NASA's top candidate for its still-open administrator position — a space tourist who was handpicked to run the agency by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — has been thrown under the bus by the Trump administration.

As scooped by Semafor, the White House has pulled its nomination for billionaire fighter jet pilot-turned-SpaceX astronaut Jared Isaacman.

While the exact reasoning behind the eyebrow-raising move remains unclear at best — a White House spokesperson said Isaacman wasn't in "full alignment with" the Trump agenda — the timing of the announcement comes as Musk's relationship with the Trump administration is visibly fraying.

The mercurial CEO arrived at his own White House goodbye party last week with a black eye, which he blamed on his five-year-old son, bookending chaotic and destructive months in Washington, DC. Given recent reports, a major rift appears to have opened up between Musk and Trumpworld.

In other words, it's easy to imagine that the Trump administration pulled Isaacman from consideration out of retribution, given the latter's extremely cozy relationship with Musk.

During his confirmation hearing, the former NASA administrator hopeful had to repeatedly assure lawmakers he wasn't in the pocket of the richest man in the world, going as far as to diverge from Musk's plans to make sending humans to Mars a top priority.

But it was hard to see much daylight between the two. The SpaceX CEO played a key role in Isaacman's nomination, catapulting him to the front of the line.

As such, the pulling of his nomination could represent a major blow to SpaceX, which has relied heavily on NASA contracts to sustain itself since its early years.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has indicated that it's planning to catastrophically slash the space agency's science budget, an existential risk for major interplanetary missions, including NASA's next major space telescope and Mars Sample Return mission.

Isaacman said he planned to lead missions to both the Moon and Mars simultaneously, despite extremely slimmed-down budgets, potentially handing SpaceX major contracts for trips to the Red Planet on board its still-under-development Starship rocket.

But now that he's been kicked to the curb by the Trump administration, lawmakers are bound to ask some tough questions. The US Senate Commerce Committee approved his nomination in late April, voting 19 to nine, including unanimous support from Republicans, as Ars Technica reports.

In spite of his close ties to Musk, Isaacman remains a popular figure in the space community, likely making his abrupt departure a tough pill to swallow for many influential figures.

"NASA is f*cked," a current NASA leader to Ars.

"NASA's budget request is just a going-out-of-business mode without Jared there to innovate," a separate NASA leader added.

Chances are that Isaacman could make his return to his civilian space exploration program, Polaris Dawn, which was put "on hold" following his nomination. In September, he became the first private astronaut to go on a spacewalk outside of a SpaceX spacecraft.

Now that he's become the victim of the murky machinations of an administration that has long been known to throw anybody who fails Trump's loyalty test to the wolves, chances are he may soon be headed off-planet once again to leave all of that drama behind.

More on Isaacman: Incoming NASA Administrator Throws Elon Musk's Mars Plans Under the Bus


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