Moon vs. Mars: Trump's NASA pick says both can be done at the same time

By David Shepardson and Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump's nominee to lead NASA, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, faced questions from senators on Wednesday about his ties to Elon Musk and how he would 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, is a close partner of Elon Musk's SpaceX who has flown to space twice as a private astronaut on the company's spacecraft.

Isaacman would not answer a question about whether Musk was in the room when Trump offered him the job of NASA administrator.

The billionaire is in Washington for a confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation 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.

Senator Ted Cruz, whose state of Texas includes NASA's Houston-based Johnson Space Center, pressed the nominee on his moon program views, noting intense competition over the moon with China, which aims to send its own astronauts there by 2030.

"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,'" 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.

When asked if he supports NASA's Space Launch System rocket, a multibillion dollar pillar of the moon program, Isaacman did not offer explicit support, but said the rocket is part of the current plan and that he wants to see the Artemis 2 crew get to the moon. Isaacman has previously criticized SLS as "outrageously expensive."

"I do believe it's the best and fastest way to get there," he later said of SLS and Orion, the multibillion dollar Lockheed Martin-built crew capsule that sits atop SLS.

"I don't think it's the long term way to get to and from the moon and to Mars with great frequency, but this is the plan we have now and we've got to get this crew around the moon and the follow on crew to land on the moon," he added.

Asked if he has had any contact with Musk on how he would run NASA, Isaacman said "not at all," and that his loyalty is to NASA, not contractors such as SpaceX - "they're the contractors, NASA is the customer. They work for us, not the other way around."

CONTRACTS WITH SPACEX

SpaceX has roughly $15 billion worth of NASA contracts, offering the agency its only U.S. ride for astronauts to space and a moon lander that will land crews on the moon later this decade.

Isaacman also told senators he does not see why the International Space Station, the 25-year-old science lab in space, should be deorbited before the current plan of 2030 - when NASA hopes to replace it with private space stations.

Musk has called for the station to be deorbited in 2027 to focus on Mars, a surprise position that angered Cruz, according to three people familiar with his thinking. SpaceX has a contract to deorbit the ISS in 2030.

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.

As a Musk ally and astronaut on novel SpaceX missions, Isaacman would reinforce NASA's strategy of depending on private companies for accessing space as a commercial service - a model that threatens space programs held by established contractors like Boeing and Northrop Grumman, the two main builders of SLS.

Isaacman's background has won him the endorsement from a key industry group representing more than 85 space companies as well as 28 former astronauts.

While NASA's last two leaders were seasoned politicians who proved effective in navigating the agency's funders in Congress, Isaacman has no political experience, though during the hearing he cast his unusual background as an advantage.

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington and Joey Roulette in Colorado Springs; editing by Chris Sanders and Nick Zieminski)