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.”