One of his first steps would have been to attempt to accelerate the timeline for the Artemis II mission, which is scheduled to fly four astronauts around the Moon in April 2026. He planned to bring in "strike" teams of engineers to help move Artemis and other programs forward. Isaacman wanted to see the Artemis II vehicle on the pad later this summer, with the goal of launching in December of this year, echoing the historic launch of Apollo 8 in December 1968.
Isaacman also sought to reverse the space agency's decision to cut utilization of the International Space Station due to budget issues.
"Instead of the current thinking, three crew members every eight months to manage the budget, I wanted to go seven crew members every four months," he said. "I was even going to pay for one of the missions, if need be, to just get more people up there, more cracks at science, and try and figure out the orbital economy, or else life will be very hard on the commercial LEO destinations."
"I wanted to bring back the Payload Specialist program and open it up to the NASA workforce," he said. "Because things are pretty difficult right now, and I wanted to get people excited and reward the best."
Isaacman's signature issue was going to be a full-bore push into nuclear electric propulsion, which he views as essential for the sustainable exploration of the Solar System by humans. Nuclear electric propulsion converts heat from a fission reactor to electrical power, like a power plant on Earth, and then uses this energy to produce thrust by accelerating an ionized propellant, such as xenon. Nuclear propulsion requires significantly less fuel than chemical propulsion, and it opens up more launch windows to Mars and other destinations.
"We would have gone right to a 100-kilowatt test vehicle that we would send somewhere inspiring with some great cameras," he said. "Then we are going right to megawatt class, inside of four years, something you could dock a human-rated spaceship to, or drag a telescope to a Lagrange point and then return, big stuff like that. The goal was to get America underway in space on nuclear power."
"I'm sure a lot of supporters in the space community would love to hear me say that I’m done with politics, but I'm not sure that’s the case," he said. "I want to serve our country, give back, and make a difference. I don’t know what, but I will find something."
Many of these would have been difficult to fund given the current U.S. administration, but it still would have been nice to have someone who values ambitious goals. I suspect whoever is chosen as NASA admin at this point will not have the same ambitions.
Whoever pledges to take the most tax dollars from NASA, and give it corporate contractors, will likely be appointed. If someone who cares does, that just means they will have no ability to stop that from happening, and are just there to fill a seat.