18.12.2025

Jared Isaacman, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead NASA, has a blunt warning about China’s rapid advances in commercial and military space. “We are in a great competition with a rival that has the will and the means to challenge American exceptionalism across multiple domains, including the high ground of space,” he told a Senate panel at his confirmation hearing in early December. “This is not the time for delay but a time for action, because if we fall behind, if we make a mistake, we may never catch up.”

NASA, under the Artemis lunar exploration initiative, is preparing the Orion capsule for its first flight with a crew in early 2026—after 22 years of development. Isaacman knows that if the storied but bureaucratic U.S. space agency continues to operate at that pace, it will be left in the dust. “I’m here to bring urgency and extreme focus to the mission,” the 42-year-old high-school dropout-turned-billionaire-entrepreneur told lawmakers at his confirmation hearing. Such urgency is, frankly, decibels higher than what Aviation Week editors heard when we sat down with NASA’s last full-time administrator, Bill Nelson, 14 months ago (AW&ST Oct. 14-27, 2024, p. 35).

Widely expected to win Senate confirmation, Isaacman will face momentous challenges, starting with making sure that the U.S. returns to the Moon ahead of China’s first crewed landing there. That return was first proposed by President George H.W. Bush when Isaacman was six years old. Simultaneously, NASA must prepare for the decommissioning of the 25-year-old International Space Station, figure out how to bring to Earth samples from Mars to help answer the question if life exists beyond Earth and lay the foundation for human expeditions to Mars, which will require leaps in human space physiology. And how will NASA fit into the new orbital economy as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others race ahead with billions of dollars of investment?

Then there are his bosses in the White House, who proposed a massive reduction to NASA’s budget—which so far has largely been stymied by Congress—and angered international partners with heavy-handed cancellations of joint space projects that were supposed to last for years. Can the entrepreneur convince this go-it-alone administration that supporting NASA and leveraging international partnerships in civil space are essential for America’s future?

Isaacman’s path to lead the civil space agency has been bumpy. He was first nominated in December 2024 with strong backing from then-Trump advisor Musk, only to see Trump yank the nomination on May 31 in the wake of a nasty public feud between the president and Musk. Isaacman took the high road, declining to complain or criticize Trump (AW&ST June 30-July 13, p. 40). That paid off with his renomination by the president on Nov. 4.

Like Nelson, Isaacman, who at age 28 earned a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, has flown in space. In 2021, he commanded the first all-civilian orbital spaceflight on a SpaceX Dragon capsule (AW&ST Sept. 27-Oct. 10, 2021, p. 22). During a second Dragon charter in 2024, he became the first private citizen to conduct a spacewalk. His initial plans for NASA, drawn up during his first nomination, call for focusing the agency on three core missions: human deep-space exploration, building the orbital economy and replacing flagship science programs with cheaper but more numerous missions that yield data more quickly.

Can he succeed? Early in my career, I covered NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, who also had bold dreams about space. His vision to “darken the skies with spacecraft,” articulated more than 30 years ago, is coming true: 43,000 satellites are projected to be launched during the coming decade, three times what we have seen in the last 10 years.

But many of the more revolutionary advances that Goldin pursued in the 1990s have yet to be realized, and China has morphed into a challenger with dogged technology pursuits in hypersonics, launch and on-orbit maneuvering. The U.S. does not have another 22 years to turn Isaacman’s visions into reality, and he knows it. There is no time to waste.

Quelle: AVIATION WEEK