President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be NASA’s next administrator, Jared Isaacman, said Wednesday that as the US establishes more of a human presence in space, it will eventually need Space Force guardians stationed in the domain to protect its economic interests .
“I think it’s absolutely inevitable,” Isaacman said at the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida. “If Americans are in low Earth orbit, there will need to be people looking out for them for all the reasons we described earlier.”
Isaacman, a technology billionaire who has traveled to space twice on commercial missions, said exploration and economic ambitions will drive more commercial and civilian activities in space in the coming years – from space mining to NASA discovery missions. While some of that work will be done by robotic probes or remote operators, some of it will also require human input, he said.
Isaacman is CEO of Shift4 Payments, a payment processing company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In 2012, he co-founded Draken International – a company that trains pilots for its own fleet of private military fighter jets. He links his interest in space to his own background as a fighter pilot.
In 2021, he self-funded a space mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, the first-ever space flight crewed exclusively by civilians. In September, he made his second trip to space as part of a SpaceX program called Polaris. During that mission, he and three crew members performed the first commercial spacewalk.
Isaacman isn’t the first to suggest the military will one day have troops in space. The former second-in-command at the US Space Command, retired Lt. Gen. John Shaw, said in 2020 that the Defense Department would one day send Guardsmen to run command centers or perform other missions in the domain.
Other military officials have suggested that it could take decades for Space Force personnel to be put into orbit.
Isaacman did not provide a timeline for his prediction, but suggested that a military presence in space could coincide with future NASA moon and Mars missions.
“This is the trajectory that humanity will follow,” Isaacman said. “America will lead the way and we will need guardians up there on the high ground watching out for us.”
