Jared Isaacman

Elon Musk now has an ally in charge of Nasa — a fellow billionaire with a penchant for space travel

- Fred Harter

Last September, Jared Isaacman emerged from a SpaceX Dragon capsule and peered down at Earth. In doing so, he made history, becoming the first person to perform a commercial space walk. The feat cemented his position in the vanguard of the new space age, led by boundary-pushing billionaires and nimble private ventures rather than vast government agencies.

A few weeks later Donald Trump picked Isaacman to run Nasa, a move that sent a ripple of excitement through the space community.

“It seemed like an almost inspirational choice, a really good fit for this new era of commercially enabled space travel,” said Simeon Barber from the Open University, who builds lunar landing craft. “He had enough money to do whatever he wanted with his life, and he chose to go into space. He’s genuinely got a passion, and that counts for a lot.”

Then, in May, Trump abruptly changed his mind and cancelled Isaacman’s nomination, days before the Senate was due to vote on it. Observers suspected this was related to the president's spat with Elon Musk. After Nasa itself, Isaacman is arguably the best customer of his company SpaceX.

In a second twist, Trump renominated Isaacman earlier this month as relations with Musk thawed. On Wednesday the Senate will grill Isaacman on his plans for the agency — plans that remain, for now, in the realm of science fiction. The billionaire is a supporter of mass space travel and sending humans to Mars, ambitions closely aligned with those of Musk. He has lamented the fact that only about 600 people have left Earth’s atmosphere. “We want it to be 600,000... I drank the KoolAid in terms of the grand ambitions for humankind being a multi-planet species,” he said in 2021. “I think that we all want to live in a Star Wars, Star Trek world where people are jumping in their spacecraft.”