Isaacman shows up as surprise speaker at Turning Point USA event in Alabama
In what could very well explain why Donald Trump changed his mind about Jared Isaacman’s nomination for NASA administration, Isaacman showed up unexpectedly at a Turning Point USA event at Auburn University in Alabama this past week, where he described how the murder of Charlie Kirk had profoundly changed his outlook on life.
[O]n a very personal note, I didn’t grow up very religious at all — my mother’s family, we celebrate Christmas. My father’s family, we celebrated Hanukkah. But I can tell you, having gone to space twice and looking back on our planet, looking at the stars around us, it is very hard not to be spiritual.
But it was only recently, in the last couple weeks that I was inspired for the first time in a very long time to pick up the Bible, and I’ll tell you why.
It’s because of Charlie, and it’s for Charlie, and there’s millions others just like me. Thank you.”
One of the theories as to why Trump withdrew Isaacman’s nomination in May was because of Isaacman’s past political and financial support for numerous Democratic Party candidates, along with his apparent support for DEI at his companies. It was speculated that once Trump learned of these associations during the confirmation process he decided Isaacman was not trustworthy and dumped him.
I wonder now if Isaacman changed Trump’s mind when they met several times in the past few weeks by talking about Kirk’s assassination and how it had changed Isaacman. I can easily see how that would have influenced Trump.
This is also another case of the Democrats and their most radical and public cohort doing a good job of alienating another former Democrat, simply by advocating and committing violence against those who disagree. They did it to Trump and Elon Musk, both former Democrats, and apparently they have done it to Isaacman as well.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
In what could very well explain why Donald Trump changed his mind about Jared Isaacman’s nomination for NASA administration, Isaacman showed up unexpectedly at a Turning Point USA event at Auburn University in Alabama this past week, where he described how the murder of Charlie Kirk had profoundly changed his outlook on life.
[O]n a very personal note, I didn’t grow up very religious at all — my mother’s family, we celebrate Christmas. My father’s family, we celebrated Hanukkah. But I can tell you, having gone to space twice and looking back on our planet, looking at the stars around us, it is very hard not to be spiritual.
But it was only recently, in the last couple weeks that I was inspired for the first time in a very long time to pick up the Bible, and I’ll tell you why.
It’s because of Charlie, and it’s for Charlie, and there’s millions others just like me. Thank you.”
One of the theories as to why Trump withdrew Isaacman’s nomination in May was because of Isaacman’s past political and financial support for numerous Democratic Party candidates, along with his apparent support for DEI at his companies. It was speculated that once Trump learned of these associations during the confirmation process he decided Isaacman was not trustworthy and dumped him.
I wonder now if Isaacman changed Trump’s mind when they met several times in the past few weeks by talking about Kirk’s assassination and how it had changed Isaacman. I can easily see how that would have influenced Trump.
This is also another case of the Democrats and their most radical and public cohort doing a good job of alienating another former Democrat, simply by advocating and committing violence against those who disagree. They did it to Trump and Elon Musk, both former Democrats, and apparently they have done it to Isaacman as well.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
This whole escapade leads me to suspect that there are anti-Trump players at senior levels of the administration, players who are adept at using Trump’s (completely justified) paranoia about disloyalty and his mercurial temperament to sow discord and distrust. Every time one of these saboteurs strikes a chord, the media stands ready to amplify the potential misalignment into a crisis capable of derailing a major part of the administration’s program. Democrats, especially those in the pocket of the CCP, play for keeps. They are so willing to hurt Trump that they help our enemies hurt America!
It’s possible – I mean, there was no lack of such people in the first Trump term.
Some of this looks like petty turf battles, though. I think Duffy was thinking mostly or entirely about just his own political career. I think Sergio Gor was mostly or entirely thinking about Elon intruding on his turf.
Ray Van Dune,
Given the size of the federal workforce, even after all of the RIFs that have occurred pursuant to the government shutdown, and also its overwhelmingly Democrat-aligned nature, there are certainly such people still around, but I don’t think any of them are actually in the White House anymore – unlike in Trump’s first term. Trump’s biggest problem then was that he had been primarily motivated by money his entire life and didn’t understand people whose primary motivation was power. Having received several post-graduate degrees in the university of hard knocks during his first term and the Biden interregnum, Trump has largely rectified that previous lack of perspective.
Anent the government workforce writ large, at least one Cabinet Sec’y., Kristi Noem at DHS, has embarked on a program to polygraph literally everyone on the department payroll to ferret out remaining weasels. This will probably work for all but the genuine Grade A psychopaths in their ranks. I wish all of the other Cabinet Sec’ys would do likewise.
It is not true to say that the current Trump White House is an entirely weasel-free zone, but it’s orders of magnitude more so than it was during Presidency 45. And the weasels of today are not weaseling on behalf of ideology or foreign governments but simply for their own accounts. Short-term, can’t-see-beyond-the-end-of-one’s-nose, blind-to-the-big-picture personal ambition weaseling of the sort we’ve been seeing from Sean Duffy lately will, one hopes, get him ejected from Trump’s circle of trust at a minimum and perhaps out of the administration entirely. Sergio Gor, meanwhile, has been “kicked upstairs” to New Delhi.
Richard M,
I think you are correct that the remaining dysfunction in the Trump 47 White House is mainly coming from people, like Gor and Duffy, who are just reflexive turf-defenders and self-aggrandizers, respectively. They aren’t disloyal fifth-columnists, just people with inflated senses of their own importance and inadequate grasps of the big picture. Good help really is hard to get.
Speaking of DOT, time to privatize the ATC system? Put it out to bid on terms like the UK did.
Why is Europe ahead of the US in this?
Auburn gets a lot of grief being called a “cow college”
(remember, it is the Bama Nation, but the loveliest village on the plains is known as the Auburn FAMILY)—but they have played a great role in aerospace unbeknownst to many.
Jared wouldn’t even have been booed had he went to Huntsville.
I don’t think Mr. Zimmerman was accosted there on a trip where he opined why they shouldn’t even exist :)
Then too, had he helped out with these fine folks:
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1228564982652678&id=100064975620491&http_ref=eyJ0cyI6MTc2Mjc1NjYzNTAwMCwiciI6Imh0dHBzOlwvXC93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbVwvIn0%3D
Then too, it might have come off like Rick Snyder delivering that one package of bottled water to a resident of Flint, right Mr.Z?
Priorities:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lKYkw6NqH6Y
Snyder would make such a great NASA Chief Administrator. He has such sights to show you. No tears please…a waste of good suffering-no wait..we bottle those. ;)
”Why is Europe ahead of the US in this?”
Because the Democrats like the system the way it is.
Jeff Wright,
Auburn is hardly alone in being called a “cow college.” The first such “agricultural and mechanical” land-grant college was established in my home state of Michigan, under exclusively state-level auspices, in 1855. It went through a number of name changes over the decades and is today known as Michigan State University.
The pre-Civil War South opposed the founding of such schools. Legislation to do so – the Morrill Act – was only passed in 1862 after the onset of the Civil War. Michigan’s already-established such college was also a beneficiary of this national legislation. Many others followed, including Purdue, Auburn and Texas A&M. Even an Ivy League school, Cornell, is a land-grant university. There are dozens more.
Speaking of Isaacman, Eric Berger has a new long-form piece today at Ars looking at the challenges awaiting him once he’s confirmed.. One interesting bit about the maneuverings of Amit Kshatriya and certain Old Space companies:
Eric also mentions that right before the shutdown, there was talk at NASA about ripping up Duffy’s new decree on the Commercial LEO Destinations program and reverting to the old rules for commercial space stations. First I’d heard about this.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/11/nasa-is-kind-of-a-mess-here-are-the-top-priorities-for-a-new-administrator/
Our enemies are adept at luring a weasel under pretenses that seem deliciously self-serving but not quite traitorous, only to gradually amp up the demanded treacheries to the point that the weasel dare not attempt escape.
A lucid Joe Biden could explain the process to us quite clearly, but is unfortunately no longer available. Or is there an innocent explanation why a Biden family member might receive millions of dollars from a CCP-connected Chinese official?
That man’s wife was a Karen-and-a-half.
I bailed out an 80 year old co-worker arrested because she wanted answers to her son’s suicide…the wife had her arrested.
I saw some Hunter Biden types that way—the worst a nasty little brunette (not *physically* unattractive–that her chief problem… pretty=evil).
Her elderly parents were two of the saddest looking people I have ever seen. As her Dad went to get the car, she asked her mother if she was okay: “No.”
That and she kept bumming folks for a cigarette. I shot her the most evil look I could muster when she came to me.
Her parents must have been sooo proud.
The last person Birmingham released that night was the little old white lady…my co-worker.
Yeah…real big threat her. You know that was on purpose
Theoden (via JRR Tolkien) spoke right, “Oft evil will shall evil mar”. Charlie Kirk alive was doing the lefty world some serious damage. Charlie Kirk as a martyr is going to do them 10-100x the damage.
Richard M,
Isaacman’s first job, upon taking office, will be to look for some direct reports who are not part of the NASA Lifer Guild. I don’t know whether he has the legal authority to replace Kshatriya, but if he does, he should. Failing that, he should keep the guy at arm’s-length and regularly review his phone logs.
From Ars Technica’s Eric Berger essay:
Maybe Musk’s nickname for Duffy isn’t so far off the mark. Duffy seems to have turned the Commercial LEO Destinations program on its head and left it in a state of confusion. How are the space station companies supposed to plan for their products if the requirements are up in the air? These are companies that are cutting metal.
The essay did not mention the troubled Orion spacecraft and its scheduled manned mission in February. That has a risk that should frighten anyone who had watched NASA’s disasters with Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. All three had known problems, yet NASA had not worked out the problems to make them safe. Apollo 1 had a schedule deadline to meet and a perceived — but not real — competition with Russia. Challenger and Columbia were routine, but a “normalization of deviance” from expected performance of the hardware — accepting the poor performance as normal — resulted in catastrophe.
Once again, NASA has a situation of a safety system performance that deviated from expectation, yet managers are once again planning to fly without fully understanding or correcting the problem. Added to that, they will test the life support system on a mission that takes the crew days away from safety. Either of these is unacceptably risky, but the combination is far beyond that.
What should Isaacman do about the upcoming, risky flight? Is the right stuff the courage to take the chance just to remain on schedule to Beat the Chinese™ in a race already won? Or is the right stuff the courage to delay that manned flight until its safety features have been demonstrated to be safe?
NASA has been left in a terrible condition for Isaacman to fix. I’m not sure that Bush was good for the agency or left it in poor shape, but Obama set it adrift. Trump 45 tried to give NASA purpose, again, but the challenge was too great for the agency. What happened to the can-do spirit of the 1960s? It is hard to say, but it was probably lost in the previous decades when cost-plus programs became Congressional teats that fed the traditional contractors as they leisurely fulfilled their contracts. in the 1960s, time was of the essence, but now time is no object. Duffy, on the other hand, has shown that he only sees NASA as a political football, so he does not take advantage of the talents, skills, and knowledge of NASA’s workforce.
NASA is the American space program of record, but it is being beat not by the Chinese but by America’s own commercial space companies. American companies are quickly becoming able to provide NASA and NOAA and the military with the data that they need, saving those organizations from having to build and operate expensive satellites. American companies are already necessary for any American manned lunar landing.
What right stuff does Isaacman need? He needs the stuff to make NASA relevant again.
Edward wrote, “What right stuff does Isaacman need? He needs the stuff to make NASA relevant again.”
And I say: “Enough of NASA!” I don’t want NASA relevant or important, because when it is it dominates and chokes off independent competition and thought. Isaacman’s real task is to make NASA irrelevant, unneeded because the private enterprise of Americans can and will do the job so much better. (Just ask Elon Musk and Peter Beck!)
I know old habits are hard to break, but we have to stop seeing NASA as the solution for making American’s space effort a success. That is only prolonging the problem.
I’m still hoping for a NASA that is like the NACA. Those were the days in which America’s aviation industry ruled the world. NACA assisted the industry without being a participant.
NASA became not just a participant in the space industry, it ruled the space industry. That seemed OK when it was doing great things, but government was busy holding back citizen participation in space in favor of government — and NASA — rule. These days the agency has not done well by us. We pay a lot of money and get shockingly little for it, because the government has different goals than We the People have.
NASA looks like it has done well, but it could have done far, far more than it has done. The agency should revert back to an industry support role, and that will make it relevant again. It may not make the headlines that it did in the 1960s, but it is not making such good headlines now, either.
Most private companies are at a great disadvantage due to government’s long dominance in the industry, keeping out most of the “riff raff” space companies that wanted to do the things that We the People wanted done. NASA had their favored contractors, and those were the beneficiaries of America’s space program, not the rest of us. Congress funded their favored projects that could be done by those same favored contractors.
Now that We the People have our own ways to access space, We are beginning to do what We want. NASA loses its relevance due to this, and it will not regain relevance by competing with the investors, who collectively have far more available funds than Congress is willing to give to the agency. We the People are eager to do what we want more efficiently than government does what it wants. We the people are getting way ahead of NASA and government through a small number of companies, yet there are scores and hundreds of companies that want and deserve to have their chance. Can these startups compete head to head with the early independent space companies?
NASA has knowledgable people who can help startups avoid the pitfalls that others have already learned from. It could develop systems such as the proposed nuclear electric propulsion for us to explore the solar system. This is what relevance looks like. Right now, NASA has difficulty managing its own projects, so it should leave that work to others who can do the job better, because if those companies fail they will lose so much more than the agency loses if it doesn’t do it right. Commercial space is motivated to do it right, but many companies still need some assistance with their know-how.
An insider as administrator could be set in the old ways and would be unlikely to make the necessary changes, leaving NASA still adrift. The agency can no longer be relevant by leading the American space exploration. Commercial space is already outpacing them wherever they go. NASA needs to change, and Isaacman comes from the commercial world where he may have learned how to guide the agency into the right direction for its future.
Hello Dick,
Agreed in full. He’s not the guy to institute a major overhaul of NASA human spaceflight.
Hello Edward,
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy was formulated to answer just this question!
Charles Murray (whose book Apollo: The Race to the Moon remains the gold standard for histories of the Apollo program) said much the same thing in an interview back in 2009:
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1421/1
Of course, by now, the last of the old Apollo people are gone, too. There is a paucity of people there now who have ever run a successful space vehicle development program.
Robert,
I want NASA and the government to stop being the master and return to being the servant. In America, government is supposed to serve, not to lead. In fact, that is why humans invented government in the first place, and why our Founding Fathers reinvented government.
Edward: We are in agreement. My worry is that if we don’t state this clearly every single time, those not that educated on this issues might misunderstand. And those people include people with names like Isaacman and Trump.
The distrust of Orion is spreading. Ellie in Space is now calling it “Flaming Garbage.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10zW384XuoE (½ hour)
Lockheed Martin had a different heat shield on it, a decade ago, and tested it with that shield, but NASA insisted upon a different shield, and that is the one that is failing today. It is unfortunate that the Artemis 1 flight did not test the life support, but that, too, may have been a NASA decision. They did not require that it be tested on that flight, but they should have.
Ellie replays parts of an interview that she did with Casey Handmer, who expresses several arguments against Orion and how NASA is managed. Handmer is the one whose essay on Orion we discussed here on BTB in another thread. Ellie and Handmer do not summarize the essay but discuss the various topics as well as related topics.
Toward the end, Handmer says: “Since 2015, the United States has been a launch superpower. There’s never been a meaningful constraint to our ability to launch stuff into space. We’ve had reusable Falcon 9s, Falcon Heavies, and now we’re about to have Starship. How much did NASA’s plans in terms of their crewed and robotic space exploration programs adapt to this new reality? Nothing. Not a single thing was changed. It’s been ten years and NASA has not taken advantage of the fact that they successfully helped birth the transformational capacity that they’ve been dreaming about in policy papers since the late 1960s of having the ability to have dispatchable launch at a reasonable price to basically anywhere in the solar system.”
NASA successfully helped birth the capabilities it has wanted, but now it does not use them. NASA should not be using the hardware and capabilities, but it should be helping to birth the hardware and capabilities for We the People to use as We see fit.
Government exists to protect and to serve We the People as we take ourselves to where We want to go. Government does not exist to lead us to where government wants us to go. The former is liberty. The latter is tyranny.
To be fair, the “flaming garbage” epithet was Casey Handmer’s, not Ellie, who was just riffing it in her video title because the whole thing was built around an interview with Casey. You can see that in Casey’s original blog essay:
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
But yes, both the interview and the essay are both worth everyone’s time. Admittedly, it will be a depressing time.
Richard M,
Thank you for the book recommendation.
From the interview you linked:
This explains why Johnson was such an eager participant in the space program, having been given the responsibility for it, and why it survived the Johnson administration with huge budgets. After Johnson, NASA turned into a political football with the usual bureaucracy.
If you haven’t already, you may want to read a technical book: How Apollo Flew to the Moon by W. David Woods. It explains how a lot of the onboard equipment and hardware worked and several of the methods used.
If we had started with a space station, then it would have had to be used for the obvious benefit of us here on Earth. Otherwise, it would not have seemed worth the cost. Manufacturing some materials that cannot be easily made on Earth, such as pharmaceuticals, would have been one advantage to space. Other than that, America would have lost a race to a space station, because such a thing was fairly easily manufactured and launched. It is one of the reasons it is an early goal for commercial space, companies with amazingly small budgets compared to the amounts NASA spends on similar flight hardware.
I think that SpaceX has met the five listed conditions. The sense of urgency, the deadline to Mars, is to do it in time for Elon to live there, and Musk is the guy paying for it, leading the people doing the work yet often getting out of their way as he runs his other companies and ran DOGE.
Yes, it is fair that “flaming garbage” is not original to Ellie, but she did choose to present that point of view and use the phrase in the title. Anti-Artemis sentiment seems to be growing in popularity, among space enthusiasts, as we learn more and more about the problems and dangers with Artemis. Learning about the state of the Orion heat shield was a big surprise, a year ago.
It is to our advantage that commercial space has been allowed to prosper, in America. One company is eager to build lunar landers that can carry men as well as materiel. Blue Origin is also eager to perform polluting industrial manufacturing off the Earth. Another company is eager to colonize Mars and is developing the space ships to accomplish that goal, and those ships can be adapted to lunar landings and other tasks, too.
So now we have our national space program practically (in a practical way) being SpaceX and its operations. This one company launches most of the mass that goes into space, and it is impressive even if Starlink is not included. SpaceX launches more often than the rest of the world combined, and even without Starlink launches it still is close to the number of launches as the Chinese. SpaceX’s near-term Mars goal is the same as NASA has dreamed about for more than half a century.
Over time, as the other commercial companies start being competitive with SpaceX, the American space program will be those commercial companies. It will be We the People running things, just as it was We the People who ran the settlement of America.