) clearly speaks to the commercial space,” Dreyer said. Dreyer, however, points out that the NASA administrator is still under federal control if Isaacman is appointed to head NASA In office, he would not be able to choose the agency’s budget or spending, or personally sign contracts with SpaceX.

“The NASA administrator can’t just come in and cancel SLS and sign a commercial contract,” Dreyer said.

Either way, Isaacman’s nomination marks a major shift for NASA under the Trump administration as the agency tries to stay afloat in the new era of spaceflight. watch it drown in a sea of ​​commercial endeavors.