Jared Isaacman-The High School Dropout Who Wil Lead NASA

United States | Top desk Jared Isaacman, the high-school dropout who will lead NASA The entrepreneur is a foe of the “Old Space” establishment Jared Isaacman Photograph: Getty Images Mar 13th 2025 Save Share Give Listen to this story In 2021 Jared Isaacman, the man soon to become NASA’s boss, bought a 30-second ad at the Super Bowl. Mr Isaacman—a boyish-looking 42-year-old billionaire, jet pilot and one-time owner of the world’s biggest private air force—had paid for four seats on one of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. Viewers were told that one lucky member of the public willing to donate to St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee, for which the mission eventually raised over $250m, would be able to join him and the rest of the crew. Space tourism is nothing new. But Mr Isaacman was no mere dilettante on a joyride. He is a space enthusiast who believes humanity’s destiny is to colonise the solar system, and who is happy to spend his own money to help make it happen. In September last year he was back on the launchpad for the first mission of his private “Polaris” programme, designed to lay the foundations for exploring the Moon and Mars. Polaris was due to culminate, sometime later in the decade, with the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket, which is designed to ferry humans to Mars. All that is on hold for now: his new job means Mr Isaacman will be stuck flying a desk for the foreseeable future. Like many of Mr Trump’s appointments, he is an outsider to the agency he will be in charge of. Unlike some of them, though, he is not a conspiracy theorist or bomb-throwing MAGA radical. In interviews he comes across as thoughtful and diplomatic. But he is likely to push through big changes at a NASA that has devolved into a vehicle for funnelling pork to contractors as much as an enterprise dedicated to exploring space. Mr Isaacman grew up in New Jersey. The youngest by eight years of four siblings, he was jealous of his brothers’ and sisters’ adult freedoms while he was still stuck in school. As he told The Green Dot, an aviation podcast, in 2024, “I had to raise my hand to go to the bathroom….they were out living their lives.” He left school as soon as he could, at 16, for a job doing IT support at a payment-processing firm. Mr Isaacman soon realised he could greatly streamline the clunky process of setting retailers up with credit-card terminals, and left to start a payments firm of his own from his parents’ basement. These days, Shift4 Payments is worth $8bn and employs around 4,000 people. The teenage entrepreneur worked himself hard. One day Mr Isaacman woke up after falling asleep at his keyboard and decided he needed a hobby. A fan of the film “Top Gun” and a keen player of flight-simulator video games, he drove to a local airport and signed up for flying lessons, starting in propeller-driven Cessnas before graduating to jets. In 2010 he helped found the Black Diamond Jet Team, an aerobatics group that performs at air shows around America. These days his pride and joy is a Soviet-built MiG-29, a Mach-2 fighter jet which he bought from Paul Allen, one of Microsoft’s founders. The hobby spawned another business, too. Draken International, which was sold to Blackstone in 2020, uses a fleet of surplus military jets to give America’s air force adversaries to train against. His experience as an entrepreneur will inform what Mr Isaacman does with NASA. Like many space enthusiasts, he dislikes the “Old Space” establishment: big firms such as Lockheed Martin or Boeing, which receive billions from NASA to build rockets. As he told MECO, another space podcast, last year, the cost-plus contracts those firms are awarded, and a congressional tendency to treat them as job-creation programmes, mean “they are incentivised to accomplish very little.” He puts his faith instead in a newer generation of entrepreneurial space startups: firms like Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace and Stoke Space. Many of these have been nurtured by NASA, which has given them fixed-price contracts to do things like fly cargo to the International Space Station or take scientific probes to the Moon. The standout success has been SpaceX, which has slashed launch costs, pioneered reusable rockets and built the Starlink satellite-broadband service. Assuming the Senate confirms him, Mr Isaacman is likely to double down on support for the insurgents. NASA’s Old Space-powered Artemis Moon programme will probably get chopped back. The Boeing-made SLS rocket at its heart might be scrapped altogether. He is particularly enthused about Starship. Its combination of mass production, a huge payload and a bargain-basement price could, he has said, “open up the entire solar system”. Turbulence ahead But it will not just be boldly going where no man has gone before. Rumours in Washington are that Mr Trump’s first budget will require huge cuts—numbers up to 50% have been mooted—in NASA’s science budget. Those are likely to fall most heavily on climate research, long a bugbear among Republicans. But they could also require shuttering things like space telescopes and Mars probes. Reworking NASA’s human spaceflight projects while managing a depressed and fearful science directorate would tax even the most experienced administrator. The biggest question is the extent to which Mr Isaacman will prove to be his own man, rather than simply a cipher for the views of Elon Musk, SpaceX’s boss, with whom he is closely associated. The idea that NASA could benefit from working even more closely with young, hungry companies is probably correct. But Mr Musk, whose role as one of Mr Trump’s closest advisers has made him a divisive figure, stands to benefit personally. Mr Isaacman has said he finds flying jets a good way to escape the stresses of life. Flying desks may have the opposite effect. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. Explore more Space United States