NASA is facing increasingly sharp challenges as it pursues its goal of landing astronauts on the moon again before this decade is out — and as the space agency braces for another leadership change, it’s clear that the year ahead will also bring further challenges. How will NASA fare?
“There’s a lot left up in the air, though the signs are more positive than I would have said a couple of months ago,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the nonprofit Planetary Society, said this week at the ScienceWriters2025 conference in Chicago.
One of the big issues left up in the air has to do with who’ll be at the helm at the world’s leading space agency. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump chose tech billionaire Jared Isaacman to become NASA’s administrator. In May, Trump withdrew the nomination in the midst of a spat with SpaceX founder Elon Musk — but just this month, Isaacman’s nomination was revived.
In the interim, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was doing double duty as NASA’s acting administrator — and reportedly making his own pitch to lead NASA. Now the rivalry has apparently been patched over.
Isaacman, who basically created his own space program and has been on two privately funded flights to orbit, received largely positive reviews after his first Senate confirmation hearing in April. Dreier said it’s likely that the second hearing, which hasn’t yet been scheduled, will also give a thumbs-up to Isaacman’s renomination.
“I think a lot of people see that — given the range of potential options, and who is running some of the other scientific agencies in the government right now — having someone who doesn’t dislike the agency that they want to run is actually not bad,” he said.
But Isaacman will still have things to answer for. Just days before his renomination was announced, Politico obtained a leaked copy of a 62-page report in which Isaacman laid out his vision for reforming NASA. (It’s thought that the document, known as Project Athena, was leaked by Duffy in hopes of boosting his own chances of getting the job.)
The Project Athena report suggests shifting some responsibility for space science missions from NASA centers to commercial ventures. It calls for taking NASA out of the “taxpayer-funded climate science business” and leaving it up for academia to study such issues. And it raises questions about long-term funding for NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System and for a Gateway outpost in lunar orbit.
All those moves are consistent with the Trump administration’s budget priorities, but they may not sit well with members of Congress whose states benefit from spending on SLS, Gateway and other elements of NASA’s current Artemis moon program.
The report also calls for NASA to investigate the “relevance and ongoing necessity” of each of more than a dozen agency centers across the country — including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages many of NASA’s robotic space exploration missions.
“What is ‘built’ at JPL?” Isaacman asked in the report.
After the report was leaked, Isaacman responded to the criticism he was getting in a lengthy posting to the X social-media platform. He said that the leaked draft was written before his initial nomination was withdrawn in May, and that “parts of it are now dated.” He also insisted that his plan “never favored any one vendor, never recommended closing centers, or directed the cancellation of programs before objectives were achieved.”
Isaacman said the report didn’t specifically call for the SLS rocket program to be shut down, but only suggested exploring “the possibility of pivoting hardware and resources to a nuclear electric propulsion program after the objectives of the president’s budget are complete.”
“It was written as a starting place to give NASA, international partners, and the commercial sector the best chance for long-term success,” Isaacman wrote. “The more I see the imperfections of politics and the lengths people will go, the more I want to serve and be part of the solution … because I love NASA and I love my country.”
Dreier said he supported some of the ideas laid out in Project Athena.
“There are parts of it that I liked … setting these expectations for the performance that we need to have in order to do big things,” he said. “I really think nuclear electric power is incredibly important, probably the most important legacy if he’s able to move that through.”
Dreier said the fact that Isaacman isn’t a partisan ideologue should help him navigate the narrow straits of Senate confirmation.
“He does want to make NASA better, and so I’m personally optimistic that he will take some of this feedback and learn from this,” Dreier said. “But he’ll have to probably make a lot of promises not to do things in that document in order to get confirmed.”
Assuming Isaacman does get confirmed, he’ll have to navigate an obstacle course in space policy that’s as tricky as the asteroid field Han Solo faced in “The Empire Strikes Back.” Here are a few of the questions that the next NASA administrator will have to resolve:
How deeply will science be slashed? Trump’s budget request calls for reducing NASA’s overall funding by 24% in 2026, and cutting science spending by 47%. If the budget ends up being slashed that much, dozens of space science projects — including NASA’s Mars sample return campaign, the Juno mission at Jupiter and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — would have to be abandoned. Congress isn’t likely to support cuts that deep, so it would probably be up to Isaacman to mediate between Capitol Hill and the White House. How soon the moon? NASA’s current timeline calls for the Artemis 3’s astronauts to set foot on the moon in 2027, but last month Duffy hinted that the schedule was slipping to 2028. He also said NASA might reconsider its plan to have SpaceX’s Starship put the first crew on the lunar surface. “They push their timelines out, and we’re in a race against China,” Duffy said. “The president and I want to get to the moon in this president’s term, so I’m going to open up the contracts.” In response, SpaceX said it would create a “simplified” version of Starship for Artemis 3. Looking ahead, Isaacman would play a key role in deciding whether to stick with SpaceX or shift to Blue Origin. Focus on the moon, or Mars? The Trump administration wants NASA’s Artemis program to put astronauts back on the moon before a Chinese crew gets there, but Trump is most interested in planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars. SpaceX has talked about sending a robotically controlled Starship to the Red Planet in 2026 or 2028, and although that timeline looks unrealistic right now, Isaacman just might find himself under pressure to make it so. The Project Athena report includes references to a “Project Olympus” that would test technologies for landing humans on Mars. What about the SpaceX connection? Isaacman worked closely with SpaceX on his two orbital missions and is said to have invested tens of millions of dollars in the company. His first nomination ran aground in part because of concerns that his relationship with SpaceX and Elon Musk might pose a conflict of interest. During last year’s Senate confirmation hearing, Isaacman took pains to reassure lawmakers about his ties to SpaceX. “NASA is the customer,” he said at the time. “They work for us, not the other way around.” Isaacman is sure to be asked about the relationship again during the deliberations to come.Dreier said he’s worried about SpaceX’s dominant role in America’s space effort, including the plan to send American astronauts to the moon. “If you frame this as a national space race and as a national goal, we have therefore put our nation’s reputation and goals in the hands of literally one company to deliver on that space race,” he said.
He’s also worried that NASA will tighten its focus on “just one or two celestial bodies” while cutting back on space science in general.
“There’s way more opportunities for engineers, there’s way fewer opportunities for scientists,” Dreier said. “People talk about, ‘Why do we have NASA when we have SpaceX?’ Show me how many interplanetary spacecraft SpaceX has built. How many scientific instruments have they designed and sent to Venus, or what have you? They could if they wanted to, but they don’t, because they’re not interested in that. … Where the scientists go, I honestly do not know.”
Alan Boyle was a moderator for this week’s ScienceWriters2025 session on space policy. He’s also a volunteer member of the board at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, which was one of the organizers of the conference.