Jared Isaacman speaks out, and it’s clear that NASA lost a visionary leader

In a revealing interview published by the All-In Podcast on Wednesday, the private astronaut nominated to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, spoke at length on what he thought about the nomination process, how he would have led NASA, and the factors that led to the abrupt rescission of his nomination by President Trump.

"I got a call Friday, of last week, that the president has decided to go in a different direction," Isaacman said. "It was a real bummer."

It was a real bummer for most of the space community, myself included. To be clear, I am biased. I have gotten to know Isaacman over the last five years rather well, talking with him about his passion for spaceflight, what is working, and what is not. What I have discovered in Isaacman is a person who cares deeply about the future of US spaceflight and wants to make a meaningful contribution to its advancement. To see him done wrong like this, well, it's a very sordid affair.

A lot of Isaacman's intellect and thought on these issues was evident in the podcast. Here's a look at some of the things that we heard for the first time, publicly, from Isaacman on Wednesday.

On what NASA is doing

"The agency is doing a lot of littles, a lot of things that other agencies, departments, companies are capable of doing," Isaacman said. "That's not why the taxpayers fund NASA. NASA's funded to do the near impossible that no one else can do."

So, what are the needle-moving projects that NASA should be focused on?

"That's leading in the high ground of space," he said of his priorities. "Let's complete our lunar obligations, because that's a whole other story with China. At the same time, in parallel, develop the capabilities to get to Mars. Help the commercial industry develop the rapid, reusable, heavy-lift capability that allows us to go anywhere. Pivot from competing with industry to doing what no company would ever do, which is build nuclear spaceships."

Isaacman referenced the recent cancellation of the DRACO project, which aimed to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion engine. He supports this, saying NASA should fund a much larger project that is applicable in the real world and focus on nuclear electric propulsion.

"It's subscale," Isaacman said of the DRACO program. "It's a program that sits in a lab forever. Like what you need in nuclear electric—I'm passionate on the subject. You need us to get back to the good old days. We went from the atomic bomb in 1945 to laying the keel on the Nautilus [the world's first nuclear submarine] in 1951. Five, six years. We didn't keep it in the lab forever. We said, you know what? We're going to do big, bold things. And that's what we need to be doing in space when it comes to nuclear."

On Artemis

It's clear that Isaacman was not overly enamored with the Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon, viewing it as a program built around using the large, expendable Space Launch System rocket.

"It's a giant disposable rocket program that repurposes shuttle hardware," he said. "It's incredibly expensive. We signed up a lot of international partners to support it because we like collecting flags, and it doesn't necessarily always mean that what they're contributing to is in the best interests of the program, case in point, you know, Gateway, man. This is going down a rabbit hole of a lot of things because of the shortcomings of the vehicle. But it's expensive; it's disposable. It is not the way to do affordable, repeatable, efficient exploration, whether it's to [the] Moon, Mars, or anywhere else."

Isaacman said NASA should fly Artemis II and Artemis III using this SLS rocket and then proceed toward deep space programs focused on reusable hardware. Later in the interview, he continued to assail the expensive, expendable hardware NASA has been developing for two decades.