Trump's NASA nominee backs US moon program in talks with lawmakers, sources say

By Joey Roulette

(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump's pick to lead NASA has assured lawmakers that returning astronauts to the moon would remain the agency's main strategy, quelling concerns that Trump's space agenda would focus instead on traveling to Mars, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Since taking office, Trump has fixated on sending missions to Mars with little to no mention of the moon in his public comments, stirring fear among space contractors and U.S. allies that the president and his future NASA administrator could upend years of work and investments toward a multi-mission lunar astronaut program.

But Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who Trump tapped to lead NASA in December, told U.S. Senate staff in meetings last week that returning humans to the moon before China sends its own astronauts there is a national imperative, the sources said on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.

Isaacman backed the moon effort in a meeting last Tuesday with Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican whose state is home to NASA's Houston-based Johnson Space Center, a major hub for the moon program, two of the sources said.

Trump in his first term sped up NASA's moon efforts and named the program Artemis, which has since planned multiple missions to the moon involving dozens of private companies and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. The moon, per the program, is a proving ground for eventual missions to Mars.

But the fate of that program has been called into question as Trump vowed in his inauguration speech to launch "American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars." And SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who spent $250 million in support of Trump's presidential campaign and pushed for Isaacman's nomination, has recently cast the moon as a distraction from his own goal to colonize Mars.

"Stopping at the Moon simply slows down getting to Mars," Musk wrote on X last week.

Isaacman, CEO of payment processing company Shift4 Payments, is a close partner of Musk's SpaceX. The nominee has flown to space twice on SpaceX capsules in fully private missions arranged by his Polaris program, spending hundreds of millions of dollars as one of the first human spaceflight customers for Musk's space company.

He is expected to face questions by lawmakers about his SpaceX ties and support for the moon program in a nomination hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee scheduled for Wednesday.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Editing by Jamie Freed)