New NASA administrator takes over after a year of scientific loss—and survival

23 12 2025 | 14:48Paul Voosen / SCIENCE

Following Senate confirmation, billionaire Jared Isaacman will lead a diminished workforce

After a tumultuous year that saw his nomination withdrawn and resubmitted, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire businessman, pilot, and two-time private astronaut, was confirmed today by the U.S. Senate as NASA administrator. Many NASA supporters hope his appointment could help stabilize an agency that at times this year threatened to fall into a tailspin.

Like nearly all NASA administrators before him, Isaacman’s focus will be on the agency’s human space-flight program. At his confirmation hearing this month, he told senators that any delay in returning to the Moon could cause the United States to fall behind China. “There is no question the overwhelming near-term priority is to return American astronauts to the Moon,” he said.

But more than one-quarter of NASA’s annual funding—some $7 billion—goes to science. And in its proposed budget for the current fiscal year that is underway, President Donald Trump’s administration targeted more than 40 science missions for cancellation, including the Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft and the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, two missions studying the flows of carbon dioxide (CO2) on Earth. Congress has not approved a final 2026 budget, but NASA’s chief of staff, Brian Hughes, a Florida political operative installed by the White House in May, told agency leaders multiple times to implement the president’s budget anyway, according to whistleblower accounts given to Democrats in the House of Representatives.

But now Hughes’s influence has diminished, and the threat to turn off operating science missions—even climate science missions—has receded, several sources told Science. That partially reflects how broadly useful the agency’s data are: For instance, CO2 tracking observatories are also good at monitoring a faint fluorescent light emitted by plants during photosynthesis. That light is an indicator of plant health worldwide, making the data an invaluable tool for farmers and national security—so much so that in 2022 China launched a satellite to track it as well.

Isaacman sketched out his preliminary ideas for NASA’s future in a document called Project Athena, which leaked online earlier this month. He proposed cutting the agency’s bureaucracy and pushing for a faster, commercial approach to space missions. The document also describes privatizing and consolidating work done at NASA centers, although at his hearing, Isaacman said he did not intend to close any of them. In the document, he described a “pivot” away from Space Launch System—the costly rocket designed to take astronauts to the Moon in the Artemis program—in favor of developing nuclear-electric propulsion systems. At his hearing, however, Isaacman expressed support for Artemis.

Project Athena also talks about leveraging data from existing commercial earth science satellites and taking “NASA out of the taxpayer-funded climate science business.” As many critics of such rhetoric have since pointed out, NASA already buys commercial data. And few observers think Isaacman is likely to ramp up a campaign against earth science missions, despite the plan’s pointed words. “We only inhabit one planet, and earth science is pretty vitally important,” he told senators at the confirmation hearing.

But many NASA-funded scientists and agency employees are still worried. At the behest of the White House, NASA this year rapidly moved to eliminate grants it deemed to reflect diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. It canceled its support for U.N. climate science work and the National Climate Assessment. It eliminated the New York City offices for its premier climate-modeling lab. And perhaps most challenging for the agency, it encouraged some 4000 employees to take buyouts or early retirements, cutting its workforce by 20%. Those losses, which cut into the agency’s deep bench of internal expertise, are dearly felt, says David Radzanowski, who served as NASA’s chief of staff under former President Barack Obama. “That bench is no longer there like it used to be.”

At the same time, scientific work at the agency continued, with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy serving as acting administrator. The Science Mission Directorate (SMD) is still led by Nicola Fox, a heliophysicist who took the job in 2023. This year, NASA launched two major Earth-observing satellites: Sentinel-6B, a radar altimeter that tracks sea level rise, and, with the Indian Space Research Organisation, the $1.5 billion NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, which sees through clouds to map fine changes in Earth’s surface. Both missions will be important for studies of climate change—though in the agency’s public comments on each, global warming went unmentioned.

The agency was also able to save the finished Viper lunar rover, fully built but lacking a launch vehicle, thanks to a bid from Blue Origin. It launched the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer, an infrared telescope, and the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe to study the solar wind. And it finished construction on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope during the shutdown, prepping it for a potential early launch date in 2026.

But Isaacman will face problems at its two leading science centers, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. This year, JPL laid off 540 staff, some 11% of its workforce, following similar layoffs the previous year. Goddard has been reorganizing its facilities at a breakneck pace, shuttering offices and moving staff with little notice. Their problems stem not only from White House targeting, but also the chronic cost overruns within NASA’s science division, says Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame. “I look at the underlying way SMD has been operating and I’m not surprised this has happened. You’re trying to bail out water with a bucket full of holes.”

Last decade, business boomed at JPL with the success of its two multibillion-dollar Mars rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance. JPL also built the $5 billion Europa Clipper, which launched last year. Each of the missions ended up costing far more than first estimated. JPL’s future rested on NASA going ahead with Mars Sample Return (MSR), a $7 billion mission to collect rock samples from our neighboring planet and rocket them back to Earth. For planetary scientists, it remains the top priority, but the mission faced skepticism from the White House, which in its 2026 budget proposed canceling it. The Senate spending bill for the current year was silent on MSR’s future, whereas the House of Representatives maintained funding for it. Those differences will have to be resolved in a final spending bill, which could be happen before a provisional “continuing resolution” budget expires at the end of January.

JPL’s projects aren’t the only ones plagued by cost overruns. The current standard bearer is Dragonfly, an audacious mission to fly a rotocopter to Titan, Saturn’s large moon, set to launch in 2028. Led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, its initial budget was less than $1 billion; now, partially because of delays imposed by NASA, costs have risen to $3.35 billion. Even without the broad science cuts envisioned by the administration, the overruns meant there was little money left to start work on new missions. Two already selected missions to Venus, one led by JPL and the other by Goddard, are on hold.

The list of major missions in active development at NASA, costing $500 million or more, has grown thin enough to rattle off in a short sentence: Dragonfly, Viper, Roman, the asteroid-hunting Near-Earth Object Surveyor, and Grace-C, a follow-on mission to measure gravitational shifts on and below Earth’s surface caused by changes in ice and water. Restarting the next generation of science is critical, says Jack Kiraly, director of government relations at the Planetary Society. “NASA has been slow to initiate new missions to address cutting-edge science questions and revitalize aging infrastructure.” As a consequence, he adds, many students who could be leaders in space research and exploration are questioning whether they have a future in the field.

doi: 10.1126/science.zahr0xl

Cover photo:  Jared Isaacman told senators at his confirmation hearing this month that if NASA falls behind China, “we may never catch up.”

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