Trump’s Nominee For NASA Administrator Meets Congress

Nominee Jared Isaacman prioritized a Mars mission in his confirmation hearings, raising questions about the fate of the Artemis lunar program.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Flora Lichtman?

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• 1:24Ira Flatow?

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• 1:43Flora Lichtman?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lixman. 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 SciFrid's own Charles Berquist. Hi, Charles.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Hey, Flora.

• 2:01Flora Lichtman?

  OK, so what's the news from this confirmation hearing? And why are we leading with this?

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so during the hearing, Jared Isaacman said sending a crude American mission to Mars would be a priority for the agency. You know, 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.

• 2:31Flora Lichtman?

  Moon first, then Mars.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah, a staged thing. So having the possible new NASA administrator say that Mars is a priority is a pretty big policy shift.

• 2:41Flora Lichtman?

  Does he have the power to ditch the moon for Mars?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Yes, the thing is that the authorization for NASA and its funding comes from, you know, 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, you know, NASA is a great agency. It can do both things. We can have both, both Mars and moon. But, you know, 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

• 3:30Speaker 03

  districts. That said, you know, the administrator obviously has a certain amount of power to influence the way that the agency's headed.

• 3:38Flora Lichtman?

  Tell us about who Jared Isaacman is.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  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 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 spacewalk.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:36Flora Lichtman?

  What did he say?

• 4:37Speaker 03

  He said, "My interview was with President Trump." And then the follow-ups were, you know, "Was Mr. Musk in the room? My interview was with President Trump."

• 4:47Flora Lichtman?

  So I guess we'll see what happens with this confirmation?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Yes, you know, 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.

• 4:58Flora Lichtman?

  You know, we've been covering these cuts to federal agencies, federal science agencies. What's happening at NASA? How has NASA been faring?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this nomination comes at a time when government agencies across the board are facing steep cuts, right? Restructuring. Early in March, NASA announced that it was eliminating the office of the chief scientist, along with offices that advise the agency on strategy, technology, and those that coordinate its diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility work. In late March, a Doge post said that around $400 million in NASA grants had been terminated. And on Friday, Ars Technica published an analysis of an internal White House budget proposal for NASA. This is something called passback documents. And those call for drastic cuts to NASA's science portfolio.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  The overall proposed cut, agency-wide, would be something like $5 billion off of an overall $25 billion budget. But if all of these cuts go through, science programs at the agency would be cut by about half. And the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is the next big space telescope that people have been hoping for, it's largely already constructed but awaiting launch. That program would be canceled. Now, this is just the White House wish list. Budgets come from Congress, so a lot of these numbers are going to change. But clearly, whoever takes this post will have some pretty complicated work to do.

• 6:24Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, back here on Earth, there was a lot of howling this week over news from a company called Colossal. Tell us about it.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  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 the story was everywhere.

• 6:44Flora Lichtman?

  I saw it. It was, every feed was just, dire wolf, dire wolf, dire wolf.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Time Magazine cover story, right? But, you know, the details are more complicated. Honestly, this, this might be more of a, a press release advance than a de-extinction advance.

• 7:00Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, how dire is their wolf?

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is where the controversy comes in, right? They, 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.

• 7:33Flora Lichtman?

  Key genes, that doesn't sound like a whole dire wolf to me.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  It doesn't. They, 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, you know, the last common ancestor of dire wolves and gray wolves is thought to have lived something like five or six million years ago. So that's a lot of time for genes to change. Can I hit you with a little math here?

• 7:59Flora Lichtman?

  Of course.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Okay, 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, you know, comparison wise, humans and chimps are like 98.8% similar. So closer than the humans to chimps, but not a lot closer, right? 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.

• 8:34Flora Lichtman?

  I love that you took this to the Mathias place, Charles. Very you. I love it.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:48Flora Lichtman?

  Do they have their sights on other extinct animals to quote resurrect?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:00Flora Lichtman?

  I did, of course. Yeah. Again, that's like the number one that fits my algorithm perfectly.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:14Flora Lichtman?

  What is the goal?

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Well, you know, they say that they want to bring back these species to fill ecological niches that have gone away. But, you know, the world has changed. There really is not an ice age for a resurrected mammoth to live in.

• 9:29Flora Lichtman?

  So this wasn't the only story this week about resurrecting long gone life. Tell me about this Baltic Sea algae.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:01Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, 7,000 years of rest and relaxation. I love it.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  Exactly. And this is the world it comes back to. You know, 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.

• 10:21Flora Lichtman?

  We have to take a quick break, but don't go away. More on this when we come back.

• 10:36Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, 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.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is work coming from Washington University in St. 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.

• 11:00Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so how does it work?

• 11:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 11:43Flora Lichtman?

  That's so cool. So it's like bird flu breathalyzer, kind of.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly.

• 11:47Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, and there was, there was news this week of another kind of sensor. This one looking for illegal mining, but there's, it comes with a twist.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a paper in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science about monitoring illegal gold mining in the Amazon, which is, you know, a big environmental concern, but can often go undetected.

• 12:06Flora Lichtman?

  How does it work?

• 12:07Speaker 03

  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 and 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.

• 12:52Flora Lichtman?

  That's cool. The trees are like eavesdropping and calling out the mining.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 12:56Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, 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. Okay, there's pressing research out on how to optimize your cup?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Not exactly pressing. This is pour-over coffee.

• 13:09Flora Lichtman?

  I'm sorry.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, this one is a do-try-this-at-home. Pour-over coffee, the kind where there's like 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.

• 13:31Flora Lichtman?

  Tell us, how do we pour the water?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 13:59Flora Lichtman?

  Yes.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Those do the best job at creating that kind of flow from high up, but not too high up.

• 14:04Flora Lichtman?

  The coffee snobs are gonna love this one.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Exactly. All of your gear is justified.

• 14:10Flora Lichtman?

  Science says so. Okay, finally, new research for the mind wanderers out there. There's good news for us.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  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, "Okay, I'm going to think of something else now." So, you know, maybe it's okay to just space out a bit.

• 15:11Flora Lichtman?

  You can't force the wander.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And fun fact, apparently, our minds are wandering 30% to 50% of the time we're awake. So, you know, don't feel bad if you kind of missed some of this segment. You can listen to it on the podcast later.

• 15:25Flora Lichtman?

  That tracks for me, Charles. I think I need another cup of coffee.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:29Flora Lichtman?

  Sci-Fry's senior producer, Charles Burquist. Thanks for coming on.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Thanks, Laura.

• 15:36Ira Flatow?

  One more thing before we go. Calling all cat people. Next week, we're going to dig into what we do and don't understand about cat genetics and behavior. Is there something weird your cat does that you just can't understand? Do they have an insatiable need to tear every piece of paper in your house to shreds? Does your orange cat match the stereotype of being a menace to society? All great questions. Leave us a voicemail at 1-877-4-SCI-FRY. That's 1-877-4-SCI-FRY.

• 16:20Flora Lichtman?

  And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including...

• 16:25Speaker 04

  Dee Petersman. Praise Aguchi.

• 16:28Flora Lichtman?

  Kathleen Davis.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  Santiago Flores.

• 16:31Flora Lichtman?

  I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.