NASA will prioritize sending American astronauts to Mars, President Trump’s nominee to lead the space agency told a Senate committee on Wednesday.
That led to prickly exchanges between the nominee — Jared Isaacman, the chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments, who is a close associate of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX — and both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. They wondered about the future of the International Space Station as well as Artemis, NASA’s current effort to send astronauts back to the moon.
“I don’t think we need to make any tough trade here,” Mr. Isaacman said. “I think we can be paralleling these efforts and doing the near impossible.”
Mr. Isaacman shared the hearing on Wednesday with Olivia Trusty, a nominee to be a member of the Federal Communications Commission. During his testimony, Mr. Isaacman avoided direct answers to a number of questions while repeatedly saying that the space agency could work to send astronauts to both moon and Mars within its current $25 billion budget.
“NASA was built to do the near impossible,” Mr. Isaacman said.
Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas who chairs the committee, gave Mr. Isaacman a lecture about the bipartisan law that dictates NASA’s priorities, reading back the portion that states that Mars would be the destination after the moon. The Johnson Space Center, which runs most of NASA’s spaceflight programs, is in Mr. Cruz’s state.
”When legislation uses the word shall, it denotes a mandatory obligation,” Mr. Cruz told Mr. Isaacman.
Mr. Isaacman said, finally, that he would follow the law,.
In response to an earlier question from Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, Mr. Isaacman agreed that the massive Space Launch System rocket that has been under development for more than a decade would be the fastest way to get American astronauts back to the moon. NASA currently plans to use that vehicle, which made its debut launch in December 2021, for its moon missions.
The first of those missions, Artemis II is scheduled for launch next year, and would take four astronauts on a flight around the moon without landing. Those astronauts, three from NASA and one from Canada’s space agency, attended Wednesday’s hearing. The next mission to land two astronauts near the moon’s south pole, Artemis III, is to occur no earlier than 2027.
Mr. Cruz asked Mr. Isaacman about the possible cancellation of Gateway, an outpost planned for lunar orbit that would serve as a way station for astronauts en route to the moon’s surface.
“I will say there’s a long history in NASA of administration coming in and canceling programs and causing massive delays,” Mr. Cruz said. He cited the cancellation during the Obama presidency of Constellation, an earlier effort to send American astronauts back to the moon.
“NASA struggled for years as a consequence,” Mr. Cruz said.
As someone who has led two private astronaut flights to orbit, Mr. Isaacman would, if confirmed, bring to NASA and its $25 billion budget a perspective more in line with newer entrepreneurial aerospace companies like SpaceX.
During the hearing, Mr. Isaacman said kick-starting a vibrant economy in orbit around Earth and increasing the rate of scientific discoveries should be other objectives for NASA. But he was sparse about details of how he would do that, and sidestepped senators’ questions about specific programs.
Instead, he said it is most important for NASA to deliver on its promises on time and on budget.
Mr. Isaacman did not directly reply, and would only say, repeatedly, that his interview was with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Isaacman also said that he had not been in contact with Mr. Musk since being nominated.
Mr. Markey then asked Mr. Isaacman whether he would commit to restoring climate data produced by NASA missions that had been removed from online databases. Mr. Isaacman said he did not know about the issue.
Mr. Isaacman said he loved science and even the Earth science that NASA conducts but avoided saying “climate change” or “global warming.” Instead, he highlighted other areas of research including landslides, flooding and the detection of asteroids that could potentially hit Earth.
During the hearing, Mr. Isaacman also sidestepped questions about potential layoffs or closings of NASA centers in different parts of the country.
The Trump administration has eliminated NASA’s office of the chief scientist and another office that provided advice on policy and strategy but has so far held back from the kind of large-scale and sometimes chaotic layoffs that have swept through many other federal agencies.
Mr. Musk, a key adviser to Mr. Trump, has said that the moon program is a “distraction” and that the International Space Station has served its purposes and should be thrown away in a couple of years.
In a posting on X in October, Mr. Isaacman described the S.L.S. rocket as “outrageously expensive” and an example of traditional NASA programs that have been canceled because they end up far over budget and behind schedule.
But the S.L.S. for Artemis II is already built. The Artemis III would rely on another S.L.S. rocket as would other planned moon missions that are more distant in the future.
For many years, NASA was led by people with experience at NASA or in the traditional aerospace industry. The last two permanent NASA administrators did not fit that mold but instead were former politicians. During his first administration, Mr. Trump chose Jim Bridenstine, a former congressman from Oklahoma, and Joseph Biden chose Bill Nelson, a former Florida senator.
Mr. Isaacman’s nomination breaks tradition in different ways. He has not worked at NASA and does not possess a conventional aerospace background.
But in February 2021, he announced he was financing a private mission called Inspiration4. With its crew riding in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, the mission was the first in which no one aboard was a professional astronaut.
The crew launched into orbit in September 2021, spending four days in space.
Mr. Isaacman followed up last year with another trip to orbit, called Polaris Dawn. This mission — a collaboration with SpaceX — tested novel technologies including a new spacesuit that was used during the first spacewalk by private astronauts.
Two additional Polaris missions were to follow, but those will be on hold if Mr. Isaacman becomes the leader of NASA.
