Billionaire Isaacman takes big step toward leading Nasa

A 42 year-old entrepreneur who was the first non-professional astronaut to walk in space is on his way to becoming the head of Nasa.

Jared Isaacman won approval from a key Senate committee and now only needs to clear a vote of the full chamber to lead an agency that has set its sights on returning to the moon.

While he is expected to win that vote, the billionaire with ties Elon Musk has encountered scepticism. Members of both parties asked at his confirmation hearing about possible conflicts of interest, his desire to send astronauts to Mars, and budget cuts.

President Donald Trump has said Mr Isaacman's leadership will pave the way "for groundbreaking achievements" in science and technology.

The committee voted 19 to 9 to send his nomination to the full chamber, with most of the votes against him coming from Democrats.

Mr Isaacman, along with Space X's Elon Musk and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, is among a new wave of billionaires who have been challenging the old order in space. They have accelerated the pace of innovation and are aiming to dramatically reduce the cost of human space travel.

He'll be expected to do the same at Nasa, whose space programmes are regarded by private sector operators as wasteful and often significantly over budget.

Mr Isaacman has said that the major aerospace contractors are "incentivised to be economically inefficient".

He has made it clear he would like to expand the human spaceflight programme at the agency.

In a confirmation hearing on 9 April, Mr Isaacman said he hoped to pursue the Artemis mission to the moon, as well as potential missions to Mars.

But lawmakers feared he would sacrifice the long-planned moon mission to focus on Mars. He sought to reassure them that the two were related and "we could be paralleling these efforts and doing the near-impossible".

"We will prioritise sending American astronauts to Mars and along the way we will inevitably have the capabilities to return to the moon," he said.

"We don't have to make a binary decision of moon versus Mars, or moon has to come first versus Mars," he later added.

During the confirmation process, it emerged that he had been arrested at the Canadian border in 2010 and returned to Nevada to face charges that he had passed bad checks to casinos.

In a questionnaire, Mr Isaacman said that the dispute with the Palms Casino in Las Vegas stemmed from a travel reimbursement that the resort promised but failed to deliver.

He added that the issue was resolved in 24 hours, with charges dismissed and court records sealed.

On the day of his nomination in December, Mr Isaacman posted a statement on X that gave an early glimpse into his vision: "This second space age has only just begun."

"There will inevitably be a thriving space economy – one that will create opportunities for countless people to live and work in space," he wrote. "At Nasa, we will… usher in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilisation."

Additional reporting by Lisa Lambert