A plan written by Trump’s NASA pick was leaked. Here’s what to know about ‘Project Athena’

By Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — A 62-page document written by President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again pick to run NASA, billionaire Jared Isaacman, outlines a sweeping, ambitious, and at times controversial plan for the space agency.

Isaacman, who was tapped to be NASA administrator after Trump was elected in 2024, only to see his nomination retracted months later, was renominated for the top job last Tuesday.

While Isaacman has publicly acknowledged the leaked document, which is labeled May 2025 but was recently leaked to several news outlets, he said in a social media post that “parts of it are now dated.” He did not specify which portions were obsolete.

It nonetheless set off a flurry of speculation about how the space agency would function with Isaacman at the helm. A copy of the document was obtained and authenticated by CNN.

In his statement, which was posted the day of his renomination, Isaacman said that “Project Athena,” as the paper is titled, “was always intended to be a living document refined through data gathering post-confirmation.”

“I would think it is better to have a plan going into a responsibility as great as the leadership of NASA than no plan at all,” the statement reads.

Among the proposed goals are revamping some NASA centers to focus on nuclear electric propulsion, establishing a new Mars exploration program, and embracing an “accelerate/fix/delete” philosophy to reshape the agency.

If enacted, many of the policies laid out could significantly alter the day-to-day lives of NASA workers and transform the 67-year-old agency.

“I think it is presenting a more dramatic set of changes than many in the space community were expecting,” said Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the nonprofit exploration advocacy group Planetary Society, of the document.

Some lawmakers have also expressed concern about how Isaacman might seek to reform NASA campuses across the country.

Isaacman still faces a confirmation vote in the Senate and would need Congressional approval for many of the objectives mapped out in the document.

As a tech CEO — who made his fortune by founding payments company Shift4 at age 16 and has twice flown to orbit on self-funded SpaceX missions — Isaacman is an unorthodox pick for NASA’s top role.

Space agency administrators are typically selected from a pool of scientists, engineers, academics and public servants.

But Isaacman has also garnered broad support within the commercial space industry, where he’s perceived as an energetic outsider ready to usher NASA into a new era.

A power struggle

According to a source familiar with the matter, the original Project Athena document was more than 100 pages. Isaacman made only three hard copies of a truncated 62-page version and distributed them to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his chief of staff. The leak — according to a recent Ars Technica report and a source who confirmed the account to CNN — looked to have been part of an effort by Duffy, who is temporarily running NASA, to spur controversy and potentially thwart Isaacman’s renomination.

CNN previously reported that Duffy has said privately that he would like to hold the space chief title permanently, according to a source familiar with the matter.

A spokesperson for Duffy previously denied that he’s said he wishes to remain in the NASA administrator job, and Isaacman said in his social media statement, posted after the “Project Athena” document was leaked, that he believes Duffy has “great instincts and is an excellent communicator.” (The spokesperson for Duffy did not offer comment for this story.)

“If there is any friction, I suspect it is more political operators causing the controversy,” Isaacman said.

Isaacman was renominated for the NASA post on November 4, one day after reports about the Athena document began circulating in the news.

“I think (the people who leaked Project Athena) thought this would ruffle feathers amongst the delegations that care about human spaceflight,” said one former NASA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private document. “I will tell you — it hasn’t worked.”

CNN reached out to nearly a dozen senators whose home states have NASA centers that could be pegged for major changes, according to the Project Athena document. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland — the home of Goddard Space Flight Center — offered the most detailed responses.

Van Hollen said in a statement that he had met with Isaacman earlier this year and he “looks forward to another hearing to discuss further with him why the next space race and the search for habitable planets runs through Maryland.”

“To protect our nation’s innovation leadership, he must be more than a rubber stamp for the Administration’s chainsaw approach to our space science initiatives,” Van Hollen said.

Warner, whose state houses NASA’s Langley campus, urged Isaacman to “engage with Congress and reconsider any plan that threatens these world-class facilities and the communities that depend on them.”

“The reported proposals to downsize or privatize key missions at Langley and Wallops would be a serious mistake, jeopardizing critical scientific capabilities and the talented workforce whose expertise keeps the United States at the forefront of aerospace research,” Warner’s statement reads.

No lawmaker reached by CNN indicated how they intended to vote on Isaacman’s confirmation.

A Mars shot and nuclear propulsion

One eye-popping proposal in Project Athena is to set up a new Mars program, dubbed “Olympus.”

Much of that vision, the source familiar with the document told CNN, was intended to align NASA with SpaceX’s goal of sending an uncrewed Starship spacecraft to the Martian surface next year.

SpaceX’s plan, which CEO Elon Musk discussed publicly in May, “was going to be a more-or-less free mission that SpaceX was going to do anyway,” the source said. The thinking was that NASA could step in to provide support through the Olympus program at minimal cost to taxpayers, according to the source.

The document also includes numerous mentions of setting up an expansive program to pursue nuclear electric propulsion — which involves powering spacecraft engines with electricity from small nuclear reactors. The technology could one day provide steady, long-lasting power for faster and more flexible deep-space missions, including Mars travel.

Isaacman has pushed publicly for expanding such research, writing in an August op-ed for RealClearScience that he coauthored with Newt Gingrich that the space agency should focus on tasks and research “no other agency, organization, or company is capable of accomplishing.”

Nuclear electric propulsion is an example of such a focus area, the op-ed argues.

“Our competitors are not waiting. China and Russia are investing heavily in nuclear space technologies. If America wants to lead, NASA must take on the hard problems again and do the near-impossible,” Isaacman and Gingrich wrote in the article.

Project Athena also suggests setting up a demonstration mission to dock a nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft with a crewed vehicle in orbit, according to the leaked paper.

Isaacman’s nuclear vision also proposes that NASA centers working on projects like the Space Launch System rocket — including the Marshall and Michoud facilities in Alabama and Louisiana — shift their focus to nuclear electric propulsion development when the SLS program concludes.

When contacted for comment, a spokesperson for Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said Tuberville had not met with Isaacman yet but he “will, of course, ask about Marshall.”

The source familiar with the document noted that it was crafted around the same time the Trump White House drafted the President’s Budget Request, or PBR, which called for canceling NASA’s SLS rocket and some other major projects that could have left multiple NASA centers without a cornerstone program.

The source said that Isaacman began compiling the Project Athena document in late 2024 and updated it as he had conversations with policymakers. The source also said that Isaacman did not help draft the PBR.

With this summer’s “Big Beautiful Bill” expressly extending the SLS program through at least the next four missions, it appears Isaacman may delay implementing a bold new focus on nuclear electric propulsion research.

Isaacman said November 4 on social media that he hopes to zero-in on those pursuits only after a “foundation” of lunar exploration has been built.

To the moon

When the Project Athena document was drafted in early 2025, Trump had already signaled a renewed interest in Mars — even mentioning exploration of the planet in his inaugural address while staying silent on NASA’s ongoing efforts to return astronauts to the moon.

Isaacman echoed Trump’s Mars ambitions during a confirmation hearing in April, saying he intended to pursue exploration of the red planet in tandem with NASA’s moon program. However, questions about how he would fund such projects loomed.

In the months since, however, the moon has emerged as the clear policy priority amid a renewed space race with China, which is aiming to land its taikonauts on the lunar surface by 2030.

The recent push to bolster NASA’s moon missions, including a $10 billion influx Congress gave the agency’s human spaceflight efforts in July, “brings clarity to the topic,” Isaacman said in his social media statement.

But Isaacman is back in the running for the top NASA job at a time when the agency’s plans for a crewed moon landing, called Artemis III, are in flux.

Shifting lunar plans

The Artemis III mission, which is slated to launch later this decade, currently hinges on SpaceX’s Starship ferrying NASA astronauts down to the lunar surface.

But some policy experts have grown increasingly concerned that Starship — the most powerful rocket ever built — is too large, novel and complex to meet NASA’s urgent timeline.

Duffy recently signaled a willingness to boot SpaceX off the project, saying he would ask the company and its chief competitor, Blue Origin, to show how they could expedite development of their respective lunar landers.

Those remarks prompted an acerbic response from Musk, a friend of Isaacman’s, who referred to the interim NASA leader as “Sean Dummy.”

Isaacman has not publicly said whether he would support sidelining SpaceX from the Artemis III mission. But a source familiar with the matter said that Isaacman has expressed an intention to partner with whichever company most quickly produces an astronaut-worthy lunar lander.

The Project Athena “plan never favored any one vendor, never recommended closing centers, or directed the cancellation of programs before objectives were achieved,” Isaacman said in his social media statement.

“The plan valued human exploration as much as scientific discovery,” Isaacman said. “It was written as a starting place to give NASA, international partners, and the commercial sector the best chance for long-term success.”

Uncertainty for science

The source familiar with the Project Athena document said some of the more controversial aspects of the plan warrant more explanation.

One line item in the document, for example, states that Isaacman intends to take “NASA out of the taxpayer funded climate science business and leave it for academia to determine” — a proposal that critics say said could impede the nation’s ability to gather crucial environmental data.

The document also maps out similar policies that could be applied across many of NASA’s initiatives, such as recommendations to embrace “science-as-service” for future projects.

Such measures, calling for researchers to focus on purchasing data from the private sector, could mark a significant change for the agency.

Similar policy philosophies have been tried at NASA, particularly in the 1990s during a “better, faster, cheaper reformulation,” Dreier noted. But enthusiasm waned for that approach when a pair of Mars missions were lost.

And the commercial space industry may not be in a position to take up all the tasks Isaacman’s Athena document suggests it can, he said.

“It places a lot of faith on the commercial marketplace to deliver in ways that it hasn’t had the chance to fully be tested on,” Dreier said.

Isaacman’s social media statement also acknowledges his “science-as-a-service” concept “got people fired up” but clarified that he intended to focus on purchasing data from Earth observation satellites: “Why build bespoke satellites at greater cost and delay when you could pay for the data as needed from existing providers and repurpose the funds for more planetary science missions (as an example)?”

Isaacman has also publicly defended science programs such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was slated for budget cuts in the PBR. And he stated he’d be willing to spend his own money to get the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope off the ground. “I was prepared to personally cover the cost to launch Roman — if that’s what it took to get to the science,” Isaacman said in a June social media post. (That same promise appears in the Project Athena document.)

“Anything suggesting that I am anti-science or want to outsource that responsibility is simply untrue,” Isaacman’s November 4 statement reads.

A rankled workforce

Among the other proposals in the Project Athena document are plans to hasten NASA’s reorganization. The agency has already lost roughly 4,000 of its 18,000 employees as part of the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program.

Isaacman said in his social media statement last week that he wishes to move away from rolling out piecemeal change and instead implement “a single, data-driven reorganization aimed at reducing layers of bureaucracy between leadership and the engineers, researchers, and technicians.”

Extensive changes, however, could further disgruntle a workforce that has been reeling from looming budget cuts and what employees have described as political distractions and discordant communication from leadership.

Isaacman’s document also details myriad other plans to change how the agency operates — such as conducting a sweeping review of NASA’s boards and committees to suspend any that “delay decision making,” and reimagine the space agency’s approach to risk assessment.

“We will ensure safety is at the forefront of our decisions but achieving the mission of NASA means accepting that some risks are worth taking,” the document reads.

Former NASA astronaut and SpaceX advisor Garrett Reisman, who has long said he believes NASA may have become too risk-averse in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster, told CNN in a November 8 phone interview he was encouraged to see that Isaacman hopes to reevaluate that aspect of the agency.

It would be unwise, he added, to start eliminating safety organizations — but they could be revamped to create a “healthy tension” between risk assessors and engineers seeking to push boundaries.

However, he cautioned that “it’s really hard to know in the moment if you’re going too far or not,” Reisman said. “It’s a very difficult thing to do, so I wish him good luck.”

A leader of change

Isaacman is generally well regarded across the space industry, where he has largely been viewed as a passionate leader who can enact visionary change.

In an emailed statement, Dreier, the Planetary Society executive, acknowledged that the Project Athena document “was prepared in a different era.” NASA has since received billions of dollars for projects including lunar exploration, Dreier noted, and science advocates have demonstrated an outpouring of opposition to Trump’s proposed cuts to research.

Isaacman’s renomination to the NASA chief job now presents “a good opportunity to engage on some of these proposals, particularly as they relate to science,” Dreier added.

In his social media post, Isaacman said that, if the Project Athena document becomes public, “I will stand behind it,” adding that he believes “there are many elements of the plan that the space community and NASA would find exciting.”

But he did not wish to debate the plan “line-by-line while NASA and the rest of the government are going through a shutdown,” according to the November 4 post.

More broadly, Isaacman has suggested he intends to enter the NASA job with an open mind and adjust course based on feedback.

In a social media post in June, for example, Isaacman wrote that he “didn’t love” being approached by “people who thought they were uniquely NASA’s savior.” He added: “I have little interest in doing the same.”

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