Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who conducted the first commercial spacewalk with SpaceX, was initially nominated by Trump to lead NASA, then had his nomination cancelled in May amid Trump's conflict with Elon Musk, and was re-nominated this month as their relationship improved.

Isaacman faces the immediate challenge of restoring morale at an agency threatened with deep cuts that would slash its science budget by half and reduce staff by a third, while technical delays to the Artemis lunar program risk losing the moon race to China.

Sean O’Keefe, University Professor Emeritus and former NASA administrator, thinks Isaacman has the right stuff, arguing it is a myth that NASA administrators “all come from some monolithic, similar background of science or technology or engineering.”

“The job is a leadership role, where your task is to motivate people from wide-ranging, different disciplines to come together to define the problem as the same and then go about trying to solve it through multiple avenues,” says O'Keefe in The Observer article “Profile: Jared Isaacman, Nasa’s incoming billionaire boss.” “Everything I’ve heard about him certainly suggests that he’s got a lot of talent and capability to make him the ideal person.”