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Musk pal tapped to run NASA

Another nomination from Donald Trump:

President-elect Donald J. Trump will nominate Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who led two private missions to orbit on SpaceX rockets, as the next NASA administrator.

Mr. Isaacman, the chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments, is a close associate of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, and, if confirmed to the post by the Senate, would bring the perspective of an outsider to the space agency and its $25 billion budget.

This doesn't rate up there with the likes of Tulsi Gabbard or Pete Hegseth, but it's yet another meme pick. I hardly need to point out that being rich enough to afford vanity trips to space hardly qualifies you to lead NASA. And being a buddy of Elon Musk is a massive conflict of interest for running an agency that Elon Musk does a lot of business with.

On the other hand, at least Isaacman is actually enthusiastic about space. He's not a typical Trump nominee who hates the very fabric of the agency he's going to run. And he also has legit experience managing a large organization.

In other words, all things considered, thumbs up!

23 thoughts on “Musk pal tapped to run NASA

  1. Josef

    The standards to judge appointments has been lowered so much that anything better than absolute worst is now given a thumbs up. His association with Musk should be a red flag and probably why he was picked regardless of anything else.

    1. Crissa

      He's like picking a random astronaut flight director. It's nonsensical but at least he's been trying to build a series of missions and capabilities from an executive point of view.

  2. DeadEndSutton

    Our recent achievements in space have been done with unmanned programs such as planetary probes and telescopes. If Isaacman is enthusiastic only about manned flights he may stiff the unmanned parts of space exploration.

    1. Crissa

      He's not enthusiastic about only manned, he's just literally been working in one part of the system.

      It shouldn't be a red mark just because it was a flight director for astronauts, or A,es, or whatever. No one below the head of NASA deals with both manned and unmanned missions, except the executives at Boeing and SpaceX, because no one else has done manned flights to orbit!

  3. jlredford

    Isaacman is a pretty impressive guy, far more competent than Trump's other cabinet picks. He does have an interesting supervillain vibe though - he has a private air force down in Florida called Draken International. It has piles of US and Euro fighter planes, along with 25 Russian MIG-25s. It has contracts with the Pentagon to provide "Red Air" support, testing of how US pilots do in conflict with Russian ones. He personally owns a MIG-29, the only one in private hands.

    I do NOT think this means he has sketchy contacts with the Russians - the Pentagon is careful about that stuff. Musk certainly does, what with calls with Putin about Starlink.

    Musk's main interest here is probably canceling the SLS rocket in favor of his Starship. Lots of people are calling for this, since the SLS is vastly over-budget and schedule. Isaacman may be hoping that he gets to go to the Moon personally!

      1. cmayo

        I think you have it backwards. Once NASA realized that SpaceX wasn't really up to the tasks that the vaunted privatization of the spaceflight industry was expected to complete, they re-started internal development.

        Almost like it never should have been canned in the first place.

        1. ScentOfViolets

          It's hard to do real R & D if you don't know the size of your budget from year to year. Or even if you have one.

    1. NotCynicalEnough

      I don't really care about starship or SLS but to the extent that any of NASA's budget gets diverted away from unmanned missions and climate research to Elon's idiotic Mars fantasy it is a a huge loss of efficiency. You would think that manned space flight would be the first thing to go if you really cared about efficient use of resources as the robots are orders of magnitude better at space research. [Edit: And remember that Elon is supposed to be a big AI fan boy as well so the robots are in theory going to get much, much better than they are now. Humans, not so much]

      1. aldoushickman

        Agreed: it makes zero sense to divert resources away from unmanned missions towards putting a person on Mars.* The US government has functionally infinite money, so we can readily do both (even if putting a human on Mars is more performative stuntwork than real science).

        In the past few years, NASA collected rocks from an asteroid that hadn't even been discovered until like 20 years ago, and put a space telescope with a 22-foot reflector at a goddamn lagrange point. Those people are wizards, and we should absolutely not back away from that sort of work.

        _________
        *That said, I've always thought that it would be an easier sell to put a human in _orbit_ around Mars. Fuel-wise, it's about the same as going to the moon and back, so it's much, much easier from an engineering standpoint. And then you send back glorious 8K video of a spacewalk above the red planet; and watch funding pour in for the next phase.

  4. D_Ohrk_E1

    Am curious how NASA goes forward with Artemis. Is Trump going to increase the program's funding and pushes it to land on the Moon during his administration? Or, will they shut down the program and put money into commercial ventures?

    1. aldoushickman

      I've heard speculation that Trump will keep Artemis going, if for no other reason than that he can crow about returning us to the Moon.

      That said, Musk probably wants to divert resources towards manned Mars exploration, so who knows.

  5. jeffreycmcmahon

    What exactly does "chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments" do? Sounds like the most boring existence a human being could have.

      1. Ken Rhodes

        The first line in the subsection linked here:
        "In 1999, Isaacman founded a retail payment processing company named United Bank Card, which was later renamed Harbortouch, a point-of-sale payment company based in Pennsylvania."

        That's interesting to me. Isaacman was born in 1983. It's not unique that a person starts a company at age 16. It's quite uncommon, though, when that company is a payment processing company, in competition with Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, etc. ... and succeeds so hugely.

  6. geordie

    He is more competent by far than any other appointee. The dude has got to the highest orbit of anyone in the last 50 years. Well except the rest of his crew obviously.

    Perhaps the congressmen who are using SLS and the other programs as a federal assistance grant for their states will now actually have to do so against the recommendations of the NASA director. I mean it is too much to hope that the boondoggles will actually get killed but at least the grift will be out in the open.

  7. pjcamp1905

    Enthusiastic about space or about humans in space? There's a world of difference. We're long past pretending that humans can do anything in space better than robots beyond studying what happens to humans in space. The entire human spaceflight program needs to die. It is obsolete.

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