Will This Jewish Spaceman Point NASA Toward Mars?

The science fiction book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson describes a manned voyage to the red planet. The ship includes an international crew of about a hundred colonists who before long are resurrecting old rivalries and waging interpersonal battles even while dodging billion-particle radiation storms. The large capsule rotates slowly to give its passengers a sense of gravity as it rushes forward at 40,000 kilometers an hour, putting them on Mars roughly 300 days after liftoff.  

More than 30 years after Red Mars was published, undeterred astronauts and ordinary civilians are taking their first steps toward a trip that looks a lot like the one imagined back then, replete with sophisticated equipment and long, expensive distances. Particularly interested is Jared Isaacman, 42, a Jewish billionaire businessman and amateur fighter jet pilot, who has already traveled into space on two occasions. And if President Trump and Elon Musk get their way, Isaacman will soon be confirmed as the next head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).   

On his Truth Social platform, Trump has praised Isaacman as “ideally suited” to run NASA, and Musk has hailed him as a person of “high ability and integrity.” And Isaacman says he shares their aim of establishing outposts on the Moon and sending people to Mars. “We’re absolutely going into the second great age of exploration,” Isaacman said in an interview with CNBC after completing the second of his trips in September 2024. 

Though reaching and settling Mars will be costly and, from an engineering standpoint, awesomely difficult, Isaacman told CNBC that he sees the birth of a “thriving space economy—one that will create opportunities for countless people to live and work in space,” further describing a “true space-faring civilization” that would exploit manufacturing, biotechnology, mining and pathways to new sources of energy.  “Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars, and in doing so, we will make life better here on Earth,” he said when accepting his nomination to lead NASA.  

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Isaacman has long been obsessed with flying and says his favorite movies growing up were Top Gun and The Right Stuff. As a 16-year-old, he dropped out of Ridge High School in north-central New Jersey and started Shift4, a payment processing business initially run out of his parents’ basement. He hated high school, he said, and was jealous of his three older siblings. The company quickly grew and today is worth about $6.5 billion and handles transactions for everything from the New York Yankees and the Alterra mountain resort to Hilton hotels and nonprofit organizations. In the fourth quarter of last year Shift4 earned a net income of $139.3 million.

Isaacman’s true passion, however, has been flying everything from corporate planes to fighter jets. He’s gone to aviation camps, built simulators and flown in air shows. In 2011, he started Draken International, which bought its first aircraft to provide training for military pilots in the United States, the United Kingdom and various other NATO countries. Today the company owns the world’s largest private fleet of military aircraft, managing hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts.  In 2019, he sold a major stake in the company to Blackstone, the behemoth Wall Street investment firm.  

Over the last 20 years, Isaacman has flown more than 7,000 hours in jets and ex-military aircraft—his favorite is the MiG-29, “a beast,” he has said—and performed in airshows. He holds the record for flying around the world in a fighter plane. But he still wanted to conquer one thing: space. 

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In 2021, he bought seats for himself and three others aboard a Space X vehicle called Crew Dragon Resilience on a mission dubbed Inspiration4. It was one of a series of missions that year that highlighted the nascent private spaceflight industry, which aims to open up Earth’s orbits to more people. Time magazine said he paid $200 million, though Isaacman has not disclosed the price. 

In September 2024, he again bought room on a Space X flight for himself and three others. It was a five-day mission, Polaris Dawn, and it orbited between 120 and 460 miles above Earth. One crew member, Space XS engineer Sarah Gills, played the Star Wars theme on a violin in the cargo bay. Anna Menon, a medical officer and seven-year veteran of NASA, read a book she had written for her children. Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and avid Ironman racer, also joined them.   

Isaacman donned a new type of space suit designed by Space X and popped outside the capsule to have a look around. If settlements are built on the Moon or Mars, they will require thousands of space suits able to manage the vacuum of space. 

“It’s very different from looking out the window,” he later said to CNBC, recalling the Polaris Dawn trip and the difficulty of moving around in the specially designed suit.  “It is not just heavy clothing but pressurized—it’s as rigid as a spaceship.” 

Inside the capsule, the four-person crew performed scientific tests, at times looking into “the darkness of space.” Comparing it to explorers who crossed oceans in the early days, Isaacman said they must have felt worried that they would “fall off the end of the world.” 

In a YouTube interview for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, Isaacman said that a lot of astronauts talk about “seeing Earth as [a] fragile place, with a thin atmosphere, a world without borders and without violence. But you know,” he said, “I felt like I knew those things without having to go to space.” 

“Of course it’s super impressive,” Isaacman was quick to add. “It made me want to look more outward to all that we don’t know and all that we have yet to explore and learn about our universe. And I just had a feeling that we need to get at it because we haven’t made a whole lot of progress over the last 60 years.”

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About 15 years ago, Isaacman, then still in his 20s, met Rabbi Eli Kornfeld, executive director of Chabad of Hunterdon County, NJ.  When Isaacman learned of the group’s annual auctions to help children going through cancer treatment, he offered a grand prize: a ride in one of his fighter jets. “Something was there that resonated with him,” Kornfeld says. “This was an area that was doing good work in his eyes and was something he wanted to support.”

Later Kornfeld accompanied the prize winner to the hangar to introduce him to Isaacman, and after they returned from their flight, Isaacman told Kornfeld to ‘jump in.” So Kornfeld ended up riding in a Czech-manufactured L39 jet, experiencing the force of gravity turns and some “flips.” 

Kornfeld says he believes that Isaacman, who is not known to be religious, was “a spiritual person in his own unique way.” 

“He is an independent thinker focused on building his business and making a difference in the world and using his success to amplify his desire to be a positive force for good in this world and help people—kids especially,” says Kornfeld. 

The Jewish footprint on the space program so far is relatively light, but jokes about Jews in space are legion. There is a story about a Jewish astronaut who returns to Earth exhausted. He says the spaceship orbited the Earth every 90 minutes. That meant that each orbit was considered a “day” of twenty-four hours. So an observant astronaut would spend most of his time praying, and after every six orbits (or nine hours) he or she would have to observe Shabbat for ninety minutes. 

In reality, according to Rabbi David Golinkin of the Schecter Institutes, an astronaut could follow the Jewish legal opinion of 19th century scholar Rabbi Israel Lifshitz, who ruled that a Jewish explorer or desert wanderer should pray and observe Shabbat and festivals according to his point of origin. So in space, the astronaut should establish a home base on Earth and link to central standard time in Houston.

For many Jews, the greatest space thrill has come when watching the television show Star Trek. Its two major characters are played by Jewish actors: William Shatner as the starship Enterprise’s Captain Kirk, and the late Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, who holds up his fingers in the Jewish priestly blessing and declares, “Live long and prosper.” 

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If there’s one thing Isaacman has done, it’s prosper. And at the same time, he’s given back. 

He has donated $120 million and raised another $120 million for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and has moved kids with cancer out of Ukraine. “As important as it is to make progress for tomorrow, we can’t ignore the problems on Earth today,” he said in his commitment to The Giving Pledge, promising to dedicate the majority of his fortune to charity. “If we can explore and one day inhabit the worlds beyond ours, we better tackle childhood cancer along the way.” 

In this fractious era, however, even a generous billionaire like Isaacman can stir up people who don’t agree with his terrestrial priorities. He has pushed for action on issues such as climate change, social injustice and healthcare costs and disparities. “At Shift4, we are committed to reducing our impact on the environment and contributing to important social and governance-related causes,” the company says on one of its websites. The language, highlighted in a Washington Examiner article on conservative Republicans’ scrutiny of Trump’s NASA nominee, lists projects that have saved water and waste and that have highlighted gender and racial diversity. 

Ryan Williams, the president of the conservative Claremont Institute, disparages such efforts and told the Washington Examiner that Isaacman’s support for diversity, equity and inclusion “should rightly be front-and-center” and that “GOP senators should get him to commit, on the record, to dismantling all of NASA’s DEI initiatives of recent years.”  

Congressional Republicans also want to scrutinize Isaacman’s past political campaign contributions. According to the Open Secrets website, Isaacman gave $100,000 to the Democratic Senate Majority PAC in 2021. A year later, he gave $50,000 to Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and another $50,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

Isaacman also faces concern that as NASA chief, he would feel pressured to steer contracts to Musk’s Space X. A member of the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology said that “anyone close to Elon Musk is a concern given his countless conflicts of interest and the chaos that has ensued since he and his DOGE hackers have infiltrated the federal government.” 

But in testimony before a Senate committee on April 9, Isaacman gave some glimpses into possible differences with Musk. He said, for example, that he was opposed to taking the International Space Station out of commission, something Musk has supported. 

Eager to press ahead, Musk said on X that “we’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” 

But Isaacman pushed back on this idea at the April 9 hearing, saying, “We don’t have to make it a binary decision of ‘Moon versus Mars.’ Or ‘the Moon has to come first versus Mars.’ I think we could be paralleling these efforts.” Senators such as RepublicanTed Cruz of Texas agree and have expressed concern over the United States lagging behind in a space race to reach the Moon with China and private rockets fueling a race to collect valuable and useful minerals.

Meanwhile Isaacman has garnered support in the space community. Twenty eight other astronauts wrote a letter to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee strongly backing his nomination. “It is critical that NASA maintain its position as the preeminent space development organization,” they wrote. “Our nation is at a turning point where we face international competition from China, we have the opportunity to promote international cooperation with our partner nations, and we are witnessing radical change in the commercial space sector.” 

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In the novel Red Mars, the planners of the outpost would use massive equipment—giant orbiting solar panels to warm the planet, black dust sprinkled to hold in warmth, and deep tunnels drilled to tap hot gases —to change the atmosphere and make the planet livable.

Despite the technical challenges, Musk and Isaacman certainly make getting to Mars sound doable. In a video, Musk talks to SpaceX employees about reaching the planet in as little as eight years and making settlements there self-sustaining as quickly as possible. “The civilization that we have is really a very small candle in a vast darkness and we just must do whatever possible to ensure that that candle does not go out,” Musk said. 

Whether Isaacman will lead us there is yet to be determined, but he remains steadfast in his commitment to pushing the boundaries of space exploration. “When you’re up there and you see how absolutely special our planet is,” he said in a 2021 interview. “If you can zoom out far enough from all the daily chaos and hardships and suffering, we do live in a completely extraordinary world.” He added, “We need to plan for humankind, a destiny that is not going to be constrained just to this planet.” 

Top image: Jared Isaacman (Credit: Inspiration4 / John Kraus).