On Saturday, the Trump administration withdrew its nomination of Jared Isaacman to be the next leader of NASA. Isaacman — a tech billionaire who had flown to space twice with Elon Musk’s SpaceX — had appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee in April and was expected to be confirmed soon by the Senate.
It was both a massive surprise and a bit of a mystery — was Isaacman a casualty of President Trump’s growing distance from Musk, or was he dumped because, as The New York Times suggested, he had donated to Democrats? — but maybe most importantly, it was a significant development in the increasingly stark struggle over NASA’s future. Whoever ends up leading NASA will have to adjudicate a philosophical divide over the very purpose of the agency — a debate that in the years to come will have major consequences for our planet and, perhaps, beyond.
On one side is the Trumpist vision of outer space: a realm of heroic spacefaring achievements. In his first term, Trump established a plan to take American astronauts back to the moon. In this term, he has said he wants to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”
Yet NASA is not entirely, or even mainly, an agency of adventure and flag planting. Since the moon landings of the 1960s and ’70s, NASA has grown into a dream factory for scientific discovery that doesn’t rely on a single human leaving Earth: telescopes, rovers and spacecraft that stretch human understanding across billions of light-years, nearly all the way back to the Big Bang.
NASA has, since its inception, experienced eras in which astronaut travel took precedence over scientific endeavors, and vice versa, according to Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for space science and exploration. But the prevailing idea was that America, as a spacefaring nation, should do both. “The existing paradigm sees the cosmos as being much bigger, richer, and full of potential,” Dreier told me. The Trump budget, by contrast, “sees the cosmos as no bigger than the moon and Mars.”
The Trump administration has already fired the agency’s chief scientist, canceled climate-research grants and pushed out scientists across the agency (including, ironically, in the office of experts that survey good landing sites on Mars). In April, a preliminary budget for NASA was revealed; the more comprehensive version — released last week — maintains the vast majority of the cuts in the original. It proposes dramatic reductions across the entire agency, slashing nearly 25% from its usual funding, but it’s the science efforts that stand to suffer most. While the administration has introduced funding for new human-spaceflight efforts, it wants to shrink science programs by nearly 50%.
Among the new and proposed programs the Trump administration wants to cancel: Earth-observing satellites, a pair of new spacecraft missions to Venus and an effort to bring home samples from the Martian surface. The budget would terminate existing programs, such as three missions orbiting Mars and Jupiter, a probe that is scheduled to rendezvous with an asteroid, and a spacecraft that once delivered unprecedented views of Pluto and is now surveying the outer solar system. It would also direct NASA to pull its contributions from international collaborations, including a new Mars rover. All told, the budget would extinguish more than 40 science projects. “No self-respecting scientist would come back to NASA after this budget,” a former senior NASA official told me after the administration’s preliminary budget proposal became public. At the time, scientific organizations and commercial spaceflight companies alike called on members of Congress to push back, warning of “a potential dark age for American space science.” Even Musk, the DOGE king himself, described the science-related cuts as “troubling.”
In other words, in trying to bolster American leadership in one cosmic enterprise, the administration threatens to destroy it in another. “If we don’t fund these other projects, we will cede the dominance of the space program to other countries, such as China,” Rep. Judy Chu, a California Democrat whose district includes the venerable Jet Propulsion Laboratory and who co-chairs the bipartisan Planetary Science Caucus, recently told me.
Astronomers, planetary scientists and others aren’t, to be sure, against ambitious visions of human spaceflight. Indeed, while defending science for the sake of science, they would also note that their work makes flag-planting adventures possible. Consider the experiment on a Mars rover that, a few years ago, transformed the Martian atmosphere into breathable oxygen, mimicking a tree. “You can’t have crewed spaceflight and people living on Mars without science,” said Jessie Christiansen, an astrophysicist who leads the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech and has worked on NASA projects for 17 years.
I spent the past few months reporting on Isaacman and the future of NASA, and there was reason to think he would have been well-positioned to navigate these two visions in a way that could have appealed to Trump without abandoning NASA’s scientific dimension. (Isaacman declined to be interviewed; Musk, through SpaceX, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.)
On one hand, as America’s foremost civilian space cowboy — the first civilian to ever conduct a spacewalk — Isaacman clearly had an affinity for the daring side of NASA and had poured an astronomical sum of his personal fortune into SpaceX to help further its Mars goals. But he was also on record as taking seriously the threat of climate change, which NASA studies via Earth-orbiting satellites, and last year, he lobbied the agency to maintain a little-known, aging space telescope, arguing that its cancellation would result “in a death spiral for X-ray astronomy.” Even after his nomination in December — and after he gave $2 million to Trump’s inauguration fund — Isaacman appeared ready to disagree with the president. He described NASA’s severely gutted budget as not “optimal,” and he broke from the White House on its plan to cancel a new space telescope — which is nearly finished and on schedule to launch next year — telling senators in written correspondence that he supported its deployment. (The White House has since reversed course on this telescope, restoring some funding in its latest proposal.)
Moreover, Isaacman seemed, unlike many other Trump officials, to care about the views of the government workers he would have supervised. When an anonymous NASA engineer criticized him on X, Isaacman responded: “Despite your insults, I genuinely hope that — with time — I can win you over.” The space community, as far as I could tell from my conversations, was relieved when he was picked, with the prevailing reaction being: It could have been worse.
The nominee who takes Isaacman’s place could be more inclined to pursue the Trumpist vision for NASA at all costs. “It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda,” the White House said when withdrawing Isaacman’s nomination. And there will be pressure to deliver quickly on the president’s flag-planting dreams. NASA is in the midst of the most significant lunar effort — known as the Artemis program — since the Apollo era. The program emerged during Trump’s first term, after NASA officials gently quashed the president’s goal of an expedited Mars landing, citing funding constraints and the laws of physics. Artemis astronauts are currently preparing for an Apollo 8-style loop around the moon, scheduled for next spring, and a full-fledged landing — via Starship, SpaceX’s biggest rocket yet — sometime in 2027 or later.
Could Congress or Trump’s fellow conservatives play a role in helping to salvage the scientific realm of NASA? Rep. Grace Meng of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice and Science subcommittee, told me she is hopeful that her Republican colleagues will join her in trying to restore science funding. “There really hasn’t been anyone I’ve spoken to behind the scenes that thinks we should cut these programs so drastically,” Meng said. No less a Republican than Newt Gingrich has publicly criticized the administration’s proposed cuts to NASA-sponsored science. The battle over the agency’s direction, as a second former NASA official told me, presents almost a test case for Republican governance under Trump: “This is a historic cut, so do they push back, and if they push back, does it matter?”
After the news about Isaacman broke this weekend, I messaged some of my contacts in the space community. Three responded that they were feeling more worried about the prospects for NASA’s science portfolio than they were before. Undoubtedly, many others are anxious as well — about who the next chief will be, and how this person will manage a scientific agency under a president with other outer-space priorities. “It’s a competition,” Dreier told me, before Isaacman’s nomination was pulled, “between a narrow, utilitarian and limited view of the universe, against a more expansive and ecumenical one.” The next leader of NASA may well get to decide which vision of the cosmos wins out.
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Marina Koren is a freelance journalist based in Washington. She was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she wrote about space science, exploration and policy.