For more than 60 years, NASA has stood at the forefront of space exploration with interstellar probes, Martian rovers, and the most powerful telescopes probing the cosmos for clues to Earth’s origin story. But lately, the space agency has been struggling with its efforts to return humans to the Moon and maintain a pathway to Mars, going up against budget cuts, bureaucracy, and an aggressive private industry.
“NASA is on a going out of business strategy,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, told Gizmodo. Earlier this week, news of billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman’s nomination to the position of NASA administrator was met with welcomed surprise, with members of the space community recognizing that the space agency is in desperate need of a fresh perspective in order to keep up with the growingly fast pace of spaceflight. But can Isaacman lead NASA to a more adaptive future, or will the space agency get swallowed up by commercial demands?
On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump selected Isaacman to lead NASA, pending Senate approval. The tech entrepreneur and pilot served as commander on two private missions to space on board SpaceX’s crew capsules. Isaacman’s first stint in space, Inspiration4, launched in September 2021 with the first all-civilian crew to reach orbit. Earlier in September, Isaacman led a four-person crew on board a Dragon spacecraft for the Polaris Dawn mission, which saw two crew members hop out of the capsule to perform the first-ever commercial spacewalk.
“[Isaacman] was not on the short list, I think, for many of the the pundits who speculate about such things,” Jack Burns, professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder, who served on the presidential transition team for NASA in 2016 during Trump’s first presidential term, told Gizmodo. “He’s certainly a different candidate than what we’ve had as NASA administrators before, coming from the commercial sector, being an entrepreneur and having a different background than others who have been in that job.”
NASA’s last two appointed administrators have been former politicians, while others before them have come from more traditional roles in the space industry. “Isaacman will be breaking new ground…to attempt to lead NASA during a time which will probably involve some change,” Burns added.
A day after Isaacman’s nomination was announced, NASA held a press conference to reveal further delays to its mission to return astronauts to the lunar surface. The news was disappointing, but it came as no surprise to those who have been following the development of the Artemis program. A report released in May 2023 found that NASA’s overall investment in its Artemis Moon program is projected to reach $93 billion from 2012 through 2025, of which the costs of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket alone represent $23.8 billion spent through 2022. That’s $6 billion more than initial estimates for the Moon rocket.
NASA’s giant Moon rocket, SLS, is a major point of contention for the space agency, with speculation that the Trump administration may opt to scrap the launch vehicle altogether from NASA’s lunar plans. “It is many years behind, many billions over, and it’s only going to launch once every couple of years,” Keith Cowing, an astrobiologist and former NASA employee, and the author of the blog NASA Watch, told Gizmodo. “Somebody’s got to make a decision…and now would be the perfect time to…if you’re going to get rid of something, just get rid of it and start over.”
A recent report titled, “NASA at a Crossroads” highlights the main challenges at the space agency, including infrastructure decays, technological stagnation, budget constraints, and a degrading talent pool. NASA needs to rebalance its priorities, the report concluded. This sentiment is echoed by experts Gizmodo spoke to, who agree that, while NASA’s role will always be essential, the agency must adapt to a changing environment.
“NASA needs 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 fly people to space, with examples from the private industry like SpaceX’s Starship and (eventually) Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. “It used to be that only NASA could do this stuff,” Cowing said. “But now there’s three or four generations of people who are building upon NASA’s rocket engineering.”
Instead, NASA can focus on cosmic exploration and pulling off seemingly impossible endeavors to deep space. “A public agency provides a unique set of capabilities and responsibilities back to the public that commercial entities don’t,” Dreier said. “Science and exploration is not a commercial activity. You don’t make money doing that, you gain knowledge and remodel your sense of the world.”
Isaacman is more familiar with the commercial side of things, having gone on two private trips to orbit. With that, there is concern that Isaacman’s commercial allegiance will take over NASA, influencing the agency’s direction into the future of spaceflight.
“As an entrepreneur and a private spaceflight customer, [Isaacman] clearly talks about commercial space,” Dreier said. “It’s likely he shares a strong interest in commercial space, and that obviously will drive his approach and expectations for performance.” Dreier points out, however, that a NASA administrator is still under a layer of federal governance. Should Isaacman be appointed to lead NASA, he won’t get to choose the agency’s budget or expenditure, or personally deal out contracts to SpaceX.
“The NASA administrator can’t just walk in, cancel SLS and award a commercial contract,” Dreier said. “A political process has to unfold in order to do that, the administrator is then responsible for executing on that broader set of inputs.”
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. With Isaacman at the helm, he could either help bring NASA into the new space age or watch it drown in a sea of commercial endeavors.