NASA is kind of a mess: Here are the top priorities for a new administrator

Planetary science

Another area of concern is planetary science. When one picks apart Trump’s budget priorities, there are two clear and disturbing trends.

The first is that there are no significant planetary science missions in the pipeline after the ambitious Dragonfly mission, which is scheduled to launch to Titan in July 2028. It becomes difficult to escape the reality that this administration is not prioritizing any mission that launches after Trump leaves office in January 2029. As a result, after Dragonfly, the planetary pipeline is running low.

Another major concern is the fate of the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The lab laid off 550 people last month, which followed previous cuts. The center director, Laurie Leshin, stepped down on June 1. With the Mars Sample Return mission on hold, and quite possibly canceled, the future of NASA’s premier planetary science mission center is cloudy.

Isaacman has said he has never “remotely suggested” that NASA could do without the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Personally, I have publicly defended programs like the Chandra X-ray Observatory, offered to fund a Hubble reboost mission, and anything suggesting that I am anti-science or want to outsource that responsibility is simply untrue,” he wrote on X.

That is likely true, but charting a bright course for the future of planetary science, on a limited budget, will be a major challenge for the new administrator.

New initiatives

All of the above concerns NASA’s existing challenges. But Isaacman will certainly want to make his own mark. This is likely to involve a spaceflight technology he considers to be the missing link in charting a course for humans to explore the Solar System beyond the Moon: nuclear electric propulsion.

As he explained to Ars earlier this year, Isaacman’s signature issue was going to be a full-bore push into nuclear electric propulsion.

“We would have gone right to a 100-kilowatt test vehicle that we would send somewhere inspiring with some great cameras,” he said. “Then we are going right to megawatt class, inside of four years, something you could dock a human-rated spaceship to, or drag a telescope to a Lagrange point and then return, big stuff like that. The goal was to get America underway in space on nuclear power.”

Another key element of this plan is that it would give some of NASA’s field centers, including Marshall Space Flight Center, important work to do after the seemingly inevitable cancellation of the Space Launch System rocket.

Standing up new programs, and battling against existing programs that have strong backing in Congress and industry, will require all of the diplomatic skill and force of personality Isaacman can muster.

We will soon find out if he has the right stuff.