Billionaire who performed the first private spacewalk is Trump’s pick to lead NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)—A tech billionaire that bought a series of space flights from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and carried out first private spacewalk was nominated by President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday to lead NASA.

Jared Isaacman, 41, CEO and founder of a card processing company, has been a close collaborator with Musk ever since he bought his first charter flight with SpaceX. He took competition winners on the 2021 trip and followed it in September with a mission where he briefly popped out of the hatch to test SpaceX’s new spacesuits.

If confirmed, Isaacman would replace Bill Nelson, 82, a former Democratic senator from Florida who was nominated by President Joe Biden. Nelson flew aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1986 — on the flight just before the Challenger disaster — while a congressman.

Isaacman said he was honored to be nominated and would be “grateful to serve.” “Having been lucky enough to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history,” he said via X.

During Nelson’s tenure, NASA accelerated its efforts to return astronauts to the moon. This next-generation Apollo program — named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister Artemis — plans to send four astronauts around the moon as soon as next year. The first moon landing in more than half a century would follow.

NASA expects SpaceX to get astronauts to the lunar surface via Starship, the megarocket launched out of Texas on test flights.

The space agency already relies on SpaceX to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station along with supply runs. Boeing launched its first crew to NASA in June, but the Starliner capsule ran into so many problems that the two test pilots ended up stuck on the space station. They will take a trip home with SpaceX in February, after more than eight months in orbit. Their mission was supposed to last eight days.

Also on NASA’s plate right now: solar system exploration. Robotic missions to the moon and beyond continue with a NASA spacecraft heading to Jupiter’s water moon Europa and the Mars rover Perseverance collecting more rock and soil samples.

Faced with tight budgets, NASA is seeking a faster and cheaper way to get these Martian samples to Earth than the original plan, which had grown to $11 billion with nothing coming before 2040. As with human spaceflight, NASA has turned to industry and others for ideas and help.

Musk congratulated Isaacman via X, describing him as a man of “high ability and integrity.”

Fighter pilot Isaacman, whose nickname is Rookie, has described himself as a “space geek” since kindergarten. He dropped out of high school at 16, got a GED, and started a business in his parents’ basement that became Shift4. His business is based in eastern Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and their two young daughters.

He set a speed record when he flew around the world in 2009 while raising money for the Make-A-Wish program, and later established Draken International, the world’s largest private fleet of fighter jets.

Isaacman has booked two more flights with SpaceX, including a trip that takes the Starship’s first crew into Earth orbit.

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