NASA administrator has defended and thanked the billionaires who have poured their personal fortunes into the space race. Jared Isaacman, who was confirmed as NASA administrator late last year, slammed those who argue that wealthy individuals like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson should be directing their resources toward problems on Earth rather than rockets pointed at the sky.“I’m grateful for folks like Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and Sir Richard Branson that have put their resources on the line for a capability for the good of all humankind right now,” Isaacman told Politico even as four astronauts made history aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission, travelling farther from Earth than any humans before them.When the interviewer raised the views of UN Secretary General António Guterres who in 2021 criticised billionaires for “joyriding to space while millions go hungry on Earth”, Isaacman said, “I think they’re just outright wrong, and ill-informed and going for headlines. It’s such a bad take.”.
‘Progress cannot be paused’
Isaacman’s argues that waiting to solve every problem on Earth before pushing forward with space exploration is a false choice. He also drew a parallel with the rollout of mobile phone networks in the 1980s, a technology that also faced sceptics at the time. Space exploration, he argued, carries a long-term transformational potential that is impossible to fully appreciate from the present moment.“If we concentrate all of our resources on the problems and hardships of the day, there is no progress. You don’t hit pause on progress,” Isaacman said, adding, “We should be grateful for their [billionaires’] contributions, and do the other things to make life better here on Earth,” he said.Isaacman is a member of the billionaire space club he is defending. In 2021, he led Inspiration4, the first all-civilian orbital mission, aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule, flying higher than the suborbital flights that Bezos and Branson completed that same year. In 2024, he went further still, becoming the first civilian ever to conduct a spacewalk during SpaceX’s five-day Polaris mission, venturing outside the spacecraft approximately 400 miles above Earth for around ten minutes to test SpaceX’s EVA spacesuit.Alongside his space ventures, Isaacman runs Draken International, which supplies tactical fighter aircraft to the US military and its allies — making him one of the more unconventional figures ever to lead NASA.
