NASA nominee should resist Musk's pull toward Mars
During a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Jared Isaacman, the nominee for NASA administrator, was — in a twist on the Will Smith '90s tune — gettin' squishy wit it.
Isaacman danced uncomfortably around pointed questions about whether he would stick to the space agency's plan to first establish a permanent presence on the moon with the continuing Artemis program or prioritize the big challenge of sending a human to Mars, as his close associate Elon Musk would prefer.
Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which oversees NASA — who is also a resident of Houston, where NASA has large operations — was able to pry from Isaacman that he would pursue both goals simultaneously. This was after the nominee raised some alarm in his opening remarks by saying that sending U.S. astronauts to Mars was a priority "and along the way, we will inevitably have the capabilities to return to the moon.' Isaacman needs to keep his eye on the moon and resist Musk's gravitational pull toward the red planet.
Under Cruz's cross-examination, Isaacman said he would follow the law to carry out NASA's moon mission, which calls for a sustained presence in lunar space or on the lunar surface but indicated that a permanent base would depend on what the moon has to offer.
"We have to get back to the moon first as quickly as we possibly can. Figure out, again, the scientific, economic, national security value to being there, which I am very hopeful that we are going to find in order to support the ongoing presence on the lunar surface,' Isaacman said under pressure from Cruz's questions.
Lawmakers are wary that Isaacman will be swayed by U.S. President Donald Trump and Musk to steer more of NASA's $25 billion budget to the Mars mission instead of the moon, which has water, minerals and potentially useful gases such as Helium 3. The commercial and even tourism potential of the moon, though, pales in comparison to its national security value.
It would be foolish to cede the moon to China, which is determined to catch and surpass the U.S. on space capabilities. Space is the ultimate high ground, as defense experts like to point out. Weapons will inevitably be positioned in space (if they're not there already). The number of military and commercial satellites is exploding as modern society becomes more and more dependent on them for communication and guidance.
The most logical reason to establish first a base on the moon is that it's much closer to Earth — a trip there takes three days compared with about six months to get to Mars. That makes it much easier to shuttle people and supplies and safer to work out the kinks of an extraterrestrial land base.
The race to build a moon base is under way and the U.S., along with its allies, need to get there first to establish the rules of this new frontier.
This isn't the view of Musk, who has called the moon a distraction to the big prize of landing humans on Mars. Musk's dream is to establish a colony on the red planet and make mankind a multiplanetary species. After watching Musk build SpaceX from an improbable startup to an industry leading space pioneer, it wouldn't be smart to bet against him, but NASA can't let Musk's obsession distract it from its more important goal.
Isaacman shares Musk's entrepreneurial spirit and boundless energy. He founded a payment-processing company when he was 16 in the basement of his parent's house and leveraged his passion for flying to co-found a company that helps train military pilots. He has been in Musk's orbit for a while: He was commander of the first all-commercial flight into space aboard a SpaceX capsule in 2021. In September, he and fellow crewmates flew the farthest into space since the moon landings in the 1970s and performed a spacewalk to test SpaceX's new spacesuits.
Isaacman's verbal rope-a-dope before committee members on Wednesday included sidestepping several questions from Sen. Ed Markey about whether Musk was in the room at Mar-a-Lago when Trump offered Isaacman the top NASA job. The question may seem trivial, but it's a gauge of Musk's influence over Trump on space strategy.
There's only so much NASA budget to work with. It's important to keep the priorities straight: Moon first, then on to Mars and beyond.
Thomas Black is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist writing about the industrial and transportation sectors.
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