Delian Asparouhov: Jared Isaacman is the best possible NASA pick, and the moon is the right pit stop on the way to Mars

Summary

Delian Asparouhov, partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of Varda Space Industries, argues that Jared Isaacman is the best possible pick to lead NASA — someone who completed the first commercial spacewalk in human history, built a substantial business, and understands capital markets. Sources close to the Senate confirmation process suggest it is on track, and with one prior withdrawal already on the record, a second rejection is politically unlikely.

Moon vs. Mars

Asparouhov has long held that the moon is the right pit stop on the way to Mars, and the case for that position has strengthened. Ten years ago, Musk's push to go straight to Mars made sense when the industry was too fragile to sustain a two-destination strategy. Today that logic no longer applies. November 2025 was the first month in human history with more orbital rocket launches than days in the month — a data point Asparouhov cites as evidence of genuine industrial abundance. In that environment, the moon becomes a productive intermediate step rather than a distraction. Even Musk has shifted, recently discussing building mass drivers on the lunar surface to manufacture and ship solar panels, data centers, and industrial equipment to Mars at near-zero marginal cost.

A lunar mass driver works because the moon has no atmosphere — an electromagnetic sled, effectively a maglev track, can accelerate cargo to escape velocity without the heat and drag that make the concept impractical on Earth. The moon's weaker gravity well reduces the speed required further. Asparouhov's vision is a lunar industrial outpost that functions as a logistics hub: materials mined and manufactured there, launched cheaply toward Earth orbit or deeper into the solar system.

NASA budget and program priorities

The White House budget proposal came in below the current $25 billion NASA baseline, so Isaacman is unlikely to publicly push for more. Asparouhov expects him instead to hold the budget flat while aggressively reallocating it — cutting programs the commercial sector now handles more cheaply and redirecting funds toward things like CLPS (the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program), which pays contractors a flat rate per kilogram delivered to the lunar surface, roughly $100,000/kg. The contractor keeps any margin from doing it cheaper. With Starship flying regularly, New Glenn now operational as a second large reusable orbital rocket, and Rocket Lab's Neutron and Stoke Space likely online in 2026, continuing to fund SLS makes little sense. Asparouhov's read is that Isaacman will move to cut those legacy programs and reassign the savings.

His preferred strategy for Isaacman: fund Firefly and similar providers to land on the moon not once a year but quarterly, establish a regular supply chain, and use that cadence to seed a wave of companies building lunar robots, humanoids, pavers, and solar panel assemblers — so that by the time humans arrive, robotic infrastructure is already in place.

Golden Dome

The Missile Defense Agency recently awarded roughly 1,000 contractors out of approximately 3,000 applicants onto its Golden Dome IDIQ. Varda was among those awarded. Space Force has also handed out its first space-based intercept contracts, though the winners were not disclosed for national security reasons. Asparouhov expects first demonstrations of fielded capabilities by end of 2026, with a broader set of demos across space radar, space intercept, space-to-ground systems, advanced ground radar, and hypersonic interceptors arriving in 2027. His view on program durability: the fastest way to protect Golden Dome across a potential change in administration is to get capabilities into the hands of warfighters before the next election cycle — fielded systems are far harder to cancel than R&D programs.

Starship and SpaceX trajectory

Asparouhov's 2020 prediction was that Starship would take roughly as long as Falcon 9 to reach true production rate, given a comparable step-up in complexity. He stands by that: 200 Starship launches per year by end of decade is still his rough estimate. The more underappreciated point is that Starship is already functional — it reaches orbit and carries large payloads cheaply today. The remaining engineering challenge is reliable reusability on landing, and SpaceX is deliberately not scaling production rate until that is solved. The next public narrative around SpaceX, in his view, will shift toward extraterrestrial missions — the company holds a large NASA contract to land on the moon and is devoting significant internal resources to it, even though that work is largely invisible next to Starship and Starlink headlines.

On the Apollo-era debate between refueling in orbit versus shooting straight for the moon: Wernher von Braun won that argument partly because it let him build one very large rocket. Counterintuitively, the refueling architecture is more sustainable at scale — you don't load a car with all the fuel it will ever need before a long trip. For a full Mars mission, Asparouhov estimates roughly 26 orbital refuels are needed; for the moon, closer to three.

Space-based data centers

Asparouhov is not moving off his skeptical position. His argument is structural: nuclear-powered terrestrial data centers, optical fiber, cheap buildings, solar, and batteries are all improving rapidly on the ground, while space remains more complex and expensive on every dimension. By 2030, ground-based operators like Crusoe will almost certainly have better economics than any orbital data center. His concession is narrow — satellites with onboard compute (Starlink already carries it) will handle edge inference for things calculated in orbit or for users who are physically in orbit. That is a sliver, not a market. Varda shareholders have lobbied him to use space factories to manufacture components for terrestrial data centers; he acknowledges the idea but says his job is revenue and returns, not hype.