Orlando, Florida – The former NASA administrator candidate, Jared Isaacman, says he is interested in pursuing some of the objectives he had for the outside agency.
Isaacman received the Wernher Von Braun Prize from the National Space Society on June 21 on behalf of Polaris Dawn, the mission of private astronauts in September 2024, he commanded. The award ceremony at the International Conference on the development of space here was one of its first public appearances since The White House withdrew his appointment to be the NASA administrator three weeks earlier.
Isaacman, in a speech and a cat by the fire at the award ceremony, said little about his appointment, focusing rather on his spatial flight experience. He discussed the appointment and the Plans withdrawn for NASA in a podcast earlier in the monthIncluding his desire for NASA to prioritize “needle mobilization” programs and reduce bureaucracy.
In the comments after the speech, he said that there was no thing that he wanted to do the most if he had been confirmed as the administrator of NASA. “It was a question of bringing the agency to redo the quasi-impossible. There are just a lot of” small “which were going on which are all pretty cool, but many of them could be made by others.”
His priorities if he had led NASA, he said, understood the withdrawal of humans on the moon and to put himself on a “good path to at least to start to go to Mars”. Another, he said, invests in nuclear electric propulsion (NEP), a technology which, according to him, was important for the exploration of March.
He said he wanted to try “to pivot the SLS to” NEP states while he was trying to eliminate the space launch system. The Marshall Space Flight Center of NASA in Alabama, which oversees work on SLS, is also involved in nuclear propulsion technologies.
Another objective he had had for NASA to associate himself with university organizations on missions where these organizations would have played a more important role in funding. “My priorities would have been leadership in space and the orbital economy,” he said, “and trying to introduce a concept where NASA could help others carry out interesting scientific missions, forcing university organizations to contribute.”
This is something he said he might be interested in pursuing outside the agency. “It might not bother me to try to put this on a test and see if you could finance an interesting robotic mission, just to show that it can be done, and try to get some of the leading university institutions that want to happen. So, it is in my mind.”
The withdrawal of the White House from his appointment came a day after NASA has published its budget proposal for the detailed 2026 financial yearwhich is looking for a reduction of almost 25% of the overall expenses of NASA and more steep cuts in fields such as science and space technology. The budget, for example, has eliminated the financing of nuclear propulsion, concluding that such “efforts are expensive investments, would take many years to develop and have not been identified as the propulsion mode for deep space missions.”
In his cat by the fire, he said that people were “rightly so” upset by the cups, but that it was always optimistic. “When you zoom in a little of this turbulence, you will see that it is the best moment in human space flight, because probably the first chapter of the 1960s,” he said.
He argued that “it will be no less than $ 20 billion in a year that the US government will engage in science and discovery in space.” The budget proposal only required $ 18.8 billion for NASA in 2026, $ 6 billion less than 2025.
“You have the richest people, like two richest people in the world, who are happy to commit their resources to allow the capacities to live the space by the many, so that we go beyond the limits of our planet,” he added, a reference to the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk and the founder of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos.
Isaacman’s Polaris Dawn mission was supposed to be the first of the three missions he planned to finance, although he put these plans aside after being nominated to direct NASA. He said in the cat by the fireside which, for the moment, he spent “catching up time” with his family, taking advantage of his first prolonged break from work since he was 16 years old.
He left the door open, however, for a return to space. “I don’t think I have traveled my last mission, but I don’t necessarily know exactly what form it can take. So we will have to see. “