Jared Isaacman at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, earlier this year. The billionaire astronaut with close ties to SpaceX was named head of NASA by President Trump.

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President-elect Donald Trump has chosen billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman to be NASA’s next administrator.

“Jared will advance NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology and exploration,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

Isaacman made headlines earlier this year when he became the first private astronaut to perform a spacewalk. The five-day mission took place using a capsule built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. During the flight, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis donned spacesuits provided by the company and briefly floated outside the capsule.

It was Isaacman’s second trip to space on a SpaceX capsule. He declined to say how much he paid the company for the two flights.

Isaacman is a friend of Musk and his online payments company Shift 4 has extensive financial ties to SpaceX. According to financial documents, Shift 4 had invested $27.5 million in SpaceX in 2021. That same year, Shift4 announced a five-year partnership that would make it the payment platform for Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by SpaceX.

If confirmed as NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee billions of dollars in contracts awarded by the government to SpaceX. He would also be able to put more money into Musk’s company.

“Isaacman will likely favor ambitious and innovative commercial projects,” said Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, which analyzes the space business. “Many of these projects could certainly be carried out by SpaceX.”

In fact, Isaacman appears to have shown a strong preference for SpaceX in previous posts on Musk’s social media platform X. He has advocated for allowing SpaceX to increase its launches from California after lawmakers there voted to restrict its flights from Vandenberg Air Force Base. He also criticized NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), designed to carry astronauts to the moon, as well as the agency’s decision to award a lunar landing contract to Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Blue Origin Award came after NASA awarded SpaceX a multi-billion dollar contract for the same mission.

Farrar says Isaacman wouldn’t immediately be able to restructure NASA’s major programs, such as its Artemis mission to take astronauts to the moon. That’s because many aspects of these programs are dictated by Congress, which sets the budget for the space agency. “The real question for NASA is whether Congress will allow it to abandon legacy projects like SLS so that the budget can be redirected to SpaceX,” he says.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment. Through a spokesman, Isaacman declined to speak to NPR, but said in a statement sent to X that he was honored to receive the nomination: “With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this,” he wrote . “We will never again lose our ability to travel to the stars and never settle for second place.”