President Donald Trump first ran on a campaign to “make America great again.” Whether he’s been successful in doing so (or if America was ever great to begin with) is hotly contested—but even as the work continues on our home planet, one NASA leader is encouraging Trump to set his sights even further.
Newly appointed NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said he thinks Pluto should regain the planetary status that it controversially lost 20 years ago.
“I 100% support President Trump making Pluto great again,” Isaacman told Daily Mail in a new interview. Isaacman cited Pluto’s discovery by Clyde Tombaugh, the farmboy-turned-astronomer who first spotted Pluto from a Kansas observatory in 1930, as one reason it ought to be recognized as a planet.
“I think we owe it to everyone from Kansas and all their great contributions to astronomy and aerospace to rightfully restore that discovery to a planet,” Isaacman said.
When Pluto got demoted
Pluto may have been discovered by an American, but that doesn’t mean President Trump controls its planetary status.
That power falls to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which decided two decades ago that Pluto doesn’t meet the criteria to be a planet.
It may orbit the Sun and be large enough to form a nearly round shape—two of the three qualifications for planetary status, according to NASA—but it “has not been able to clear its orbit of debris,” the IAU’s 2006 resolution stated.
As such, the IAU declared Pluto a dwarf planet instead.
The push to be a planet
Folks have been fighting to reverse Pluto’s demotion from the moment it was decided. That fervor has reached a fever pitch under Trump, with both celebrities and government officials weighing in.
In 2025, Star Trek actor William Shatner decried the IAU’s authority over space and asked for Elon Musk’s help in getting Trump’s attention: “We should ask Elon to get the President to sign one of those Executive thingies to make Pluto a planet again,” he posted on X, to which Musk replied, “I’d support that.”
On the political side, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) asked Trump to “Make Pluto Planetary Again” in a post of his own last February.
Even Isaacman’s predecessor Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator during Trump’s first administration, said at a 2019 press event that “Pluto is a planet, and you can write that the NASA administrator declared Pluto a planet once again.”
Trump himself has yet to address the demands to “make Pluto great again”—though judging from his track record of renaming things he has no claim over (does anyone actually call it the Gulf of America?), it wouldn’t be surprising if he tried to exert power over Pluto.
Isaacman’s rocky history with Trump
Though Isaacman only became the administrator of NASA in December of 2025, he was first nominated for the position by Trump a year prior in December 2024, when Trump was still only the president-elect.
Though Isaacman passed a Senate Committee vote in April of 2025, his nomination was rescinded by the White House a month later, just a week before he was set to be confirmed by the full Senate.
“After a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA,” Trump posted on social media at the time, referring to Isaacman’s previous donations to Democratic politicians.
But Trump changed his mind about Isaacman yet again that November, when he nominated Isaacman for the position a second time. Trump’s reasoning for the switch-up isn’t totally clear: He and then-acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy reportedly met with Isaacman in the months leading up to the nomination.
On the day of Isaacman’s swearing-in, Trump issued a sweeping executive order, which included plans to put astronauts back on the moon by 2028 and to begin progress on a permanent lunar base by 2030.
