Billionaire Jared Isaacman is sworn in as the brand new administrator of the house company on the identical day that the president indicators a decree to “ensure American superiority in space”: Trump delays the return of astronauts to the Moon till 2028, after having had NASA with out a chief for a 12 months | Science | EUROtoday

Donald Trump returned to the US presidency, endorsing Elon Musk’s dream of colonizing the purple planet. “We will pursue our manifest future in house, watching American astronauts plant [la bandera de] the Stars and Stripes on Mars,” he declared in his inauguration speech on January 20. But his ups and downs with the renewal of NASA, along with legal obligations, have led him to be left with an old, much more modest challenge. And to which he adds a new delay: the White House has set itself as a major goal of taking astronauts to the surface of the Moon in 2028 – a year later than planned – in the decree to “guarantee American superiority in house” that Trump signed this Thursday.

In the first 11 months of Trump’s second term, NASA has been leaderless. Until, also this Thursday, billionaire, aviator and private astronaut Jared Isaacman was sworn in as administrator of the US space agency in a private ceremony held before a judge in Washington (USA). The end of his path to the direction of NASA has been carried out very discreetly, after the newly elected president nominated him with great fanfare for the position in December 2024, but he decided to withdraw his candidacy last June after breaking up with Elon Musk, a friend and partner of Isaacman, who has commanded space flights for his space company SpaceX.

With Musk facing him, it no longer made sense for the US president to appoint Isaacman, who had already passed his previous exam and had the consensus of Republican and Democratic senators to confirm him, after having forced him to promise that he would prioritize the reconquest of the Moon over the Martian dreams of his friend and the president. He was just days away from the final vote and taking office.

But Trump ousted him before he began, citing past ties to Democratic politicians, and soon after named Sean Duffy—his administration’s Transportation Secretary—as acting administrator of NASA. He succeeded a director of the agency, Janet Petro, who had also been in charge provisionally and with limited responsibilities: the acting administrators cannot make the necessary decisions to, for example, make the changes required by the Artemis program to return to the Moon, with China hot on the heels of the United States in this new space race.

The Asian superpower recently announced that everything is going according to plan in its plans to achieve a manned moon landing before 2030. Meanwhile, the United States plans to launch the Artemis 2 mission starting next February, which will take four astronauts to orbit the Moon and return to Earth in a NASA space capsule. The space agency has done its homework, but with several delays and with a multi-million dollar extra cost above the initial budget. Now the ball is in SpaceX’s court.

It is one thing to reach lunar orbit and another much more complicated thing is to land on its surface. Elon Musk’s company won the contract to design and manufacture the ship responsible for landing NASA astronauts on the Moon, for the first time since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. That ship is Starship, powered by the largest and most powerful rocket in history, which after 11 test flights has still not even managed to raise it to Earth orbit and leave it spinning a few hundred kilometers above our planet. During 2025, the Starship project has accumulated resounding failures and no progress with respect to its promising achievements of 2024.

Thus, no one in the space industry was confident that the Artemis 3 mission could meet its launch date in mid-2027. Last October, Sean Duffy commented on the possibility of opening the Artemis 3 contract to other suppliers – such as Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos – that compete with Musk’s company and could have a lunar landing module ready sooner. He could do little more at the head of NASA. Just two weeks later, Trump revived Jared Isaacman’s candidacy to lead the space agency. The process began again, but this time it was resolved in just a month and a half, with an even greater consensus of Republican and Democratic senators and with the approval of the US space industry.

Jared Isaacman has no political or scientific experience nor has he worked at NASA, requirements met by almost all of the 14 people who have previously held that position. However, Isaacman can boast of having been the first private astronaut to perform a spacewalk and to command a mission made up only of civilians. This prototype of a self-made American – he began to build his fortune at just 16 years old, when he founded the payment processing company Shift4 – becomes a NASA administrator with the great challenge of finding a solution to reach the Moon before China.

This Thursday, Trump gave him 90 days to present a plan that meets the main objective of his decree to “guarantee American superiority in house”, with which the US president intends to determine a everlasting lunar base in 2030 – it isn’t clear whether or not in orbit or on the floor – and deploy nuclear reactors on the Moon. On Earth, the primary measures had already been taken throughout Biden’s mandate: the tip of the International Space Station initially of the subsequent decade and the higher dedication to personal operators for the brand new house race. In this decree, Musk’s dream of reaching Mars is decreased to a wager for the long run, as soon as the presence on the Moon is consolidated.