ORLANDO, Florida—On Wednesday, Jared Isaacman made his first public appearance since his nomination earlier this month to become NASA's next administrator. Although his remarks were short on specifics, Isaacman endorsed a vision that would signal radical departures from the way NASA does business.
He talked of commercial investment, a thriving space economy, and going fast and taking risks. These talking points are familiar to anyone who has listened to NASA's leadership in recent years, and there has been tangible progress in the agency's partnerships with commercial companies. However, NASA is leaving some commercial expertise on the field, or in this case, on the ground.
"I love all about the commercial space industry right now," Isaacman said in a discussion at the Space Force Association's Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida. "They’re all generally doing the same thing, which is putting a lot of their own dollars on the line because they believe in the future that it holds."
It's not just launch. More startups are pursuing satellite manufacturing, Earth return vehicles, and commercial space stations. But rockets happen to be one of the most mature segments of the commercial space industry, and they attract a lot of attention.
"Blue Origin is putting a ton of their own money on the line," Isaacman said. "I love everything that Rocket Lab did, as kind of another small scrappy startup that’s doing great things. And, for sure, SpaceX and their approach with a fully reusable first and second stage. Pretty awesome stuff."
Blue Origin and SpaceX were founded by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who made their first fortune in other businesses. Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, didn't start out rich, but his company's success has made him a billionaire.
Isaacman, too, is a wealthy entrepreneur. According to Forbes, he has a net worth of $1.9 billion, primarily from his stake as founder of Shift4, a mobile payments platform he established when he dropped out of high school at the age of 16. Isaacman later earned his GED and a bachelor's degree in aeronautics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
He's also an accomplished pilot with a fleet of high-performance jets and flew to orbit two times on self-funded missions aboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. Most recently, he commanded the Polaris Dawn mission in September, when he became the first person to perform a fully commercial spacewalk wearing a SpaceX-made spacesuit.
Through his Polaris program, Isaacman has booked two more missions for him to fly to space with SpaceX. One of those is supposed to fly on another SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, and the other is slated to be the first crew flight on Starship. If confirmed by the Senate, Isaacman's next spaceflight might have to wait.
“The future of the Polaris program is a little bit of a question mark at the moment," Isaacman said in a discussion with Matt Anderson, the Space Force Association's chief growth officer. "It may wind up on hold for a little bit. We’ll have to see. But overall, I’m just super passionate about humankind’s future among the stars and what’s approaching, because it’s going to arrive a lot quicker than probably many of us think.”
Spiraling to new heights
Isaacman didn't take questions from reporters Wednesday and didn't directly address his nomination to be NASA's next administrator. But he made a clear endorsement of commercial industry's agile, iterative approach to technology development and rebuked the government's top-down, or waterfall, model for big-money space projects.
"Shockingly, the government does do business very differently than the rest of the country," Isaacman said.
SpaceX has achieved the most success with the iterative, or spiral, development approach. Engineers experimented with rocket landings for several years before accomplishing the first intact recovery of a Falcon 9 booster. SpaceX is now test-flying its new Starship rocket in a similar manner, with each launch validating changes to the design and revealing which areas need more work.
Cost reductions enabled by reusable rockets will "allow us to experiment in really grand ways," Isaacman said. "You talk about the cost to accelerate the mass to orbit coming down to such an extent that we can really figure things out and take risks."
Isaacman has previously criticized the high costs of NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. He didn't mention them by name, but his comments Thursday suggest he favors a different way forward.
"If the launch doesn’t cost a half-billion dollars, we don’t need to spend many, many years and lots of billions to get it right with some super exquisite asset, when you can get into a rhythm of using all of these providers to get things up very quickly to see what works and what doesn’t, and then evolve into something else," he said.
This is the way of spiral development, but this isn't the way NASA spends most of its human spaceflight budget.
Flipping the script
NASA has partially embraced commercial space for a while. The agency signed contracts in 2008 with SpaceX and Orbital Sciences—now part of Northrop Grumman—to resupply the International Space Station with commercial cargo freighters. In 2014, two years after the first commercial cargo delivery to the ISS, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to develop the commercially-owned Crew Dragon and Starliner spacecraft for astronaut missions.
SpaceX launched the first commercial crew mission to the space station in 2020. The positive experience with commercial cargo and commercial crew led NASA to pursue a similar program to deliver experiments to the surface of the Moon with robotic landers. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program scored an early success with the first commercial Moon landing in February, but there's still much work to do to make these landings as reliable and repeatable as commercial missions to the International Space Station.
Most recently, NASA has signed deals—fixed-price, service-based contracts like commercial cargo, crew, and CLPS—for SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop human-rated lunar landers for the agency's Artemis program. NASA awarded a similar commercial contract to Axiom Space to design and build spacesuits to protect astronauts walking on the surface of the Moon and selected Maxar and Northrop Grumman for fixed-price contracts to develop elements of the agency's planned Gateway mini-space station in lunar orbit.
As you read this list, it might seem NASA has already gone all-in with commercial space. But these are half-measures. To put a finer point on it, it's a little less than a half-measure. In 18 years, NASA has either spent or plans to spend close to $40 billion on these large fixed-price contracts.
Meanwhile, over about the same time period, NASA's Space Launch System rocket, Orion deep space crew capsule, and ground support system upgrades cost nearly $50 billion before the unpiloted Artemis I mission in 2022, according to an analysis by the Planetary Society. That sum has now risen to just shy of $60 billion.
Artemis II, the next flight in NASA's Artemis program, is scheduled for launch with an SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft in 2026 to carry a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth. Artemis III, as NASA currently envisions it, will launch no sooner than mid-2027 on another SLS and Orion, which will dock with SpaceX's Starship lander near the Moon for the final descent to the lunar south pole.
No parts of the SLS rocket are reusable, and last year, NASA's inspector general estimated the next three Artemis crew launches will each cost $4.2 billion—more than the agency's total spending to help SpaceX fund the development of the Crew Dragon spacecraft."We’re about to enter an era of great experimentation," Isaacman said Wednesday.Listening to the broader context of Isaacman's comments Wednesday, he may have meant this in not just a technical sense, but in the way NASA does business. The incoming Trump administration will certainly keep NASA's goal of landing people on the Moon, but the agency's new leaders are widely expected to assess how to achieve this goal without the budgetary burden of the SLS rocket. One solution might be to piece together elements from different rocket companies, like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance, to replicate the capabilities of the Space Launch System.“We have the best spaceship in the world right now in Dragon," Isaacman said. "This is what American astronauts go to the space station in routinely, every six months or so. But we're about to have this light switch-like moment when Starship comes online."
SpaceX has launched six full-scale test flights of the Starship rocket, and the next one is scheduled for January. SpaceX demonstrated the first catch of the rocket's enormous Super Heavy booster after a launch in October. Next year, SpaceX aims to catch the Starship upper stage after coming back from low-Earth orbit and kick off in-space refueling trials with two ships docked together.
NASA will human-rate Starship for landings on the Moon, and SpaceX eventually plans to launch and land people on Earth using Starship. Once operational, Starship will be able to deliver payloads between 100 and 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, and with the advent of orbital refueling, will carry the same payload mass to the Moon, Mars, or other destinations.
"What happens when industry starts cranking out spaceships out of multiple factories? SpaceX has a great vision for this, but so does Blue Origin. You've got Rocket Lab building a brand-new behemoth rocket," Isaacman said. "You’re going to have lots and lots of people in space at one time, and that’s why I call it a light switch-like moment, where a lot of things are going to change."
NASA's spending levels peaked relative to the entire federal budget in 1966, when funding for the space program accounted for 4.4 percent of all government spending. In the last few years, this has fallen to about 0.5 percent.
"We can do some pretty awesome things when you can write that big of a check," Isaacman said. "We can go to the Moon. We can bring people back safely. That’s pretty awesome, but we’re going into a new era now where some of this funding can come privately, through commercial endeavors, but still for the benefit of everyone."
