WASHINGTON--President Donald Trump's nominee to lead NASA, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, faced questions from senators on Wednesday about his ties to Elon Musk and how he would balance Trump's focus on reaching Mars with the U.S. space agency's flagship moon programme.
Isaacman, CEO of payment processing company Shift4 Payments, is a close partner of Elon Musk's SpaceX who has flown to space twice as a private astronaut on the company's spacecraft. Isaacman would not answer a question about whether Musk was in the room when Trump offered him the job of NASA administrator.
The billionaire is in Washington for a confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in which conflicting views on the moon and Mars as a destination for U.S. astronauts were front and center.If confirmed, Isaacman, 42, would oversee 18,000 employees and a budget of roughly $25 billion, focused heavily on returning astronauts to the moon's surface as part of a programme called Artemis. Trump started the programme during his first term.
Senator Ted Cruz, whose state of Texas includes NASA's Houston-based Johnson Space Center, pressed the nominee on his moon programme views, noting intense competition over the moon with China, which aims to send its own astronauts there by 2030. "I am hard pressed to think of a more catastrophic mistake we could make in space than saying to Communist China, 'the moon is yours. America will not lead,'" Cruz said in his opening statement.
But the president and Musk, who spent $250 million in support of Trump's presidential campaign and pushed for Isaacman's nomination, have become fixated on Mars as a national priority, raising questions about NASA's moon programme for which billions of dollars have been committed. "I absolutely want to see us return to the Moon... we don't have to make a binary decision of Moon versus Mars," Isaacman said, adding that NASA can do simultaneous Moon and Mars missions.
When asked if he supports NASA's Space Launch System rocket, a multibillion dollar pillar of the moon programme, Isaacman did not offer explicit support, but said the rocket is part of the current plan and that he wants to see the Artemis 2 crew get to the moon. Isaacman has previously criticized SLS as "outrageously expensive."
"I do believe it's the best and fastest way to get there," he later said of SLS and Orion, the multibillion dollar Lockheed Martin-built crew capsule that sits atop SLS.
"I don't think it's the long term way to get to and from the moon and to Mars with great frequency, but this is the plan we have now and we've got to get this crew around the moon and the follow on crew to land on the moon," he added.
