Copyright Forbes
The White House’s resurrection of Jared Isaacman’s candidacy to head NASA could give the billionaire space pilot the chance to begin pushing forward his vision of seeing millions of spacefarers lift off in times ahead. Isaacman, who has commanded two trailblazing orbital missions by independent astronauts aboard SpaceX Dragon capsules, aims to “push the frontiers of human spaceflight and the extension of human civilization to other worlds,” says Professor Kip Hodges, one of the top space scholars in the United States. The starry-eyed space visionary has quietly endowed SpaceX’s campaign to build up its astronaut training program and perfect its experimental spacesuits, and has become a lodestar in the NewSpace sector: he would be the first head of NASA to hail from the realm of independent spaceflight. “Isaacman is a major proponent of sending humans to Mars” as an early step in expanding exploration forays, Hodges, the founding director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, told me in an interview. MORE FOR YOU Speeding through space at 28,000 kilometers per hour, Isaacman tested out SpaceX’s prototype EVA gear while piloting the Polaris Dawn mission and conducting a spacewalk hundreds of kilometers above the clouds. After that flight, Isaacman told me in an extensive interview that his experiments with SpaceX’s next-generation space tech, and bolstering its astronaut instruction regime, are aimed at speeding up the design and production of “millions of spacesuits for the Moon and Mars travelers of the future.” SpaceX aims to rocket a million interplanetary nomads to Mars by the year 2050, while Isaacman predicts short sojourns to cratered tourist hotspots on the Moon could one day capture the imagination of Earth-based adventurers who want to launch their own space odysseys. Skyrocketing increases in the ranks of spacefarers as the cost of reusable rockets nosedives, he predicts, could aid the entire Earth. The best way to protect human civilization into the far future, he says, is to expand outward, across the solar system, while developing the super-technologies capable of reengineering entire planets to resemble the Earth and its biosphere. Terraforming Mars by restoring its atmosphere and ancient waterways, melting its polar caps and creating an archipelago of New Edens shielded inside crystalline domes, he says, could be the first step in fostering new branches of civilization across the heavens. As Mars morphs into the new-millennium New World for generations of discoverers and utopians seeking to build an ideal off-world society, the dual planets could become interconnected sanctuaries for life and culture, for advances in spacecraft design and in astronomy, with each globe ready to aid its twin if some doomsday disaster were to strike. The Earth’s history of being pelted by “extinction events,” like the gargantuan asteroid that struck the planet and ended the reign of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs, signals that the best way to safeguard the future of humanity and its techno-civilization is by transplanting life across multiple worlds, Isaacman says. “I think he [Isaacman] would be one of the best people available to lead NASA,” Professor Hodges says. A one-time member of NASA’s Space Advisory Council who has helped train American astronauts, Hodges predicts Isaacman will temper his passion to speed NASA explorers to Mars by first testing out lander and expedition technologies with a series of touchdowns around the South Pole of the Moon. Isaacman “is wise enough to know that a ‘direct to Mars’ approach is more dangerous and could, quite likely, lose the support of the American public with one disastrous mission.” “That is why he is on the record as fully endorsing getting astronauts back to the Moon to help refine engineering designs and establish best practices for longer distance space travel to Mars and (I hope) beyond,” Professor Hodges says. Hodges forecasts Isaacman could also emerge as a champion of NASA’s vanguard interplanetary spacecraft now under threat of being terminated by the White House. The president’s proposed budget slashes funding for vast sections of NASA’s exploration of the solar system, and would halt operation of its world-leading New Horizons probe, which sent back the first sensational imagery of the dwarf planet Pluto, and is now flying toward the comet-rich rings of the Kuiper belt. The White House plan would also, inexplicably, end allocations for three of the Mars orbiters that make up the Mars Relay Network, which speeds communications between the NASA robots now mapping the Red Planet and mission controllers back on Earth. Over the course of our interview, Jared Isaacman said he still hopes to finance and head a leading-edge mission to rescue the Hubble Space Telescope, which is slowly falling back toward Earth, by piloting a SpaceX capsule to dock with the observatory and boost it into a higher, safer orbit. Isaacman has presented his masterplan to save the astronomical outpost to NASA’s leaders, but the agency still hasn’t approved the operation. This offer to prevent the Hubble from reentering and burning through the atmosphere reflects Isaacman’s passion for NASA science missions, Professor Hodges says, and his potential to save the exploratory spacecraft now threatened by the president’s scythes. After being confirmed by the Senate, Isaacman could quickly maneuver to implement congressional calls to safeguard the Pluto and Mars spacecraft, along with the Mars Sample Return mission, aimed at returning evidence gathered on the Martian surface of potential ancient life forms, that is likewise in danger of being axed by the president, Hodges says. “What sets him [Isaacman] apart is not just that he has vision but that his plan for the agency fuses human space exploration with space science,” Professor Hodges says. “Too often, people think of NASA as an organization expressly built for propelling humans into space, onto the Moon, and beyond to Mars.” “But, to date, much of what we have learned scientifically about our universe has been based on NASA spacecraft and landers that are operated remotely by humans but do not carry humans.” “Isaacman seems to value that contribution,” Hodges says, “and to want to continue it into the future.” His altruistic offer to prevent the fiery death of the Hubble Telescope, via a mission that would likely cost him more than $100 million, is a great example of Isaacman “valuing space science and not just human spaceflight.” Isaacman’s extraordinary life as a philanthrope extends from the heavens to the Earth. He dedicated his twin flights circumnavigating the planet to raising funds for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, whose globally acclaimed doctors aim to advance cures for catastrophic ailments that threaten to cut short the lives of children around the world. The premier research outpost provides its cutting-edge treatments gratis, and depends instead on benefactors for its funding. During his Inspiration4 mission, Isaacman and his wife personally donated $125 million to St. Jude, and persuaded fellow Good Samaritans worldwide to contribute another $100 million-plus. On another front, just days after Moscow’s missiles began targeting medical centers across Ukraine, including pediatric clinics, Isaacman piloted an aircraft packed with medicines and SpaceX Starlink satellite gear into nearby Poland, and then helped set up a rescue network to ferry hundreds of hospitalized kids out of shell-shocked Ukraine to sanctuary medical outposts across Europe and to the St. Jude campus in Memphis. Across the philanthropic world, Isaacman is regarded as a patron saint of the Children’s Research Hospital, where he has funded a new state-of-the-art research center. During our interview, Isaacman told me he has channeled donations into futuristic space technologies and astronautics that could help generations of spacefarers take flight, and into eradicating the mortal diseases that threaten children across the planet, in order to show the world that these twin goals can be pursued simultaneously and in concert. In that sense, he bears a strong resemblance to iconic President John F. Kennedy, who launched the fantastical quest to land an American on the Moon on an incredibly short timeline, even as he pumped funds into his utopian drive to protect and uplift children across America. Widely popular and admired across the political spectrum, Isaacman is expected to gain swift U.S. Senate confirmation of his appointment to head NASA. Professor Hodges, meanwhile, advises that as NASA’s new administrator, Isaacman should begin organizing, on day one, an expansive robotics mission to Mars that could be lofted when the Earth-Mars orbital transfer window opens in late 2028. Advanced robots equipped with high-resolution cameras and laser scanners can begin imaging top-tier candidate landing sites for a human mission to be launched two years later. This imagery can be speedily transformed into 3D maps that mission planners and future astronauts can immerse themselves in as they create a masterplan for the first human exploration across another planet. Professor Hodges says his Digital Discovery Initiative team at ASU, which specializes in combining photographs and laser-derived point clouds into photorealistic virtual reality simulations, could provide an ongoing stream of VR doubles of landing sites to prepare the first waves of aeronauts heading to Mars. After they touch down on the orange-red Martian dunes, he adds, these astronauts can send their robotic photographers on daily sorties to image new sites, and build three-dimensional replicas that can be bounced back to NASA’s Mars operations center to collectively sketch out upcoming expeditions. These first human Martians, and their teams of collaborators across NASA and university space centers, Professor Hodges predicts, could transform these streams of robotically collected imagery and laser scans into an ever-evolving digital twin of Mars Base Alpha. This expanding hyper-tech doppelgänger of the Mars outpost, he adds, could be used to train the generations of future explorers that Isaacman envisions descending on the Red Planet as it is transformed into a second foundation for humanity’s spacefaring civilization.
