Trump's pick for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, is pictured second from the right in a SpaceX Dragon capsule in preparation for a 2021 commercial space mission. (SpaceX via AP)
President-elect Donald Trump's choice to be NASA's next administrator, Jared Isaacman, said Wednesday that as the U.S. establishes more of human presence in space, it will eventually need Space Force guardians stationed in the domain to protect its economic interests.
"I think it is absolutely inevitable," Isaacman said at the Space Force Association's Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida. "If Americans are in low Earth orbit, there's going to need to be people watching out for them for all the reasons we described before."
Isaacman, a tech billionaire who has traveled to space twice on commercial missions, said exploration and economic ambitions will drive more commercial and civil activity in space in the coming years -- from space mining to NASA discovery missions. While some of that work will be done by robotic probes or remote operators, some of it will also require human input, he said.
Isaacman is CEO of Shift4 Payments, a payment processing company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In 2012, he co-founded Draken International -- a firm that trains pilots on its own fleet of privately owned military fighter jets. He links his interest in space to his own background as a jet pilot.
In 2021, he self-funded a mission to space aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, the first-ever spaceflight crewed only by civilians. In September, he took his second trip to space as part of a SpaceX program called Polaris. During that mission, he and three crewmates performed the first commercial spacewalk.
Isaacman is not the first to suggest that the military may one day have troops in space. The former second in command at U.S. Space Command, retired Lt. Gen. John Shaw, said in 2020 that the Defense Department would one day send guardians to operate command centers or perform other missions in the domain.
Other military officials have suggested it could be several decades before Space Force personnel deploy to orbit.
Isaacman didn't offer a timeline for his prediction but suggested that a military presence in space could coincide with future NASA moon and Mars missions.
"This is the trajectory that humankind is going to follow," Isaacman said. "America is going to lead it and we're going to need guardians there on the high ground looking out for us."