A 62-page doc written by President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again pick to run NASA, billionaire Jared Isaacman, outlines a sweeping, formidable, and at instances controversial plan for the house company.
Isaacman, who was tapped to be NASA administrator after Trump was elected in 2024, solely to see his nomination retracted months later, was renominated for the prime job final Tuesday.
While Isaacman has publicly acknowledged the leaked doc, which is labeled May 2025 however was just lately leaked to a number of information retailers, he said in a social media publish that “parts of it are now dated.” He didn’t specify which parts had been out of date.
It nonetheless set off a flurry of hypothesis about how the house company would operate with Isaacman at the helm. A replica of the doc was obtained and authenticated by NCS.
In his assertion, which was posted the day of his renomination, Isaacman said that “Project Athena,” as the paper is titled, “was always intended to be a living document refined through data gathering post-confirmation.”
“I would think it is better to have a plan going into a responsibility as great as the leadership of NASA than no plan at all,” the assertion reads.
Among the proposed targets are revamping some NASA facilities to concentrate on nuclear electrical propulsion, establishing a brand new Mars exploration program, and embracing an “accelerate/fix/delete” philosophy to reshape the company.
If enacted, lots of the insurance policies laid out might considerably alter the day-to-day lives of NASA employees and rework the 67-year-old company.
“I think it is presenting a more dramatic set of changes than many in the space community were expecting,” stated Casey Dreier, the chief of house coverage at the nonprofit exploration advocacy group Planetary Society, of the doc.
Some lawmakers have additionally expressed concern about how Isaacman would possibly search to reform NASA campuses throughout the nation.
Isaacman nonetheless faces a affirmation vote in the Senate and would wish Congressional approval for a lot of of the goals mapped out in the doc.
As a tech CEO — who made his fortune by founding funds firm Shift4 at age 16 and has twice flown to orbit on self-funded SpaceX missions — Isaacman is an unorthodox pick for NASA’s prime position.
Space company directors are sometimes chosen from a pool of scientists, engineers, teachers and public servants.
But Isaacman has additionally garnered broad help inside the business house trade, the place he’s perceived as an brisk outsider prepared to usher NASA into a brand new period.
According to a supply aware of the matter, the unique Project Athena doc was greater than 100 pages. Isaacman made solely three exhausting copies of a truncated 62-page model and distributed them to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his chief of workers. The leak — in accordance to a current Ars Technica report and a supply who confirmed the account to NCS — regarded to have been a part of an effort by Duffy, who’s quickly working NASA, to spur controversy and probably thwart Isaacman’s renomination.
NCS beforehand reported that Duffy has stated privately that he would love to maintain the house chief title completely, in accordance to a supply aware of the matter.
A spokesperson for Duffy beforehand denied that he’s stated he needs to stay in the NASA administrator job, and Isaacman stated in his social media assertion, posted after the “Project Athena” doc was leaked, that he believes Duffy has “great instincts and is an excellent communicator.” (The spokesperson for Duffy didn’t supply remark for this story.)
“If there is any friction, I suspect it is more political operators causing the controversy,” Isaacman stated.
Isaacman was renominated for the NASA publish on November 4, someday after studies about the Athena doc started circulating in the information.
“I think (the people who leaked Project Athena) thought this would ruffle feathers amongst the delegations that care about human spaceflight,” stated one former NASA official, talking on the situation of anonymity to talk about a personal doc. “I will tell you — it hasn’t worked.”
NCS reached out to practically a dozen senators whose residence states have NASA facilities that could possibly be pegged for main modifications, in accordance to the Project Athena doc. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland — the residence of Goddard Space Flight Center — provided the most detailed responses.
Van Hollen stated in an announcement that he had met with Isaacman earlier this 12 months and he “looks forward to another hearing to discuss further with him why the next space race and the search for habitable planets runs through Maryland.”
“To protect our nation’s innovation leadership, he must be more than a rubber stamp for the Administration’s chainsaw approach to our space science initiatives,” Van Hollen stated.
Warner, whose state homes NASA’s Langley campus, urged Isaacman to “engage with Congress and reconsider any plan that threatens these world-class facilities and the communities that depend on them.”
“The reported proposals to downsize or privatize key missions at Langley and Wallops would be a serious mistake, jeopardizing critical scientific capabilities and the talented workforce whose expertise keeps the United States at the forefront of aerospace research,” Warner’s assertion reads.
No lawmaker reached by NCS indicated how they meant to vote on Isaacman’s affirmation.
A Mars shot and nuclear propulsion
One eye-popping proposal in Project Athena is to arrange a brand new Mars program, dubbed “Olympus.”
Much of that imaginative and prescient, the supply aware of the doc informed NCS, was meant to align NASA with SpaceX’s aim of sending an uncrewed Starship spacecraft to the Martian floor subsequent 12 months.
SpaceX’s plan, which CEO Elon Musk discussed publicly in May, “was going to be a more-or-less free mission that SpaceX was going to do anyway,” the supply stated. The considering was that NASA might step in to present help by way of the Olympus program at minimal value to taxpayers, in accordance to the supply.
The doc additionally contains quite a few mentions of organising an expansive program to pursue nuclear electrical propulsion — which includes powering spacecraft engines with electrical energy from small nuclear reactors. The know-how might someday present regular, long-lasting energy for quicker and extra versatile deep-space missions, together with Mars journey.
Isaacman has pushed publicly for increasing such analysis, writing in an August op-ed for RealClearScience that he coauthored with Newt Gingrich that the house company ought to concentrate on duties and analysis “no other agency, organization, or company is capable of accomplishing.”
Nuclear electrical propulsion is an instance of such a spotlight space, the op-ed argues.
“Our competitors are not waiting. China and Russia are investing heavily in nuclear space technologies. If America wants to lead, NASA must take on the hard problems again and do the near-impossible,” Isaacman and Gingrich wrote in the article.
Project Athena additionally suggests organising an indication mission to dock a nuclear electrical propulsion spacecraft with a crewed car in orbit, in accordance to the leaked paper.
Isaacman’s nuclear imaginative and prescient additionally proposes that NASA facilities engaged on initiatives like the Space Launch System rocket — together with the Marshall and Michoud amenities in Alabama and Louisiana — shift their focus to nuclear electrical propulsion improvement when the SLS program concludes.
When contacted for remark, a spokesperson for Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama stated Tuberville had not met with Isaacman but however he “will, of course, ask about Marshall.”
The supply aware of the doc famous that it was crafted round the similar time the Trump White House drafted the President’s Budget Request, or PBR, which referred to as for canceling NASA’s SLS rocket and another main initiatives that might have left a number of NASA facilities with no cornerstone program.
The supply stated that Isaacman started compiling the Project Athena doc in late 2024 and up to date it as he had conversations with policymakers. The supply additionally stated that Isaacman didn’t assist draft the PBR.
With this summer season’s “Big Beautiful Bill” expressly extending the SLS program by way of no less than the subsequent 4 missions, it seems Isaacman could delay implementing a daring new concentrate on nuclear electrical propulsion analysis.
Isaacman said November 4 on social media that he hopes to zero-in on these pursuits solely after a “foundation” of lunar exploration has been constructed.
When the Project Athena doc was drafted in early 2025, Trump had already signaled a renewed curiosity in Mars — even mentioning exploration of the planet in his inaugural address whereas staying silent on NASA’s ongoing efforts to return astronauts to the moon.
Isaacman echoed Trump’s Mars ambitions throughout a affirmation listening to in April, saying he meant to pursue exploration of the crimson planet in tandem with NASA’s moon program. However, questions about how he would fund such initiatives loomed.
In the months since, nevertheless, the moon has emerged as the clear policy priority amid a renewed house race with China, which is aiming to land its taikonauts on the lunar floor by 2030.
The current push to bolster NASA’s moon missions, together with a $10 billion inflow Congress gave the company’s human spaceflight efforts in July, “brings clarity to the topic,” Isaacman stated in his social media assertion.
But Isaacman is again in the working for the prime NASA job at a time when the company’s plans for a crewed moon touchdown, referred to as Artemis III, are in flux.
The Artemis III mission, which is slated to launch later this decade, at present hinges on SpaceX’s Starship ferrying NASA astronauts down to the lunar floor.
But some coverage consultants have grown more and more concerned that Starship — the strongest rocket ever constructed — is simply too massive, novel and sophisticated to meet NASA’s pressing timeline.
Duffy just lately signaled a willingness to boot SpaceX off the challenge, saying he would ask the firm and its chief competitor, Blue Origin, to present how they might expedite improvement of their respective lunar landers.
Those remarks prompted an acerbic response from Musk, a good friend of Isaacman’s, who referred to the interim NASA chief as “Sean Dummy.”
Isaacman has not publicly stated whether or not he would help sidelining SpaceX from the Artemis III mission. But a supply aware of the matter stated that Isaacman has expressed an intention to companion with whichever firm most shortly produces an astronaut-worthy lunar lander.
The Project Athena “plan never favored any one vendor, never recommended closing centers, or directed the cancellation of programs before objectives were achieved,” Isaacman stated in his social media assertion.
“The plan valued human exploration as much as scientific discovery,” Isaacman stated. “It was written as a starting place to give NASA, international partners, and the commercial sector the best chance for long-term success.”
The supply aware of the Project Athena doc stated a few of the extra controversial elements of the plan warrant extra clarification.
One line merchandise in the doc, for instance, states that Isaacman intends to take “NASA out of the taxpayer funded climate science business and leave it for academia to determine” — a proposal that critics say stated might impede the nation’s potential to collect essential environmental information.
The doc additionally maps out comparable insurance policies that could possibly be utilized throughout lots of NASA’s initiatives, similar to suggestions to embrace “science-as-service” for future initiatives.
Such measures, calling for researchers to concentrate on buying information from the non-public sector, might mark a big change for the company.
Similar coverage philosophies have been tried at NASA, notably in the Nineties throughout a “better, faster, cheaper reformulation,” Dreier famous. But enthusiasm waned for that strategy when a pair of Mars missions had been misplaced.
And the business house trade might not be able to take up all the duties Isaacman’s Athena doc suggests it might probably, he stated.
“It places a lot of faith on the commercial marketplace to deliver in ways that it hasn’t had the chance to fully be tested on,” Dreier stated.
Isaacman’s social media assertion additionally acknowledges his “science-as-a-service” idea “got people fired up” however clarified that he meant to concentrate on buying information from Earth statement satellites: “Why build bespoke satellites at greater cost and delay when you could pay for the data as needed from existing providers and repurpose the funds for more planetary science missions (as an example)?”
Isaacman has additionally publicly defended science packages similar to the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was slated for funds cuts in the PBR. And he acknowledged he’d be prepared to spend his personal cash to get the Nancy Grace Roman house telescope off the floor. “I was prepared to personally cover the cost to launch Roman — if that’s what it took to get to the science,” Isaacman stated in a June social media post. (That similar promise seems in the Project Athena doc.)
“Anything suggesting that I am anti-science or want to outsource that responsibility is simply untrue,” Isaacman’s November 4 assertion reads.
Among the different proposals in the Project Athena doc are plans to hasten NASA’s reorganization. The company has already misplaced roughly 4,000 of its 18,000 workers as a part of the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program.
Isaacman stated in his social media assertion final week that he needs to transfer away from rolling out piecemeal change and as a substitute implement “a single, data-driven reorganization aimed at reducing layers of bureaucracy between leadership and the engineers, researchers, and technicians.”
Extensive modifications, nevertheless, might additional disgruntle a workforce that has been reeling from looming funds cuts and what workers have described as political distractions and discordant communication from management.
Isaacman’s doc additionally particulars myriad different plans to change how the company operates — similar to conducting a sweeping overview of NASA’s boards and committees to droop any that “delay decision making,” and reimagine the house company’s strategy to danger evaluation.
“We will ensure safety is at the forefront of our decisions but achieving the mission of NASA means accepting that some risks are worth taking,” the doc reads.
Former NASA astronaut and SpaceX advisor Garrett Reisman, who has lengthy stated he believes NASA could have change into too risk-averse in the wake of the 2003 Columbia catastrophe, informed NCS in a November 8 telephone interview he was inspired to see that Isaacman hopes to reevaluate that facet of the company.
It could be unwise, he added, to begin eliminating security organizations — however they could possibly be revamped to create a “healthy tension” between danger assessors and engineers in search of to push boundaries.
However, he cautioned that “it’s really hard to know in the moment if you’re going too far or not,” Reisman stated. “It’s a very difficult thing to do, so I wish him good luck.”
Isaacman is usually properly regarded throughout the house trade, the place he has largely been seen as a passionate chief who can enact visionary change.
In an emailed assertion, Dreier, the Planetary Society govt, acknowledged that the Project Athena doc “was prepared in a different era.” NASA has since obtained billions of {dollars} for initiatives together with lunar exploration, Dreier famous, and science advocates have demonstrated an outpouring of opposition to Trump’s proposed cuts to analysis.
Isaacman’s renomination to the NASA chief job now presents “a good opportunity to engage on some of these proposals, particularly as they relate to science,” Dreier added.
In his social media publish, Isaacman stated that, if the Project Athena doc turns into public, “I will stand behind it,” including that he believes “there are many elements of the plan that the space community and NASA would find exciting.”
But he didn’t want to debate the plan “line-by-line while NASA and the rest of the government are going through a shutdown,” in accordance to the November 4 publish.
More broadly, Isaacman has urged he intends to enter the NASA job with an open thoughts and alter course based mostly on suggestions.
In a social media publish in June, for instance, Isaacman wrote that he “didn’t love” being approached by “people who thought they were uniquely NASA’s savior.” He added: “I have little interest in doing the same.”
Sign up for NCS’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with information on fascinating discoveries, scientific developments and extra.