- The billionaire Jared Isaacman said his Polaris missions with SpaceX are “a question mark” now.
- Donald Trump nominated Isaacman for NASA Administrator months after he did SpaceX’s first spacewalk.
- Space experts doubt Isaacman will fly during his NASA term, due to job demands and safety risks.
SpaceX and its go-to billionaire-turned-private-astronaut seem to be going their separate ways, at least for the next four years.
Jared Isaacman has flown two SpaceX missions to space and is slated to fly two more.
However, Isaacman may no longer fly those missions now that President-elect Donald Trump has tapped him to lead NASA.
Isaacman is the founder and CEO of a payments-processing company called Shift4, but he’s more famous for conducting the world’s first commercial spacewalk in September.
The spacewalk was the main feature of the first mission of the Polaris Program, which Isaacman started in partnership with SpaceX to supercharge the company’s human-spaceflight capabilities as it aims for the moon and Mars.
SpaceX
The program is scheduled to fly two future missions, including the first human flight aboard SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket.
Isaacman has previously indicated that he would be on board that flight. It would be a crucial step in Elon Musk’s plans to establish a human settlement on Mars using Starship.
The NASA nomination throws that mission into uncertainty, Isaacman acknowledged on Wednesday.
“The future of the Polaris program is a little bit of a question mark at the moment. It may wind up on hold for a moment,” Isaacman said at the Spacepower 2024 conference in Orlando, according to Reuters.
Indeed, shortly after his nomination, experts told Business Insider that it was unlikely Isaacman would fly to space during his term as NASA Administrator.
“Well, it certainly has never happened before,” John Logsdon, the founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told BI.
That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but Logsdon added, “NASA Administrator is a full-time, high-level government job. Taking time off to train for and carry out another spaceflight seems to me to be a little implausible.”
Polaris Program / AFP
If Isaacman wanted to fly a SpaceX mission during his NASA term, “that would take some thought on his part and the rest of the team,” George Nield, a former head of the FAA’s office of commercial space transportation, told BI. “What’s the risk, what’s the benefit, what happens if there’s a bad day, and are there succession plans?”
Nield co-authored a 2020 analysis which calculated that US spaceflight has a 1% fatal failure rate, because four out of nearly 400 spaceflights have ended in deadly malfunctions. That’s a rate 10,000 times greater than commercial airliners.
The US Senate has to confirm Isaacman’s nomination before he can take office.
“Having the boss of the enterprise take the risk of spaceflight would be unusual, but we live in unusual times,” Logsdon said.
