COLORADO SPRINGS — Jared Isaacman, the White House’s nominee to lead NASA, said that the agency should simultaneously pursue both a human return to the moon and crewed missions to Mars.
In a confirmation hearing by the Senate Commerce Committee April 9, senators pressed Isaacman about his commitment to the ongoing Artemis lunar exploration campaign given comments by President Trump advocating for Mars missions, citing concerns about losing a new space race with China.
“We must stay the course,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the committee, said in his opening remarks. “An extreme shift in priorities at this stage would almost certainly mean a red moon, ceding ground to China for generations to come.”
Isaacman, in both his opening statement and in responses to questions during the two-and-a-half-hour hearing, argued that NASA can both pursue Artemis as well as human missions to Mars. “We will prioritize sending American astronauts to Mars and along the way we will inevitably have the capabilities to return to the moon,” he said.
“We don’t have to make a binary decision of moon versus Mars, or moon has to come first versus Mars,” he said later in the hearing. “We could be paralleling these efforts and doing the near-impossible.”
He did not elaborate in the hearing how a human Mars program could be run in parallel with Artemis, but stated his commitment several times of returning humans to the moon before China’s return, anticipated by 2030.
Cruz emphasized his concerns with a poster he displayed at the hearing, an illustration with NASA astronauts on the Moon on the left side of the poster and Chinese astronauts on the right. “What will 2030 look like?” the poster stated.
“Senator, I only see the left-hand portion of that poster,” Isaacman said.
Isaacman also committed, at least for the near term, to continue the major elements of Artemis, including the Space Launch System, Orion spacecraft and lunar Gateway. “This is the current plan. I do believe it is the best and fastest way to get there,” he told Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) “I don’t think it’s the long-term way to get to and from the moon and Mars with great frequency, but this is the plan we have now.”
Among those in attendance at the hearing were the four American and Canadian astronauts assigned to fly Artemis 2 next year. “We’ve got to get this crew around the moon and the follow-on crew to land on the moon,” he said.
Isaacman stated his support for continuing to operate the International Space Station to its current retirement date of 2030 and ensuring there is a continuous U.S. human presence in low Earth orbit as NASA shifts to commercial space stations. That became a controversial issue in February when Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, stated on social media that the ISS no longer had value and should be deorbited as soon as possible.
“I am familiar with Mr. Musk’s remarks on that,” he said when asked about those comments by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) “I would like to understand his rationale behind that.”
He reiterated, though, his support for continued ISS operations. “I do not believe we should deorbit it now. I think we need to make the most use of the space station while we have it and figure out what we can accomplish in the unique environment of microgravity.”
Isaacman’s links to Musk — Isaacman commanded two SpaceX Crew Dragon private astronaut mission — was another topic at the hearing. Isaacman told Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) that he had not had any contact “at all” with Musk on NASA issues since the nomination was announced.
Isaacman, though, was evasive when asked what role Musk might have played in his nomination. Isaacman told Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) he met with then President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago last fall to be interviewed for the job, but declined repeatedly to say if Musk was also in that meeting. “My meeting was with the President of the United States,” Isaacman said several times.
“I assume that you don’t want to answer the question directly because Elon Musk was in the room,” Markey concluded.
Industry endorsements in a “weird period” for NASA
Isaacman’s nomination has had strong support in industry. One recent letter, signed by executives of two dozen space companies and venture funds, endorsed Isaacman, citing his business experience.
“Mr. Isaacman’s remarkable success as a space entrepreneur uniquely positions him to foster collaboration between NASA and the burgeoning commercial space sector, particularly benefiting smaller, agile tech companies pushing the boundaries of how we approach aerospace,” the letter stated. “Jared Isaacman represents precisely the type of leadership NASA needs in this critical era.”
Executives at the 40th Space Symposium offered similar sentiments. “I think he’d be good,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said of Isaacman in an April 7 interview. “He has strong commercial acumen and is clearly passionate about space.”
Kristin Houston, president of space propulsion and power systems at L3Harris Technologies, emphasized at an April 8 media roundtable the need to have permanent leadership at the agency. “Until we have a confirmed administrator in place, we really don’t know what the direction may be,” she said.
One of the people most excited to see Isaacman confirmed as NASA administrator is the agency’s acting leader, Janet Petro. In a talk at the Space Symposium April 8, she recalled her surprise when she found out on the afternoon of Jan. 20 that the new Trump administration had selected her to lead the agency on an acting basis.
Petro, the director of the Kennedy Space Center before named acting administrator, said she was probably the person “most looking forward to a positive result” from the confirmation process.
“It’s a weird period where we’re just keeping the agency on the programs of record,” she said. “But once we have an administrator and we get our budget from the White House, we can start looking at any changes in priorities, if there are any, or any doubling-down of priorities in any one direction.”
“I think I am the one most looking forward to that,” she said of Isaacman’s confirmation. “I know across the agency as well, it will allow us to move forward even faster and with some more specificity.”
