Expect 'Dramatic Changes' At NASA With Jared Isaacman At Helm

Reference: Visit website

Headlines:

Amid the backdrop of newly announced Artemis moon-mission postponements, analysts expect potential NASA administrator Jared Isaacman to shake up the agency from a private-businessman and private-astronaut perspective — "NASA needs to be prepared for dramatic changes."

Isaacman is the 41-year-old billionaire founder and CEO of Shift4 who partnered with Elon Musk's SpaceX to command and finance the groundbreaking Inspiration4  and  Polaris Dawn  commercial astronaut spaceflights. In September, he became the first private citizen to conduct a spacewalk in orbit during that latter mission, which launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

"This is definitely not the sort of standard NASA type of person that's spent years in the government," said Don Platt, director of the Florida Institute of Technology's Spaceport Education Center in Titusville. 

"It's definitely sort of, if you will, an outsider — obviously, with some pretty recent and interesting space experience," Platt said.

"I think that overall, he's going to definitely bring a very different perspective to NASA. And you know, hopefully that's a good perspective in terms of helping them get on track with their cost overruns and schedule problems that sort of have plagued them — especially on their big programs — over the last multiple decades," he said.

"Different perspective, different attitude, different background. I think that it's probably good for NASA, because we're definitely kind of spinning our wheels here trying to get back to the moon, for instance," he said.

#news