WASHINGTON: US President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday tapped Jared Isaacman to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Isaacman, CEO of payment processing company Shift4 Payments, has been a close associate of Elon Musk and his space company SpaceX for years and leads Polaris, a program using SpaceX vehicles to conduct private astronaut missions in orbit.
“Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in Space science, technology, and exploration,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Isaacman, if confirmed, would oversee a $25 billion agency heavily focused on returning humans to the moon under its Artemis program, a multibillion-dollar effort promoted by Trump during his first term that will rely on SpaceX’s Starship.
Isaacman would also command the space agency’s aeronautics portfolio that has been funding green aviation concepts, as well as a sprawling space science unit that has faced layoffs and budget cuts under the administration of President Joe Biden.
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NASA’s last two appointed administrators were former politicians. Trump’s first NASA chief, former Oklahoma lawmaker Jim Bridenstine, launched the Artemis program and convinced Congress to increase the agency’s budget to fund it. Biden appointed former Florida senator Bill Nelson to run NASA.
Meanwhile, Daniel Driscoll, an investor and close friend of Vice President-elect JD Vance from Yale Law School, has been tapped to become the next secretary of the Army, Trump announced on social media.
Driscoll, an Army veteran with a combat deployment to Iraq under his belt, became close to Vance at Yale before moving back to North Carolina where he has worked as an investor and ran for Congress in an unsuccessful bid in 2020 in which he focused on national security issues.
