Trump picks Jewish space adventurer Jared Isaacman to head NASA

(JTA) — To advance his efforts to return Americans to the moon, President-elect Donald Trump is tapping a Jewish entrepreneur who has traveled privately to space himself.

Jared Isaacman, 41, is the founder and CEO of Shift4, a payment processing company. He is best known for his high-profile, private jaunts into space, most recently traveling on a rocket built by SpaceX, owned by Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk, to conduct the first private spacewalk ever in September. His inaugural space voyage, in 2001, was the first to proceed without a professional astronaut on board.

Trump announced on Wednesday that he would nominate Isaacman to helm NASA.

“With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place,” Isaacman posted on X/Twitter, whose travels have prompted reflections on how Jewish law would address spaceflight, after Trump’s announcement Wednesday. “Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars and in doing so, we will make life better here on Earth.”

A success story

Isaacman, a high school dropout and billionaire, is Jewish but has not made that piece of his identity a major part of his public persona. This year, he and his father Don, who is on Shift4’s board, were among dozens of people on a gala committee for Chabad of Hunterdon County, the Hasidic movement’s outpost in their area of New Jersey. In 2010, Isaacman donated the opportunity to be “Fighter Pilot for a Day” on one of his planes to a Chabad auction.

Isaacman would not be the first Jewish NASA director. President George H.W. Bush selected Daniel S. Goldin, an engineer who had been active in the movement to free Soviet Jewry, to helm the organization in 1992.