Jared Isaacman, former NASA Administrator nominee, has shared how the US space agency might have looked under his leadership and blamed his connections with Elon Musk for the abrupt withdrawal of his nomination.
“It was a real bummer,” Isaacman told the All-In podcast. “I got a call on Friday last week that the president had decided to go in a different direction.”
Isaacman’s weekend was further ruined when news of the nomination withdrawal broke earlier than he’d expected. He thought he’d have a few days while notification of the withdrawal filtered through government, but that didn’t happen.
And the reason for the withdrawal? Isaacman said: “I don’t like to play dumb … I don’t think that the timing was much of a coincidence … There were other things going on on the same day.”
There were indeed. Elon Musk’s departure from the Department of Government Efficiency was also announced. “Some people had some axes to grind,” said Isaacman, “and I was a good visible target.”
While NASA remains in disarray as managers study the proposed budget and speculate who might be the next nominee for the agency’s administrator, Isaacman shared how things might have looked under his watch.
If the proposals remain unchanged, NASA’s budget will be cut to pre-Apollo levels. Isaacman said: “I fully support the President with the goal of shrinking the budget … but it is true that doesn’t mean that I would have landed at $19 billion.”
That said, NASA’s Moon rocket, the SLS, was still unlikely to survive his tenure. Isaacman claimed that sufficient hardware was funded for “two or three” launches – enough, he reckoned, to “check that box” of getting back on the lunar surface before shifting focus to commercial efforts.
The Mars Sample Return program would also likely be cancelled per the latest NASA budget proposal. Although he claimed to be a “huge fan” of NASA’s science programs, Isaacman reckoned that having astronauts go to Mars to collect the samples rather than investing in robotics was a better option, as well as directing funding into commercial industry to achieve the goal.
Regarding science, Isaacman wanted James Webb or Hubble-type programs launching annually with an expectation that not all would succeed. “Give me ten $100 million missions a year,” he said, “let’s try that and let’s accept that three fail.” He described prioritizing science missions over a ten-year span as “insane” and decried the current policy of overspending by billions as requirements ballooned and risks were mitigated.
“I was going to introduce Time To Science as a KPI [Key Performance Indicator],” he said.
It’s reminiscent of the Faster, Better, Cheaper philosophy adopted by NASA in the 1990s. Unlike certain commercial space companies, NASA’s missions today are held to a very high standard and face difficult questions in the event of failure. While Isaacman’s desire to rapidly iterate and accept failure is understandable, it’s unlikely that US lawmakers would be so forgiving of taxpayer dollars being used this way.
Isaacman also proposed cutting NASA bureaucracy. “You have dozens of layers of leadership,” he said. “Everybody’s got a deputy. It’s crazy! I would have deleted all that.”
Returning to the theme of NASA’s potentially depleted budget, Isaacman saw it as an opportunity. “As entrepreneurs, we know that some of our best decision-making is always when we are running low on cash, so it kind of drives efficiency, and necessity is the mother of invention.”
Or, as NASA’s acting administrator, Janet Petro, likes to sign off her memos to space agency staffers: “Embrace the Challenge.” ®
