Trump’s Nominee For NASA Administrator Meets Congress
12:17 minutes
On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation heard testimony from Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee to lead NASA. During the confirmation hearing, Isaacman indicated a priority of sending humans to Mars—while maintaining the agency’s plans to return people to the lunar surface.
In response to a question from Senator Ted Cruz, Isaacman said “I don’t think we have to make any tough trades here, Senator. I think if we can concentrate our resources at the world’s greatest space agency, we don’t have to make a binary decision of moon versus Mars, or moon has to come first versus Mars.” Senators questioned how a strategy involving both options would be possible under current funding levels, and stressed that a bipartisan law had codified the current approach of targeting the moon first, then Mars.
The fate of the Artemis lunar exploration program has faced questions in the new administration. In his inaugural address, President Trump expressed a desire to send astronauts to Mars, but didn’t mention the moon. Elon Musk, head of SpaceX and a favored advisor to the president, is in favor of prioritizing crewed Mars missions ahead of lunar programs. Under questioning, Isaacman repeatedly refused to say directly whether Musk had been present for his job interview with the President.
Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and businessman, is a nontraditional choice to lead the space agency. While he is an avid pilot and has been to space twice on commercial space missions, including the first private spacewalk, he does not come from a NASA, science, or government background. His nomination comes at a time when government agencies are facing steep cuts and restructuring. Early in March, NASA announced that it was eliminating the Office of the Chief Scientist, along with offices advising the agency on technology, strategy, and coordinating its diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility work. In late March, a DOGE post said that $420 million in NASA grants had been terminated. A vote on Isaacman’ nomination would not happen until later in this month.
Host Flora Lichtman talks with Senior Producer Charles Bergquist about the nomination and the path ahead for NASA. They also talk about other stories from the week in science, including the controversy over claims of a “de-extincted” dire wolf, advances in rapid bird flu sensors, how tropical trees can monitor mercury pollution from illegal gold mining, the detailed physics of a cup of pour-over coffee, and how your wandering mind might actually help you learn.
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Segment Transcript
FLORA LITCHMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, we’ll airlift you into the world of The Pitt, the emergency room medical drama, and research into, well, interjections.
But first, on Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation heard testimony from Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee to lead NASA. Joining me now to talk about that and other science stories from the week is Sci Fri’s own Charles Bergquist. Hi, Charles.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Hey, Flora.
FLORA LITCHMAN: OK, so what’s the news from this confirmation hearing? And why are we leading with this?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. So during the hearing, Jared Isaacman said sending a crewed American mission to Mars would be a priority for the agency. We’ve heard that the president is pro-Mars. He mentioned it during his inaugural address. But the agency’s current plan involving the Artemis program was to take a multi-step approach to return to the moon, and then only later, using things that they learned from Artemis to then head to Mars.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Moon first, then Mars.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Exactly. Yeah, a staged thing. So having the possible new NASA administrator say that Mars is a priority is a pretty big policy shift.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Does he have the power to ditch the moon for Mars?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. So the thing is that the authorization for NASA and its funding comes from an actual law passed by Congress and signed by the president. And that law says Artemis and the Space Launch System it’s using to get to the moon is the way that NASA needs to do things.
So Isaacman gave several answers along the line of NASA is a great agency. It can do both things. We can have both, both Mars and moon. But senators from both parties questioned how, first, it might do that given current resources? And they pointed out that the law calls for this moon-first approach.
Isaacman did say that he would follow the law. And there were a lot of questions from senators of both parties about how all this policy change might affect their districts. That said, the administrator obviously has a certain amount of power to influence the way that the agency is headed.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Tell us about who Jared Isaacman is.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. So he’s a billionaire entrepreneur and businessman. He’s the head of a company called Shift4, which does payment processing. When you swipe your credit card at a restaurant, there’s a decent chance that money is being processed by Shift4. So he’s not from a NASA background, science background, government. So he’s really a non-traditional choice to lead this agency.
He is a very avid pilot. He owns ex-military airplanes. He’s definitely a space enthusiast. He’s been to space twice himself on commercial space missions, including the first private space walk. He’s widely liked within the space industry.
He has close ties to Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and presidential advisor. In fact, one sticky part of the hearing was when he repeatedly avoided directly answering a question about whether or not Musk had been present for his job interview with President Trump.
FLORA LITCHMAN: What did he say?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: He said, my interview was with President Trump. And then the follow ups were, was Mr. Musk in the room? “My interview was with President Trump.”
FLORA LITCHMAN: So I guess we’ll see what happens with his confirmation?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yes, the committee still needs to vote. And then if he gets past that, probably the full Senate would not be able to vote before the end of the month.
FLORA LITCHMAN: OK, back here on Earth, there was a lot of howling this week over news from a company called Colossal. Tell us about it.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. So this week, this biotech company, Colossal Biosciences, had a big splash with claims that they had successfully de-extincted the dire wolf. And this story was everywhere.
FLORA LITCHMAN: I saw it. Every feed was just dire wolf, dire wolf, dire wolf.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah I mean, Time magazine cover story, right? But the details are more complicated. Honestly, this might be more of a press release advance than a de-extinction advance.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Yeah, how dire is their wolf?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, so this is where the controversy comes in. They say that they got DNA from dire wolf fossils, a 13,000 year old tooth, a 72,000-year-old ear bone. They sequenced it, analyzed it, and then gene-edited gray wolves to include some key genes that were found in that fossil DNA. And then using basically big dog surrogate mothers to carry the embryos, they successfully produced three wolf pups, which contained those gene edits– the two males, one female wolf pup.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Key genes– that doesn’t sound like a whole dire wolf to me.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: It doesn’t. They made edits to 20 sites in the gray wolf genome. 14 genes with 15 of those edits were, what they say, are extinct variants. But the last common ancestor of dire wolves and gray wolves is thought to have lived something like five or six million years ago. See, that’s a lot of time for genes to change. Can I hit you with a little math here?
FLORA LITCHMAN: Of course.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: OK. So the gray wolf genome is about 2,400 megabases in size. Colossal says the gray wolf and the dire wolf genomes are 99.5% similar. And comparison-wise, humans and chimps are like 98.8% similar. So closer than humans to chimps but not a lot closer.
So that 0.5% means there are around 12 million differences between the dire wolf and gray wolf genomes. So yeah, 20 edits maybe do not a dire wolf make.
FLORA LITCHMAN: I love that you took this to the mathiest place, Charles. Very you, I love it.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, I mean, I should note that this work also hasn’t really been published in a journal yet to go through peer review. So basically, what we know is what the company has said in its press releases and interviews.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Do they have their sights on other extinct animals to quote, “resurrect?”
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, this is the same company that you may have seen recently made what they call a mammoth mouse. It was basically this very hairy looking mouse.
FLORA LITCHMAN: I did, of course. Yeah, again, that’s like the number one– that fits my algorithm perfectly.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, yeah, so there’s a lot of talk about wanting to bring back the mammoth. They’ve also talked about the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and a few other extinct species.
FLORA LITCHMAN: What is the goal?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Well, they say that they want to bring back these species to fill ecological niches that have gone away. But the world has changed. There really is not an Ice Age for a resurrected mammoth to live in.
FLORA LITCHMAN: So this wasn’t the only story this week about resurrecting long-gone life. Tell me about this Baltic Sea algae.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, so scientists published a paper describing reviving algae samples, diatoms that were pulled up from sediment cores taken from a spot deep in the Eastern Gotland Deep. This is kind of off the west coast of Latvia. And they found that with the right light conditions and nutrients, they could bring this algae back to viability, even though they think it had been dormant for about 7,000 years.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Ugh, 7,000 years of rest and relaxation. I love it.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Exactly. And this is the world it comes back to. Partly, it’s just cool, but they say it could help them use these core samples as kind of like biological time capsules and really compare ecological conditions from long ago.
FLORA LITCHMAN: OK, bird flu continues to circulate, especially on poultry farms here in the US, but there’s news about a new test for it? Tell me about it.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, this is work coming from Washington University in Saint Louis. Researchers adapted an air sensor that first had been developed for COVID monitoring to be able to detect the H5N1 avian influenza virus in under five minutes.
FLORA LITCHMAN: OK, so how does it work?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: So this is like a box that you’d put at your poultry farm next to an air exhaust vent. It takes in the air, whirls it around inside a chamber with fluid on the walls. And then aerosols that are in the air, including the virus particles, would get stuck in the fluid, which then gets pumped over to an electrochemical sensor that has single strands of DNA bound to its electrodes. And the DNA binds to the virus, which then makes the response, the box goes bing.
They’re saying that this is a lot faster than the hours that it could take for previous methods to work. And also it’s cool in that it preserves the samples after the response. So if you needed to sequence the virus or double check the reading, that’s possible here.
FLORA LITCHMAN: That’s so cool. So it’s like bird flu breathalyzer kind of.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Exactly, exactly.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Oh, and there was news this week of another kind of sensor, this one looking for illegal mining, but it comes with a twist.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, this is a paper in the Journal Frontiers in Environmental Science about monitoring illegal gold mining in the Amazon, which is a big environmental concern but can often go undetected.
FLORA LITCHMAN: How does it work?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: So gold mining and refining in these cases often involves the use of mercury metal, a lot of mercury. They add it to the soil that contains a little bit of gold. And the mercury in gold form an amalgam that then can be separated out from the dirt. And the prospectors then burn the amalgam to drive off the mercury. But that puts mercury into the air, which is obviously not great.
The researchers found that trees in the area can take in that airborne mercury, and it shows up in their tree rings. It turns out not all Amazon trees make rings because of the climate, but wild fig trees do. So by looking at tree rings from those fig trees, they can roughly estimate when and in what areas this illegal mining might have taken place.
FLORA LITCHMAN: That’s cool. The trees are like eavesdropping and calling out the mining.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Exactly.
FLORA LITCHMAN: OK, I don’t know about you, but after this week, and after every week, I could use a cup of coffee after every single day. OK, there’s pressing research out on how to optimize your cup?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Not exactly pressing. This is pour-over coffee.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Oh, sorry.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah. This one is a do try this at home. Pour-over coffee, the kind where there’s the funnel containing the filter, and you slowly pour hot water over the top of the funnel. The journal Physics of Fluids is your cookbook for this week.
You can cut down on the amount of coffee grounds you use and get more efficient flavor extraction, stronger flavor, by changing the way that you pour the water.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Tell us, how do we pour the water?
CHARLES BERGQUIST: So the trick is to pour a thin stream of water from high up. But it still needs to be like a constant stream, not broken into droplets. And doing that lets the water mix more vigorously with the grounds. So it kind of churns them up in the funnel, and you get more flavor. And it turns out that they found that those traditional gooseneck kettles that you see that look almost like a fancy watering can with a curved, swoopy neck–
FLORA LITCHMAN: Yes.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: –those do the best job at creating that kind of flow from high up, but not too high up.
FLORA LITCHMAN: The coffee snobs are going to love this one.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Exactly. All of your gear is justified.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Science says so. OK, finally, new research for the mind wanderers out there. There’s good news for us.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yeah, this is work in the Journal of Neuroscience on learning and mind wandering. Researchers studied 40 people who were wearing EEG electrodes while they did a kind of boring job. They watch the screen, look at the images.
And eventually, your brain kind of picks up a pattern that it’s seeing in the images without a person really being aware of that. This is called an implicit probabilistic learning task. The researchers found that when people’s minds wandered while they were doing this boring thing, they not only didn’t do worse on the task, but they sometimes did better.
And the researchers think that the wandering is almost like the brain activity that happens when we sleep, which is known to be helpful to learning. They also found that when the brain wandered on its own, it was more effective than when people said deliberately, OK, I’m going to think of something else now. So maybe it’s OK to just space out a bit.
FLORA LITCHMAN: You can’t force the wander.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Yes, exactly. And fun fact, apparently our minds are wandering 30% to 50% of the time we’re awake. So don’t feel bad if you missed some of this segment. You can listen to it on the podcast later.
FLORA LITCHMAN: That tracks for me, Charles. I think I need another cup of coffee.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: OK.
FLORA LITCHMAN: Sci Fri senior producer Charles Bergquist, thanks for coming on.
CHARLES BERGQUIST: Thanks, Flora.
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Meet the Producers and Host
About Charles Bergquist
As Science Friday’s director and senior producer, Charles Bergquist channels the chaos of a live production studio into something sounding like a radio program. Favorite topics include planetary sciences, chemistry, materials, and shiny things with blinking lights.
About Flora Lichtman
Flora Lichtman is a host of Science Friday. In a previous life, she lived on a research ship where apertivi were served on the top deck, hoisted there via pulley by the ship’s chef.