Only days before the Senate seemed set to confirm President Trump’s nomination of payments-technology billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator, the White House has scrubbed the pick.
Semafor first reported the withdrawal of Isaacman’s nomination on Saturday afternoon, after which other publications confirmed the news and ran the same statement from the White House, which implies that Isaacman had been judged insufficiently MAGA for the job.
“It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon,” Ars Technica’s Eric Berger quoted White House spokesperson Liz Huston in his report Saturday.
Trump formally announced Isaacman’s nomination on Inauguration Day, weeks after naming him as his choice to head the space agency. The news drew applause even from space observers otherwise deeply skeptical of Trump’s approach toward science in general who saw promise in Isaacman’s resume.
Isaacman, founder of Shift4 Payments, used the billions he’d made from an e-commerce startup he founded in 1999 to develop an interest in aerospace. That led to him underwriting and commanding the first all-civilian private space flight in history, September 2021’s Inspiration4 orbital mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule launched by a Falcon 9 rocket.
Three years later, he bankrolled and led a far more ambitious sequel, the Polaris Dawn mission that saw Dragon reach 870 miles up (higher than any crewed American mission since the last Apollo mission to the moon). During the flight, Isaacman and the crew successfully tested the streaming bandwidth of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband-satellite constellation.
While some of NASA’s prior administrators have been former astronauts, none have had a background quite like that.
But Elon Musk’s recent moves to step away from his quasi-full-time role as head of the DOGE government-disruption operation (even if Trump has since said Musk isn’t really going anywhere) seem to have deprived Isaacman of a patron in the White House.
Musk sighed about the news in a reply on X: “It is rare to find someone so competent and good-hearted.” Isaacman has yet to tweet about it or unpin the post atop his X account in which he pronounced himself “honored” at the nomination and “passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history.”
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The New York Times also reported Saturday that Trump was not amused to learn that Isaacman had donated to Democratic candidates like Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, himself a former astronaut.
Trump seemed less insistent on personal loyalty and ideological alignment from a NASA administrator in his first term. Jim Bridenstine, a former Navy pilot and Republican congressman from Oklahoma, abandoned his former skepticism about global warming to defend climate science and gave credit to the Obama administration for helping to develop the commercial crew-transport program that led to SpaceX’s 2020 launch of the first human spaceflight from American soil since 2011.
Slashing the Budget at NASA
Reaction to Isaacman losing out has been uniformly gloomy among NASA observers. Berger, an exceptionally sourced space reporter, quoted an unnamed “current leader” of the agency as saying “NASA is fucked.”
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But even before this plot twist, the release Friday of details of Trump’s 2026 budget proposal for NASA had things looking bleak at the agency. That document calls for slashing its budget by 24%, from fiscal year 2025’s $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion, then keeping it clamped down to that total through fiscal year 2030.
This budget calls for canceling the extraordinarily expensive Space Launch System rocket after two more launches—one to send astronauts around the Moon, another to land them there—and replacing that with unspecified “commercial systems.”
The two most likely options both have their own issues: SpaceX’s troubled Starship rocket last week saw its ninth test flight suffer a series of system failures that ended with its upper stage incinerating in an uncontrolled reentry, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has flown only once, a successful debut launch in January.
Only Starship, however, seems serviceable for the human missions to Mars that this proposal supports with an 8% increase to NASA’s exploration budget. Musk has long made travel to Mars his own obsession.
The budget would also cut funding for the International Space Station by nearly 26% and reduce US operations there to “a minimal level,” chop NASA’s planetary-science budget by 32%, and hack its Earth-science budget by almost 52%. And it would shove the agency’s STEM-outreach efforts out a fiscal airlock, ending all funding for that office.
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