Jared Isaacman is in the Senate on Wednesday, likely to be confirmed as Trump’s NASA administrator. Add another billionaire to the pile.
Isaacman is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, a payment processor, as well as an aerospace defense contractor. He has flown on SpaceX rockets twice, which surely qualifies him to run NASA. He also said that he will strive to “ignite a thriving space economy in low Earth orbit,” which is somehow sounds both incoherent and ominous, especially given how crowded and dangerous low-earth orbit is getting these days.
He added that NASA “will be a force multiplier for science.” This sounds good, given the agency’s critical role in a variety of scientific fields, in particular with regards to climate change. Unsurprisingly given his potential new boss, Isaacman didn’t call out the issue by name, and the nominee’s views on climate change are fairly nebulous. Still, he did at least hint in its general direction: ‘We will launch more telescopes, more probes, more rovers and endeavor to better understand our planet [emphasis mine] and the universe beyond.”
Contrast that with Joe Biden’s NASA leader Bill Nelson, who in his own opening statement back in 2021 said “Combating climate change cannot succeed without robust observations, data, and research. With more than two dozen satellites and instruments observing key climate indicators, NASA satellites are our ‘eyes in the sky,’ showing us how the planet is changing at global, regional, and local scales.”
Interestingly enough, Trump’s first NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine entered the job as a bog-standard Trumpian climate denier, but left it having seen his views “evolve” significantly. “I fully believe and know that the climate is changing,” he said in 2018 after a couple of years on the job. “I also know that we, human beings, are contributing to it in a major way.”
Trump has already eliminated NASA’s Office of the Chief Scientist, among other jobs, but the catastrophic firings that have hit other scientifically minded parts of government have not yet come for the space agency. That’s not to say they won’t, of course; but NASA does still enjoy widespread support from the public, so there’s a chance the administration, as reckless and destructive as it is, might want to avoid “TRUMP KILLS NASA” sorts of headlines. Pew polling in 2024 found “favorable” views among 67 percent of Americans to only 12 percent “unfavorable,” third behind only the National Park Service and the US Postal Service among government agencies; of course, the CDC was fourth on that list, and that’s not going so hot.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
