This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Bob Zimmerman about Jared Isaacman,

an astronaut, a spacewalker, and momentarily nominated his administrator for NASA, the new NASA,

the one that's partnering with all the commercial enterprises. And then the Trump administration

turned its back. And now, Bob explains, Isaacman is back, maybe back bigger than ever.

Much more of this tonight.

Bob Zimmerman.

For those that don't remember, Jared Isaacman's billionaire who flew twice on his own private,

manned missions using a dragon capsule on a Falcon 9.

He even did a spacewalk on the second mission.

So he's a space cadet. He's also, though, a billionaire.

And he was nominated by Trump to be head of NASA in December.

He went through the committee hearing processes, the vetting, the whole deal.

He sold off some of his companies so there wouldn't be complex of interest.

And then he was scheduled to have a Senate vote in early June to get him nominated.

And all signs said he would be easily nominated.

But just before that Senate vote, Trump suddenly withdrew his nomination,

said, nope, I'm not going to do it. There were a lot of rumors about why he did this, but we've

never really gotten a clear answer. One of the things we thought that people speculated is

that Eisenman had previously supported Democrats with donations, mostly Democrats. And that

was put some, took some gloss over his nomination for the Republican Trump administration.

And secondly, he had close links to Musk because of his missions to send to space on Falcon 9 with SpaceX.

And at the time that Trump withdrew the nomination, it was also about the time he was having his

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