KENNEDY SPACE CENTER -- With just a month left to go before stepping down as the head of NASA, Bill Nelson has some advice for his likely replacement, billionaire Jared Isaacman.
"You need to be mindful that the budget is only proposed by the executive branch," Nelson said Wednesday during a farewell interview among reporters from the KSC Press Site. "The budget is enacted by the Congress, and that means a lot of nuances."
Dressed down for comfort sporting blue jeans and cowboy boots, Nelson, a native Floridian who was both a member of the U.S. House and Senate before becoming NASA administrator, suggested Isaacman will have to hone his political skills on Capitol Hill to break through and get what's needed for mostly a bipartisan effort in space.
"He needs to become friends with the members of the (appropriations) committee and the leadership," Nelson said.
He said that although he called and congratulated Isaacman on the day President-elect Trump announced the nomination, he has yet to speak again with him, and no transition team had been put together yet.
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Isaacman earned his fortune running a credit card processing company, which then funded his love of flying and two trips to space. He has so far flown with Elon Musk's SpaceX on both 2021's Inspiration4 mission, the first all-commercial spaceflight in history, and this year's Polaris Dawn mission, which saw Isaacman perform the first commercial spacewalk. He has up to two more spaceflights with SpaceX, including the first-ever human spaceflight of the in-development Starship, planned as well.
Nelson said Isaacman's close ties to Musk and SpaceX is something that will have be hashed out as far conflicts of interest.
"If I had a whiff of a conflict, I had to -- under the rules set out by the Biden administration -- I had to extinguish whatever investment that might be," Nelson said. "Whether or not those rules of the Biden administration are going to change in the Trump administration, where they allow potential conflicts, I don't know."
He still urged transparency.
"I still went to the far extreme because I felt like that it was the perception of whether or not I had a financial conflict even more so than if I actually had the financial conflict -- the perception was just as important, because of the public being so cynical about politicians feathering their own nest," he said.
Nelson, who flew on Space Shuttle Columbia while also serving in the U.S. House in 1986, was sworn in as the 14th head of NASA on May 3, 2021, taking over from the only other elected official to lead NASA, Jim Bridenstine, who led the agency for most of Trump's first administration.
"I think if you look over the 14 administrators, each brings a different platform, plethora of experiences to the table," Nelson said.
He notes only three including himself have been former astronauts. Others came from the military, were lawyers or businessmen.
"Each of the administrators has strengths, and I am what I am," he said. "42 years elected public service. Now, four years as part of the administration, and having had the experience on the 24th flight of the space shuttle."
He said he carried the water for NASA in his following years in Congress including 18 years representing Florida in the Senate.
"People will judge me on the basis of what we accomplished," he said. "We've been able to have a fairly robust budget until the budget got cut by things that are unrelated to NASA."
While NASA had originally asked for $27.2 billion for the 2024 fiscal year, that total was shaved to just $24.9 billion by a congressional deal tied to across-the-board cuts in exchange for allowing the nation's debt ceiling to be raised. The deal limited discretionary spending across the federal budget, including NASA, for both fiscal 2024 and 2025.
The 2024 funds ended up being about 2% less than what NASA was allocated in 2023, and the first time since 2013 that Congress didn't increase NASA's funding from the previous year.
Despite the recent limitations, Nelson has been proud of some of the major NASA accomplishments over the last four years.
"We've had an incredible run everything from the James Webb Space Telescope through the regular cadence of to and from the International Space Station, with both crew and cargo, and the scientific research that is finally beginning to blossom," he said.
He also touted development of electric vertical-lift aircraft, aka flying cars, as urban transport, noting he was finally able to take a ride on one just two weeks ago. And he bragged on the X-59 supersonic jet that will take the bite out of sonic booms.
"It would be a kind of muffled sound like the slamming of a car door out in the parking lot," he said. "They're ready to go, and shortly, they're going to fly their first flight, and thus potentially a future transport from Los Angeles to New York in about two hours."
He championed his shutdown of the Mars Sample Return mission from what had been its existing form after growing costs and time delays, and said NASA will announce its new plans for the mission in January.
"At the end of the day, I'm the decider on this stage, and then we hand that off to the new administration," he said. "Basically it was going to be way too expensive. The cost had grown to $11 billion and they were not even going to get the samples back until 2040, which is the decade we're going to send astronauts to Mars. And so I pulled the plug on it."
He said the new path forward that combines efforts of NASA centers like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory combined with commercial partners will be more practical, timely and cost-effective.
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Another program with ballooning costs has been Artemis, which saw its first successful flight, the uncrewed Artemis I mission, during his tenure back in 2022. That mission, though, had already been delayed from its target launch, and the next mission -- Artemis II -- has now been delayed twice over the last four years.
That mission, an eight-day flight around the moon that won't land, but will be the first with crew, is now slated to fly by April 2026. The followup lunar landing mission was recently pushed to 2027, now three years later than the target that was in place when Nelson first took the job.
Those delays, though, were because of the need to ensure astronauts' safety after the heat shield on the Orion spacecraft saw more damage than expected during Artemis I along with other issues.
"We're not going to fly until it's ready, because safety is our North Star," he said, but he still praises the results of that first mission, noting Orion remains the one human-rated spacecraft that has already flown to the moon.
He's also been proud of the growing commercial partnerships, especially the two-company approach to endeavors including commercial cargo, commercial crew and the human landing system program for Artemis.
Asked if legacy companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin could learn from the newer companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, Nelson replied, "Oh, by all means, I think there's a lot of things that have happened in the private sector. Whoever thought of catching a big rocket, the biggest rocket in the world with a bunch of chopsticks. I mean, that's pretty creative."
He still thinks progress should go through the federal agency, though, which has at its core people who can achieve the country's goals successfully and safely.
"The biggest strength is NASA's people, the wizards," he said. "The biggest challenge going forward is keeping the Congress focused to get the money so that they can continue to be wizards, and the wizards will solve the problem. You just got to give them the resources."