Jared Isaacman can be forgiven if he’s experiencing whiplash. On Dec. 4, 2024, President Trump tapped the two-time private astronaut and billionaire owner of Shift4, an online payment processing company, to serve as administrator of NASA. On April 9, 2025 Isaacman testified at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, whose members were considering his nomination. Isaacman sailed through the hearing and the Senators voted to approve him and send the nomination on to the full Senate. On May 31, however, Trump suddenly pulled the nomination, citing Isaacman’s past contributions to Democratic candidates.
“After a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I will soon announce a new Nominee who will be Mission aligned, and put America First in Space. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Yesterday, Trump made good on his promise to pick a new nominee and the surprising choice was Isaacman again. “I am pleased to nominate Jared Isaacman, an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut, as Administrator of NASA,” he posted. “Jared’s passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration… make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era.”
Isaacman was quick to reply, posting on X, “Thank you, Mr. President @POTUS, for this opportunity. It will be an honor to serve my country under your leadership.”
Isaacman has support in the larger space community. “When Jared Isaacman was nominated for the NASA job in [December], there was widespread support for him,” says John Logsdon, Professor Emeritus at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and the founder of George Washington’s Space Policy Institute. “Then he got caught up in the chaos of Trump’s early months. He has not changed in nine months; if anything his intentions have become clearer. He at a minimum, deserves a hearing to evaluate those intentions. All we need is a functioning Senate.”
Trump has so far said nothing about what’s behind his turnaround, or why Isaacman’s “prior associations” no longer matter. Part of the backing and forthing over the past eleven months is thought to have involved Isaacman’s close ties to Elon Musk.
In 2021, Isaacman commanded the Inspiration4 mission, in which four civilian astronauts spent three days in Earth orbit. In 2024, Isaacman returned to space, in command of the Polaris Dawn mission, which saw him and one of his crewmates perform the first civilian spacewalk. Both missions relied on Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon spacecraft, and while neither Isaacman nor SpaceX will confirm how much Isaacman paid for the trips, the most commonly cited figure is $50 million per seat. To launch two crew of four astronauts means Isaacman cut SpaceX checks totalling $400 million.
SpaceX, meanwhile, had been tapped to build the lunar landing craft that is intended to carry astronauts to the surface of the moon as early as 2027. Additionally, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are the workhorse boosters NASA often relies on to get spacecraft and astronauts off the ground.
None of this worked against Isaacman when Musk and Trump were getting along. But in June, the two erstwhile chums had a very public online feud about everything from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, to Musk’s threats to form a new political party, to the Jeffrey Epstein files. Isaacman, already dumped by Trump, became a collateral casualty in that scrap.
“Elon asked that one of his close friends run NASA,” Trump posted in July. “While I thought his friend was very good, I was surprised to learn that he was a blue blooded Democrat … I also thought it inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA, when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life.”
But tempers have cooled since. Trump and Musk sat together at the funeral of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September. Aboard Air Force One later, Trump told reporters that he and Musk have spoken “on and off” lately. “I’ve always liked Elon,” he told Politico during the gaggle. “He had a bad spell. He had a bad moment. But I like Elon, and I suspect I’ll always like him.”
Trump has not said if the thaw between him and Musk boosted Isaacman’s chances of being re-appointed, but at least judging from Trump’s Truth Social posts, he once again thinks highly of Isaacman.
Assuming Isaacman is confirmed, he will be taking over an agency that is facing considerable challenges. In May, Trump proposed a NASA budget that would see the space agency’s funding slashed by 24%, from $24.8 billion in 2025 to $18.8 billion in 2026—its lowest funding level since 2015. Multiple programs and projects face the axe, including the Mars Sample Return Mission, which is currently underway, with the Perseverance rover caching rock and soil samples that a later spacecraft would fly to Mars and collect. Also threatened are the Space Launch System moon rocket and the Orion spacecraft, both in development in one form or another since 2006, and both intended for crewed travel to the moon.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is already built and awaiting its ride into space, also faces cancellation. Roman is designed to answer questions regarding the habitability of exoplanets and the nature of dark energy, which is thought to make up 68% of the universe. To keep these programs going, Isaacman will have to spend as much time buttonholing and lobbying lawmakers in Congress as he will spend at NASA headquarters overseeing the agency’s work.
Isaacman will also have his hands full keeping Musk in check. In July, Trump chose Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to serve as acting administrator of NASA until a permanent administrator could be nominated and confirmed. Last month, Musk got into another online feud, this time with Duffy, over the behind-schedule development of SpaceX’s lunar lander. Duffy and Trump are determined to get back to the surface of the moon as soon as possible, with an eye toward beating China, which has set 2030 as its target date for landing taikonauts—China’s astronauts—at the lunar south pole.
If speed is of the essence, NASA made a bad bet in assigning the job of building the lander to SpaceX. The original lunar lander, used by the Apollo crews, was a light, lowslung, four-legged machine, weighing just 32,500 lbs. and standing 23 feet tall. Musk plans to use the upper stage of his massive 40-story Starship rocket to get 21st century astronauts back to the moon. That stage is a silo-like cylinder with a tapered nose cone, measuring 165 feet tall, and weighing more than 200,000 pounds. Starship has so far had 11 test flights, many of which have ended in spectacular explosions, including three from January to May of this year alone.
These serial setbacks put the 2027 target date for a lunar landing all but out of reach. While SpaceX struggles, two other companies—Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin, the company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—are busy building their own landers, both of which follow the lighter, shorter Apollo model. On Oct. 20, Duffy appeared on CNBC and made it clear he was done waiting for a working lander.
“I’m going to open up the contract,” he said. “I’m going to let other companies compete with SpaceX. We’re not going to wait for one company. We’re going to push this forward and win the second space race against the Chinese.”
Musk shot back. “Sean Dummy is trying to kill NASA,” he posted on X. “The person responsible for America’s space program can’t have a 2 digit IQ.”
NASA let that pass, and on Oct. 20, the space agency gave SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the rest of the commercial space industry until Oct. 29 to submit revised lunar lander plans that could be completed closer to the 2027 deadline. So far, the space agency has not revealed the contents of any of those reports.
Lunar launches will by no means be the only projects in Isaacman’s remit. NASA oversees eleven centers around the country, which operate flocks of spacecraft, including the International Space Station, the James Webb Space telescope, the New Horizons deep solar system probe, twin rovers on the surface of Mars, and more. The 18,000 NASA employees who do this work have all been furloughed due to the government shutdown, and many were facing layoffs even before the stop-work order, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena alone shedding 550 jobs in October. Isaacman will likely inherit a dispirited work force—along with an uncertain budget, a demanding president, and a relentless China determined to win the 21st century space race.
In his Nov. 4 post Isaacman wrote, “The support from the space-loving community has been overwhelming. I am not sure how I earned the trust of so many, but I will do everything I can to live up to those expectations.” That, as Isaacman surely knows, will not be easy.
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