Billionaire astronaut-entrepreneur Jared Isaacman walked back into the US Senate this week with a simple promise: the United States will return to the Moon before China – and it will get there on nuclear power.
In written testimony for his second confirmation hearing as NASA administrator, Isaacman pledged to “expand and accelerate investments into nuclear propulsion and surface power” and turn the Moon into a launch pad for missions to Mars and beyond. He described China as “our great rival” and warned that losing the lunar race could shift the balance of power back on Earth.
It is an audacious vision. It is also being pitched into an agency facing a historic 24% budget cut, thousands of staff buyouts, and the cancellation of the very nuclear propulsion programmes Isaacman wants to revive.
The question now is not whether nuclear technology could transform deep-space exploration. It is whether a commercially minded NASA chief, operating under a White House determined to shrink the agency, can realistically make that transformation happen.
Isaacman is not a typical candidate to run a US federal agency.
The 42-year-old dropped out of high school, founded payment processor Shift4 in his teens, and turned it into a fintech that now handles more than $250 billion in annual transaction volume. He later co-founded Draken International, assembling one of the world’s largest private fleets of fighter jets for military training contracts.
He is also one of the most experienced non-professional astronauts alive. In 2021, he bankrolled and commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian orbital mission on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. In 2024 he led Polaris Dawn, flying farther from Earth than any crew since Apollo and becoming the first private citizen to conduct a spacewalk.
That résumé – part fintech founder, part fighter-jet pilot, part space tourist – is exactly what appeals to President Donald Trump, who first nominated Isaacman to run NASA in December 2024.
But politics has already intervened once. The White House withdrew his nomination in May 2025 amid a public feud between Trump and Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX is both Isaacman’s launch provider and NASA’s most important commercial partner. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, was installed as acting administrator in July.
Trump renominated Isaacman in early November. At his latest hearing on 3 December, senators pressed him hard on conflicts of interest. SpaceX holds about $15 billion in NASA contracts; Isaacman has reportedly spent more than $100 million on private flights with the company and has championed policies that could further benefit it.
Isaacman tried to draw a line: he promised to step back from his corporate roles, described himself as “not a close friend” of Musk and argued that he flew with SpaceX only because no one else could do the job.
What sets him apart from past NASA chiefs, however, is not the corporate entanglements. It is his insistence that NASA should stop building rockets and instead throw its weight behind nuclear technologies that private industry will not touch.
Isaacman’s core thesis is blunt: the agency should focus on “near-impossible” technologies and leave mature businesses – launch vehicles, crew taxis, even some space stations – to the private sector.
In nuclear propulsion, that means two main families of systems:
NASA estimates that nuclear propulsion could cut the one-way travel time to Mars – typically six to nine months with chemical propulsion – by 25% or more, reducing both radiation exposure and the time life-support systems must operate flawlessly.
Isaacman wants to go further. In interviews and in a recent newspaper profile, he sketched an ambition to use advanced nuclear engines to halve Mars transit times, potentially enabling crewed missions that fit within a roughly two-year round-trip window.
On the lunar surface, he backs an aggressive drive to deploy fission reactors capable of supplying tens to hundreds of kilowatts of continuous power – enough to run habitats, mining equipment and communications during the Moon’s 14-day-long nights. This builds on NASA’s existing Fission Surface Power programme, which has funded industry teams to design 40 kW reactors intended to operate for at least a decade.
Under acting chief Sean Duffy, that programme has already been stretched. In internal directives and public statements this summer, Duffy urged NASA to target a 100 kW reactor on the lunar surface by 2030 and to solicit private-sector proposals within five years – roughly doubling both the power output and the urgency compared with earlier plans.
Isaacman’s testimony suggests he would not only inherit this nuclear push but reframe it as the technological centrepiece of American space strategy, alongside a revived nuclear propulsion programme.
The difficulty is that, on paper, that programme no longer exists.
Until recently, NASA and the Pentagon were already working together on exactly the kind of technology Isaacman now champions. The DRACO project – Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations – aimed to flight-test a nuclear thermal propulsion system using a Lockheed Martin spacecraft and a reactor developed with BWX Technologies.
By mid-2025, that effort was abruptly terminated. DARPA officials cited falling launch costs and unfavourable cost-benefit analysis: they concluded that nuclear thermal propulsion did not offer enough advantage over reusable chemical systems to justify the infrastructure, safety testing and regulatory friction.
The White House’s fiscal 2026 budget request went further, explicitly zeroing out funding for both nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion projects within NASA’s technology directorate.
The signal from the executive branch was clear: advanced nuclear propulsion was a luxury in an age of cheap, reusable rockets – a programme to be sacrificed in order to shrink NASA’s top-line and protect a narrower set of priorities.
Congress has pushed back. The Senate Appropriations Committee has proposed restoring at least $110 million for nuclear propulsion, including funding for a new “centre of excellence”, although appropriators have not yet agreed a final compromise with the administration.
If Isaacman is confirmed, he will inherit this limbo: a national strategy for space nuclear power and propulsion dating back to 2020’s Space Policy Directive-6, a cancelled flagship demo, a presidential budget that tries to end the line of work, and a Congress that appears reluctant to let it die.
His confirmation would therefore be more than a personnel change. It would amount to a test of whether the United States is serious about re-entering the nuclear propulsion game after walking away twice – first with the cancellation of Project Prometheus in 2005, and now with DRACO.
The geopolitical backdrop to Isaacman’s pitch is straightforward: China is no longer a distant competitor in deep space. It has a timetable.
Beijing has publicly reaffirmed its goal of landing Chinese astronauts on the Moon by 2030, backed by a new super-heavy launcher (Long March-10), a crew vehicle (Mengzhou) and a dedicated lander (Lanyue). In August, it carried out the first public test of the Lanyue lander at a simulated lunar site in Hebei province, demonstrating key ascent and descent systems.
Beyond planting a flag, China and Russia are planning an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) at the Moon’s south pole. Official statements describe a “basic model” of the base by 2035, built through at least five heavy launches, and a more extensive network by mid-century.
Crucially, Chinese officials have said that ILRS will rely on nuclear power, with a reactor on the lunar surface by around 2035 to complement solar arrays.
From Washington’s perspective, this looks like the outline of a long-term cislunar strategy: first a crewed landing, then a nuclear-powered polar base, paired with a growing presence in lunar orbit and at Mars.
NASA’s own ambitions, articulated through the Artemis programme, are not modest. The agency still officially aims for a crewed lunar landing later this decade, followed by a sustained presence at the south pole and, ultimately, human missions to Mars. But the resource picture is starkly different.
NASA’s top-line budget has been held at $25.4 billion in both 2024 and 2025 – roughly 0.37% of total US federal spending – after two years of effectively flat appropriations. The Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 request would cut that by 24%, to $18.8 billion, the lowest level in real terms since 1961. It proposes a 47% reduction in the Science Mission Directorate, including deep cuts to Earth science, astrophysics and planetary research.
By contrast, the global space economy reached $613 billion in 2024, with commercial activity accounting for 78% and government budgets – including defence – the remaining 22%. The United States spent around $77 billion on civil and national-security space programmes that year, making NASA only one piece of a much larger space-industrial puzzle.
Isaacman’s nuclear moon-race agenda is, in effect, an attempt to leverage that broader ecosystem: use NASA’s shrinking budget to push frontier technologies, then rely on a mix of commercial and allied partners to build the infrastructure.
But that brings its own tensions.
One of the most striking numbers aired around Isaacman’s nomination is not about rockets or reactors. It is about people.
Nearly 4,000 NASA civil servants – around one-fifth of the workforce – have already taken voluntary buyouts in 2025, reducing headcount from roughly 18,000 to about 14,000. Budget documents frame this as “streamlining” and “efficiency”; critics call it hollowing-out.
At the same time, NASA’s acting leadership has begun to re-open major contracts. Duffy floated the idea of recompeting the lunar lander deal – currently anchored on SpaceX’s Starship – and of accelerating the handover of low-Earth-orbit operations to commercial space stations.
Into this mix comes Isaacman’s own 62-page “Project Athena” memo, disclosed in part during his hearings. According to senators who have read it, the document calls for:
The memo reportedly lists specific companies next to potential roles – including a “Mars Discovery Base” contract next to SpaceX – raising concerns about whether a NASA under Isaacman would tilt procurement towards his existing partners.
In public, Isaacman has tried to reassure both sides: he insists Artemis will remain the top near-term priority; he has defended NASA’s right to recompete contracts; and he has promised to follow the law on conflicts of interest.
But the structural reality is hard to ignore. A leaner NASA, a larger role for commercial providers and a policy emphasis on “near-impossible” nuclear technologies all point towards an agency that looks less like Apollo-era NASA and more like an integrator at the top of a complex supply chain.
That raises a second question: how comfortable should the world be with that supply chain running nuclear reactors on the Moon?
Technically, the case for lunar fission power is straightforward. Sunlight at the poles is intermittent; during the long lunar night, solar arrays produce nothing, and batteries or fuel cells quickly become heavy and expensive. A compact reactor delivering 40–100 kW of steady output could keep habitats warm, drive electrolysers to make oxygen and hydrogen from ice and power rovers and drills for months on end.
NASA and the US Department of Energy have already funded three industry teams to design such systems. Their phase-one concepts suggest that a 40 kW reactor could power roughly 30 homes’ worth of loads for 10 years, while fitting inside a lander that current rockets can deliver.
Duffy’s 100 kW target by 2030 would more than double that capacity, potentially support multiple habitats and provide enough margin to run high-energy industrial processes such as oxygen extraction from regolith.
China and Russia are not standing still. Their ILRS concept explicitly includes a nuclear power plant on the Moon’s surface by around 2035, part of a wider plan to build a polar base that may eventually be permanently crewed.
From a technology standpoint, then, Isaacman’s nuclear enthusiasm aligns with an emerging reality: whoever controls reliable power at the lunar south pole will have enormous leverage over how that region is used.
The legal framework is fuzzier. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the placement of nuclear weapons in space and outlaws national appropriation of celestial territory, but it is silent on peaceful nuclear reactors and propulsion.
The US-led Artemis Accords – a non-binding set of principles that many Western partners have signed – introduce the idea of “safety zones” around lunar installations to avoid harmful interference. In practice, those zones can look very much like keep-out areas, especially if they surround reactors, landing pads or mining sites.
Legal scholars warn that early movers could use safety zones to create de-facto exclusive access to the most valuable terrain, even if they never claim sovereignty outright. A recent assessment of nuclear power in space noted that neither the Outer Space Treaty nor the Liability Convention clearly addresses accidents involving reactors in cis-lunar space or on the lunar surface, leaving gaps on issues such as waste disposal and compensation.
There is also a safety record to consider. An OECD Nuclear Energy Agency review counted at least 14 serious anomalies involving space nuclear systems to date – roughly 16% of all such missions – from failed radioisotope power-source launches to satellite re-entries scattering radioactive debris.
In that context, a US decision to place a relatively large reactor at the lunar south pole, potentially ahead of Chinese and Russian deployments, would be a turning point. It would shape not just Artemis logistics, but the norms around nuclear technology in space for decades.
If Isaacman ends up running NASA, he will sit at the centre of that decision-making.
Even if the Senate confirms him and Congress softens the harshest cuts, Isaacman would still be inheriting the most constrained NASA in modern history.
On one side are the budget numbers: an agency shrinking from roughly $25 billion a year to something closer to $19 billion, with deep reductions in science and technology just as Artemis, commercial space-station replacement and Mars-related work all compete for funds.
On another is schedule pressure. Artemis II – a crewed lunar fly-by – has already slipped into 2026. The first crewed landing, Artemis III, depends on SpaceX’s Starship reaching operational maturity despite multiple test failures and regulatory scrutiny. China, meanwhile, continues to march towards a 2030 landing, having tested key elements of its architecture and advanced its own nuclear-lunar plans.
Layered on top is institutional disruption: thousands of NASA veterans leaving under buyout programmes, internal fights over the future of the Space Launch System and Gateway, and uneasy relationships with commercial partners that are themselves under financial and political pressure.
Within that environment, a nuclear-first strategy could play out in several ways:
Which of these outcomes emerges will depend less on the soaring rhetoric of confirmation hearings and more on the unglamorous grind of appropriations, procurement and risk-management.
It is tempting to frame Isaacman’s nomination as a simple personality story: the thrill-seeking billionaire who wants to turn NASA into a startup-style agency and beat China back to the Moon.
The deeper stakes are structural.
A NASA that succeeds in fielding nuclear propulsion and surface power under tight fiscal constraints would re-establish the agency as the place where genuinely frontier space technologies are proven – with commercial players, including SpaceX, building the more routine hardware around it. That would give Washington a powerful hand in setting international norms for how nuclear systems are used beyond Earth.
A NASA that fails, by contrast, risks becoming a mid-sized customer in a space economy increasingly shaped elsewhere – by private capital in low-Earth orbit and by state-led consortia on and around the Moon.
Isaacman has told senators that NASA should “work on the near-impossible” and leave the rest to industry. The irony is that, given the budget profile he is likely to inherit, simply keeping the agency intact while attempting that nuclear moon-and-Mars pivot may be the most near-impossible task of all.
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