President-elect Donald Trump has chosen billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman to be the subsequent administrator of NASA.

“Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way in which for groundbreaking achievements in Area science, expertise and exploration,” Trump mentioned in a put up on Fact Social.

Isaacman made headlines earlier this yr when he turned the primary personal astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. The five-day mission passed off utilizing a capsule constructed by Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX. In the course of the flight, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis donned area fits provided by the corporate and floated briefly outdoors the capsule.

It was Isaacman’s second journey to area utilizing a SpaceX capsule. He has declined to say how a lot he is paid the corporate for the 2 flights.

Isaacman is a good friend of Musk, and his on-line fee firm, Shift 4, has in depth monetary ties to SpaceX. In response to monetary disclosure paperwork, Shift 4 had invested $27.5 million {dollars} in SpaceX as of 2021. That very same yr, Shift4 introduced a five-year partnership that might make it the fee platform for Starlink, the satellite tv for pc web service run by SpaceX.

If confirmed as NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee billions of {dollars} in contracts that the federal government has awarded to SpaceX. He would even be able to funnel more cash to Musk’s firm.

“Isaacman is prone to favor formidable and revolutionary industrial tasks,” says Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, which analyzes the area enterprise. “A lot of these tasks may nicely be executed by SpaceX.”

Actually, in earlier posts on Musk’s social media platform X, Isaacman seems to have proven a powerful desire for SpaceX. He has supported permitting SpaceX to extend its launches out of California, after lawmakers there voted to limit its flights from Vandenberg Air Power Base. He is additionally been crucial of NASA’s Area Launch System (SLS) to hold astronauts to the moon, in addition to the company’s determination to award a lunar touchdown contract to Blue Origin, the spaceflight firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Blue Origin award got here after NASA gave a multi-billion greenback contract to SpaceX for a similar mission.

Farrar says Isaacman wouldn’t instantly be capable of restructure NASA’s giant applications, resembling its Artemis mission to ship astronauts to the moon. That is as a result of many elements of these applications are dictated by Congress, which units the funds for the area company. “The actual query for NASA is whether or not Congress will allow it to desert legacy tasks like SLS so the funds will be redirected to SpaceX,” he says.

SpaceX didn’t instantly reply to NPR’s request for remark. By means of a spokesperson, Isaacman declined to talk to NPR, however in a press release posted to X, he mentioned he was honored to obtain the nomination: “With the help of President Trump, I can promise you this,” he wrote. “We’ll by no means once more lose our skill to journey to the celebrities and by no means accept second place.”