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

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —  President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday nominated a tech billionaire, who bought a series of spaceflights from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and conducted the first private spacewalk, to lead NASA.

Jared Isaacman, 41, chief executive and founder of a credit-card-processing company, has been a close collaborator with Musk ever since buying his first chartered flight with SpaceX. He joined contest winners on that 2021 trip and followed it in September with a flight in which he briefly popped out of the hatch to test SpaceX’s new spacewalking suits.

If confirmed, Isaacman will replace Bill Nelson, 82, a Democratic former senator from Florida who has served as President Biden’s NASA administrator. Nelson flew aboard space shuttle Columbia in 1986 — on the flight before the Challenger disaster — while a congressman.

Isaacman said he was honored to be nominated and would be “grateful to serve.”

“Having been fortunate 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 picked up steam in its effort to return astronauts to the moon. This next-generation Apollo program — named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister, Artemis — includes plans to send four astronauts around the moon as soon as next year. The first human moon landing in more than half a century would follow.

NASA is counting on SpaceX to get astronauts to the lunar surface via Starship, the mega rocket launching 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 for NASA in June, but the Starliner capsule encountered so many problems that the two test pilots ended up stuck at the space station. They’ll catch a ride home with SpaceX in February, after more than eight months in orbit. Their mission should have lasted eight days.

Also on NASA’s plate right now: exploring the solar system. Robotic missions to the moon and beyond continue with a NASA spacecraft en route to Jupiter’s watery moon Europa and the Mars rover Perseverance collecting more rock and dirt samples.

Facing tight budgets, NASA is seeking a quicker, cheaper way of getting these Martian samples to Earth than the original plan, which had swollen to $11 billion with nothing arriving 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.”

A fighter jet pilot, Isaacman — whose call name is Rook, short for rookie — has described himself as a “space geek” since kindergarten. He dropped out of high school when he was 16, got a GED certificate and started a business in his parents’ basement that became the genesis for Shift4. The credit-card-processing business is based in eastern Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and their two young daughters.

He set a speed record flying 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 reserved two more flights with SpaceX, including a trip leading Starship’s first crew into orbit around Earth.

Dunn writes for the Associated Press.