Billionaire adventurer Jared Isaacman at the head of NASA: here is the choice of Donald Trump, president-elect of the United States. Is this surprising? No. Will this have strong political and strategic consequences for NASA? We can safely bet that yes.
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A new phase after New Space?
This decision definitely marks a new era for space. We could even say that the famous New Space, which saw the emergence of private companies competing with historical and state agencies through a more pragmatic approach, is now behind us. At least, the stage of competition, and even that of the convergence of government and private actors, seems to be outdated. Here comes a phase of fusion. Indeed, who would have thought a few months ago that the first private astronaut to make a spacewalk – which in itself was already quite crazy – would then find himself leading NASA as an administrator? A position which will also allow him to be Donald Trump’s senior advisor on space policies.
Yes, this choice seems disruptive to us. The appointment of a NASA leader is the result of a strong political decision and certain former administrators have left their mark on history, such as James Edwin Webb, whose mandate was devoted to the establishment of the historic Apollo missions. Proof of his work, his name was then given to the most formidable space telescope (file to read here). Under Barack Obama, NASA director Charles Bolden, for example, redirected a large part of the agency’s budgets towards monitoring climate change on Earth, partly abandoning the space “dream”. The appointment of Jared Isaacman is therefore a strong political choice.
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Will Elon Musk and SpaceX have a free hand?
Of course, that’s the big question that comes next. Jared Isaacman is a personal friend of Elon Musk, who also became an astronaut thanks to the boss of Tesla and SpaceX. There is therefore indeed a collusion between them. We can therefore imagine, just to establish an understatement, that it will not be a brake on Musk’s ambitions.
The questions surrounding the future of Artemis, the North American manned lunar program, and in particular its super heavy launcher SLS, now in competition with the Starship, will not stop. Elon Musk’s absolute dream, which is to lead Man to set foot on the soil of Mars, and even to settle there permanently, must seem closer to him today than ever. A horizon nevertheless still very, very, very distant in practice.
We still don’t know how to send astronauts for so long outside Earth’s protective magnetic field, and we’ll pass over the 50% failure rate for Mars missions in general. We probably won’t have to count on it before the end of the 2030s, but the next tenant of the Oval Office seems to want to lay the first political bricks, just as he put Artemis on the path to the Moon during his first mandate.
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