NASA Chief Pushes Agency to the ‘Near Impossible’

NASA’s new leader has set his sights on returning to the moon and Mars exploration. Jared Isaacman’s confirmation as administrator marks a shift in how the nation’s space agency may operate in the years ahead, with emphasis on building a moon base, investing in nuclear propulsion and surface power technology and working with private companies.  

“NASA’s job is to constantly be recalibrating back to the near impossible. When we crack the code on a key enabling technology, it’s mature enough we hand it off to industry, and we let innovation make it better and drive down costs, and then NASA works on what industry can’t,” he said in a Bloomberg interview. He was confirmed Wednesday in a 67-30 bipartisan Senate vote.

A day after Isaacman’s confirmation, President Donald Trump’s new space policy executive order laid out the administration’s space priorities aimed at increasing discovery, securing economic and security interests and promoting commercial development.  

The order prioritized returning Americans to the moon by 2028 through the Artemis Program, establishing a permanent lunar outpost by 2030 to enable the next steps in Mars exploration and “developing and demonstrating prototype next-generation” missile defense technologies by 2028, among other goals.  

Isaacman called the order the most important national space policy since the Kennedy era. 

“I mean, what space-loving fan out there doesn’t want to see a lunar base?” he said. “Then we’re going to invest in the technology that’s going to enable frequent, long-duration missions to Mars and beyond, whether that be through nuclear propulsion or nuclear surface power, which obviously has a number of useful applications, be it the Moon or Mars.” 

A billionaire entrepreneur, commercial astronaut and longtime private-sector innovator, Isaacman brings extensive experience at the intersection in commercial aerospace and defense. His background includes founding Shift4 Payments, a major payment-processing technology firm, and Draken International, a defense aviation company supporting U.S. military training. He has also flown twice to orbit aboard SpaceX vehicles, commanding the first all-civilian mission and later participating in the first commercial spacewalk.  

He enters the role amid cost cuts and pushes for efficiency. NASA faces a proposed 24% funding reduction in the administration’s 2026 budget. 

Clues to Isaacman’s leadership philosophy emerged earlier this year with the leak of a 62-page internal agenda known as Project Athena, in which he outlined his vision for NASA’s first weeks under his leadership. Central to that vision is organizational streamlining.  

“Pivot from the drawn-out, multi-phase RIF ‘death by a thousand cuts’ to a single, data-driven reorganization aimed at reducing layers of bureaucracy between leadership and the engineers, researchers, and technicians,” he wrote.

The plan also prioritizes determining the “scientific, economic and national security reasons to support an enduring lunar presence” and “repeatable lunar architecture that supports frequent missions.” He advocates for buying science data from outside companies, something he refers to as “science as a service.” 

“Why build bespoke satellites at greater cost and delay when you could pay for the data as needed from existing providers and repurpose the funds for more planetary science mission,” he wrote.