To advance his efforts to return Americans to the moon, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has chosen a Jewish entrepreneur who has traveled to space himself to lead the National Aeronautics Administration and space (NASA).
Jared Isaacman, 41, is the founder and CEO of Shift4, a payment processing company. He is best known for his high-profile private escapades in space, the most recent of which took place in September aboard a rocket built by Space to carry out the first private spacewalk in history.
In 2001, during his first spacewalk, he became the first to go into space without a professional astronaut on board.
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On Wednesday, Trump announced he would nominate Isaacman to head the US space agency.
“With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to travel to the stars and settle for second place,” wrote on the social network thoughts on how Jewish law will address spaceflight, following Trump’s announcement.
“Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars, and we will improve life on Earth. »
Isaacman, a billionaire college dropout, is Jewish, but has not made that part of his identity a central part of his public image. This year, he and his father Don, who serves on the Shift4 board, were part of a gala committee for Chabad of Hunterdon County, the center of the Hasidic movement in their area of New Jersey.
The start of the first private spacewalk led by tech billionaire Jared Isaacman on September 12, 2024. (Space X via AP)
In 2010, Isaacman offered at an auction organized by the Chabad movement to become a “fighter pilot of a
day” on board one of its planes.
Isaacman, however, would not be the first Jewish leader to head NASA. Former President George HW Bush selected Daniel S. Goldin, an engineer who played a key role in the liberation movement of Soviet Jews, to lead that administration in 1992.
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