President Donald Trump's nominee to lead NASA, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, faced questions from senators on Wednesday about on how to balance Trump's focus on reaching Mars with the U.S. space agency's flagship moon program.
Isaacman, CEO of payment processing company Shift4 Payments (FOUR.N), is a close partner of Elon Musk's SpaceX who has flown to space twice as a private astronaut on the company's spacecraft.
The billionaire is in Washington for a confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation committee in which conflicting views on the moon and Mars as a destination for U.S. astronauts were front and center.
If confirmed, Isaacman, 42, would oversee 18,000 employees and a budget of roughly $25 billion focused heavily on returning astronauts to the moon's surface, as part of a program called Artemis. Trump started the program during his first term.
"I am hard pressed to think of a more catastrophic mistake we could make in space than saying to Communist China, 'the moon is yours. America will not lead,'" Senator Ted Cruz said in his opening statement.
But the president and Musk, who spent $250 million in support of Trump's presidential campaign and pushed for Isaacman's nomination, have become fixated on Mars as a national priority, raising questions about NASA's moon program for which billions of dollars have been committed.
"I absolutely want to see us return to the Moon... we don't have to make a binary decision of Moon versus Mars," Isaacman said, adding that NASA can do simultaneous Moon and Mars missions.
The four astronauts assigned to NASA's Artemis 2 mission - which involves a fly by of the moon in 2026 before a subsequent moon landing mission - had front row seats in the hearing.
