Jared Isaacman, a self-made billionaire, founder of Shift4 Payments and commercial astronaut, has been renominated to lead NASA, six months after President Donald Trump pulled his original nomination.
There is speculation that the president pulled Isaacman’s nomination in May due to personal disagreements he was having with then-DOGE head Elon Musk.
Musk and Isaacman have worked with each other for several years, and they share the same ambitious vision for the national space agency. The nomination pull preceded Trump and Musk’s very public breakup by five days.
In an interview last month with former Navy Seal Shawn Ryan, Isaacman said the pull didn’t have to do with his own ability to lead NASA. “I think that there was a very widely covered falling out between some pretty important people, and I became a good target as a parting shot in that whole divorce,” he said.
But as things have apparently mellowed between Trump and Musk (they were seen sitting together at Charlie Kirk’s funeral), Isaacman’s nomination is back on and headed to the Senate.
Who is Jared Isaacman?
Isaacman, 42, started building businesses young. At 16 years old, he dropped out of high school to found Shift4 Payments, and went on to found Draken International, which has grown into the world’s largest private air force.
In 2009, then-26-year-old Isaacman set the world speed record for circumnavigating the globe in a light business jet to fundraise for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
As of this September, Isaacman has clocked over 7,800 hours in a jet aircraft and has led the farthest mission into space since the Apollo Mission on SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn.
Isaacman has also worked as a private astronaut for SpaceX, and he described his first time visiting Musk’s StarBase in southern Texas as a “religious experience.”
He compared its level of innovation to that of the Manhattan Project, which created the nuclear bomb. “When you’re talking about going to Mars and making life multi-planetary, that’s a Manhattan Project, and that’s where it was all beginning.”
Touring Musk’s facilities made Isaacman “totally hooked” on the space industry.
“They were building massive launch pads and factories for vehicles and interplanetary spaceships. It’s wild stuff,” he said. “Going to a planet other than our own for the first time.”
What is Isaacman’s vision for NASA?
Isaacman told Ryan his “only real political position” is “the competitiveness of the nation.” He is afraid the U.S. will get outpaced by China.
For the past several decades, NASA has struggled from inefficiency due to bureaucratic bloat, Isaacman said.
The first step he would take if confirmed as head of NASA would be to reorganize the agency and rebuild its culture.
“The agency should be doing the near impossible, which no other organization or company in the world is capable of doing,” he said. He believes NASA should have two or three things that need to be solved, instead of splitting the budget across thousands of things, as it currently does.
To Isaacman, his three goals for NASA are to ensure the following:
- America leads in the high grounds of space.
- America unlocks the orbital economy.
- America accelerates the rate of world-changing discoveries.
What are Isaacman’s criticisms of NASA?
In the same way the federal government’s inefficiencies frustrate Musk, Isaacman has criticized inefficiencies and regulations that he believes bog down the speed of innovation at the air and space administration.
For instance, Isaacman has questioned why NASA has been using the same space suits for 40 years. “It’s hundreds of millions of dollars for just upkeep on those suits every year, and they leak,” he said, referencing a situation on the International Space Station, where an astronaut’s helmet was filling with water from their liquid cooling suit.
While NASA is doing a lot of important work, it is also “doing a lot of little things that were not necessarily the reason the agency was created and can be a bit of a distraction,” Isaacman said.
As a result, NASA is underperforming in aeronautics, Isaacman said. The aeronautics program should be focused on making things “that go super high, super fast” and have “radical designs, that if you figure out something pretty wild from, have direct influence over DoD designs or commercial designs. They should be at the absolute tip of the spear of breaking ground on aeronautics.”
“But they’re not,” Isaacman said. “They’re working on a lot of boring stuff.”
NASA currently employs 40,000 people across 10 different centers.
“Can we get a lot more mileage out of approximately $7 billion a year? I bet you can,” he said.
How did Isaacman get involved with the Trump administration?
Last November, Isaacman told Ryan he got a text from a former co-worker saying his name was floating around to be a part of the Trump administration.
Shortly after, “I had a missed call and a message that said, ‘Would you be interested in serving in DJT’s administration?’ And I deleted it, because I thought, if it was not a scam, it would be just like a little more legit than this,” he said.
“Then I got another text from (his original contact) who was like, ‘They’re trying to get a hold of you.’ So the next thing was an interview with now-Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick,” who was leading the president’s transition.
The day after his interview with Lutnick, Isaacman flew to Mar-a-Lago for an interview with Trump. Isaacman said Trump shook his hand at the end of the meeting and said, “You’ve got the job.”