NASA's new boss is a billionaire who has been to space twice on private missions - and he just told a Senate committee his other goal is making Pluto a planet again.
Jared Isaacman testified Tuesday before the Senate appropriations committee on the White House's 2027 NASA budget request, where the Pluto answer landed by surprise during what was otherwise a tense hearing about agency spending cuts.
When asked about Pluto's status, Isaacman didn't hedge. "Senator, I am very much in the camp of 'make Pluto a planet again,'" he said.
He went a step further: "We are doing some papers right now on, I think, a position that we would love to escalate through the scientific community to revisit this discussion."
That's a sitting NASA administrator publicly backing a campaign that the world's professional astronomers settled almost 20 years ago.
The International Astronomical Union laid out three rules for what counts as a planet: it has to orbit the sun, it has to be round, and it has to clear other objects from its orbital path.
Pluto fails the last test, since it shares space with a crowd of other icy worlds in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of the solar system.
Pluto fans have an answer to that. Earth and Jupiter share orbits with asteroids too, which is why supporters argue the rule cuts off Pluto on a technicality.
NASA's New Horizons probe flew past Pluto in 2015 and photographed a heart-shaped feature now called Tombaugh Regio, named for Pluto's original discoverer Clyde Tombaugh - the only American ever to find what was once called a planet.
Not much, directly. The IAU is the global body that defines astronomical terms, not NASA and definitely not the U.S. government - which means any reclassification has to go through an IAU vote.
But a NASA administrator publicly endorsing the campaign turns up the volume in a way scientists can't ignore.
Isaacman said NASA's papers will try to push the conversation back through scientific channels. A separate proposed Pluto orbiter mission would study a possible subsurface ocean on the dwarf planet, though that mission is still waiting on approval and funding.
Isaacman's confirmation as NASA chief in December 2025 was widely read as a signal of where U.S. space policy is headed under the second Trump administration.
A billionaire private astronaut running the agency suggests a tilt toward commercial partnerships, faster mission timelines, and a more public-facing administrator than NASA has historically had - all of which matters for the publicly traded contractors that supply the agency.
The bigger picture: the Pluto debate is fun, but it's the budget fight underneath it that moves dollars.
Isaacman's main job at the budget hearing wasn't Pluto - it was defending a White House proposal that would cut NASA science funding by roughly half.
The Pluto comment grabbed the headlines, but the appropriations vote that follows is the real story for any investor with exposure to defense, aerospace, or space-tech names.
