“Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” It’s a cliched piece of inspirational wisdom, the type of thing you might find printed on a forgettable motivational poster in a regional corporate office. But for Jared Isaacman, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be administrator of NASA, it’s not a bad guiding creed — and he takes it literally. 

“With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place,” Isaacman wrote on X in December, after Trump announced his pick. “Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars and in doing so, we will make life better here on Earth.”

Isaacman is the 41-year-old billionaire CEO of Shift4, a payment processing company he started at age 16 in his parents’ basement in New Jersey. He’s also a pilot and a commercial astronaut who has trained to travel to space — not through NASA, but with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In 2021, Isaacman self-funded a three-day SpaceX mission to space called Inspiration4, marking the first spaceflight manned only by civilians, rather than government astronauts. 

Isaacman is not a political ally of Trump’s; he has made over $300,000 in donations to Democrats. But his close ties to Musk and his shared excitement for one of Musk and Trump’s personal goals — bringing humans to Mars — likely played a role in him getting the job.

“I do think that that will be a concern that some people have, that he’s biased, or too pro-SpaceX,” said Eric Berger, the senior space editor at the technology publication Ars Technica. SpaceX has $15 billion in contracts with NASA. “However, having talked to Jared a number of times, I would say his interests go beyond SpaceX. He’s really interested, I think, in lifting the entire enterprise, rather than furthering the fortunes of SpaceX.” 

NASA, an agency that enjoys bipartisan support, has so far been spared from the most extensive cuts that Trump and Musk have enacted at other federal agencies. Layoffs of nearly 1,000 probationary employees at NASA facilities were postponed, although several hundred NASA employees reportedly accepted buyout offers. One question is whether Isaacman will refocus NASA from its current goal of returning humans to the moon — a project started in the first Trump administration — and instead zero in on the Mars project, which Trump mentioned in his inaugural address.

Isaacman’s own biography illustrates the changing nature of space travel, and how NASA will have to adapt to it. In September of last year, Isaacman became the first private astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. 

“The successful operation further reinforces that space travel is no longer the exclusive province of professional astronauts working at governmental space agencies like NASA, and now neither is the derring-do of spacewalks, when astronauts are protected by just their spacesuits from airless doom,” The New York Times’ Kenneth Chang wrote at the time. 

Isaacman has dedicated performances in air shows and his space flights to charity. During the Inspiration4 mission, he helped raise over $240 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He has also provided his name to institutions in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, where Shift4 is located, including Da Vinci Science Center and St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital. He has signed the Giving Pledge, promising to donate the majority of his wealth to charity. 

In 2010, Isaacman, who is Jewish, offered an unusual donation to Chabad of Hunterdon County in New Jersey: Attendees at a Chabad auction could bid to be a fighter pilot for the day in one of his aircraft. “I’m actually not a religious person,” he told CNN in 2021, after the timing of the Inspiration4 launch coincided with Yom Kippur. Shift4 acquired a large Israeli company in 2023, and Isaacman has tweeted throughout the Israel-Hamas war that he supports Israel and his Israeli colleagues. 

A Senate confirmation hearing has not yet been scheduled for Isaacman, but he is not expected to clash with Trump’s political opponents like some cabinet nominees have.

“There were options for slash-and-burn-type people to come in,” said Berger. “Jared generally believes that NASA’s mission is good, and just wants to make sure it’s modernized to fit the world we’re living in today.”