Enjoy the Pluto Show! Nothing else to see here.

Yesterday at a Senate hearing over NASA's 2027 budget, billionaire, outer-space sports betting trailblazer and current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said that he is "very much in the camp of 'make Pluto a planet again.'"

The internet, predictably, took note.

"NASA Administrator thinks Pluto should be a planet" (The Independent)

NASA chief Jared Isaacman says he's fighting for Pluto: 'I am very much in the camp of 'make Pluto a planet again' (Space.com)

The head of NASA is now openly campaigning to make Pluto a planet again (Space Daily)

NASA Chief Jared Isaacman hints at campaigning to make Pluto a planet again (Scientific American)

Quit Whining. Pluto’s Not A Planet — An Astrophysicist Explains (Forbes)

MPAPA!

Let's be clear: the Pluto thing is nothing more than nostalgia-fueled science populism. It might seem silly. It is. We unfortunately live in times in which it is important to take silly things like this seriously.

Yes, there are "some experts" — real, serious scientists — who legitimately think demoting Pluto wasn't the right call. No, that does not mean that Isaacman is acting in good faith by bringing up the Pluto thing. As Naomi Klein outlined in her book Doppelganger, the "Mirror World" of populists and conspiracy theorists draws much of its power by promising to solve twisted doubles of real problems. The gold-gilded White House's executive order on "Gold Standard Science" already deployed this strategy to masterful effect by appropriating the rhetoric of the open science movement to attack science and scientists.

But Pluto — wow, what a move. Just fantastic. Whether or not Isaacman planned for the Pluto thing to get so much media attention, he did plan to bring it up at the hearing ("I would have brought it up myself, Senator"). And he sure seemed happy to have a chance to talk about Pluto. "Make Pluto a Planet Again," he said, the corners of his mouth twisting upward as he slowed down to enunciate each syllable. Who can say if it was a knowing grin? A smug smirk?

You may have missed it if you, like me, don't live in the Mirror World (though Sci Fri did notice), but this is not Isaacman's first flirt with making Pluto a planet again. A few weeks ago, Isaacman and Pluto were even in the news. Fox News, that is. A cute 10-year-old space enthusiast wrote an enthusiastic letter to NASA begging them to make Pluto a planet again, and an online acquaintance of her mom — a weather blogger and recurring guest on Fox's weather segment — posted the letter to X. It went viral, and Isaacman responded.

"It should be a planet. I mean, more than half of people online think it should be," said Mike of Mike's Weather Page. "I did a little AI summary of the post and it said 95% plus of the 10,000 comments over on X were in favor... it's something about it, it brought back memories."

Hm.

Oh. Also. Just a few days before that letter went up, Isaacman sat down with the tabloid Daily Mail for an interview that was nominally about Artemis II to say "I fully support President Trump making Pluto Great Again... I think we owe it to everyone from Kansas and all their contributions to science and aerospace to rightfully restore that discovery."

Who was it that brought up the Pluto thing at the Senate appropriations committee again? Ah yes, Senator Moran from Kansas.

What a coincidence.

It goes back even further. In May 2025, William Shatner — yes, the man who played Captain Kirk in Star Trek — posted on X calling the International Astronomical Union "just a bunch of corrupt nerds on a power trip" and suggesting that Trump re-instate Pluto's planethood by executive order.

Elon Musk, then still presiding over the DOGE rampage, concurred.

Interesting.

Oh. And in February 2025, not even a full month into Trump's term in office, Republican Senator Mike Lee asked Trump to do "one thing" for "us."

Make Pluto Planetary Again, of course. Gulf of America-style.

How strange.

It's almost as if Isaacman somehow knew the people yearned for Pluto.

It's almost as if he knew that they would cry: Rejoice, for NASA has restored the rightful order of things! Rejoice, for NASA finally has an administrator who listens to us! Finally, someone is willing to stick it to those killjoy scientists with their made-up rules! Finally, we have a space agency that also wants to travel back to the Good Times, to your childhood, when you memorized all nine planets. Finally, we have a space agency that doesn't hate fun.

It's all so delicious, so delightful, that one could easily forget the itty bitty little fact that the White House's proposed 2027 NASA budget that Isaacman came to defend would have cut funding overall by 23%, slashed science nearly in half, and threatened 84 space missions. Make Pluto a Planet Again is so damn salient that one might easily miss that the planetary science community described the budget as an "extinction-level event" for NASA Science. Reveling in stick-it-to-the-science-man schadenfreude is just so fun that one might even forget that it was NASA Science that brought you New Horizons and took all those pretty pictures of Pluto's cute little heart.

The FY 2027 NASA budget request

An analysis of the latest President’s Budget Request for NASA.

The Planetary Society

Thankfully, the Senate committee appears to care more about NASA Science than the NASA administrator does. The committee challenged Isaacman's defense of the "extinction-level" budget request and is set to reject it; NASA will probably get about as much funding in 2027 as it got last year. Still, there is something surreal about seeing the head of a storied space agency advocate for getting less funding for his own organization.

But never mind that.

Never mind that the White House tried to push through the same budgetary apocalypse — including the 47 percent cut to NASA science — last year.

Never mind that NASA lost a fifth of its staff and 10,000 PhDs left the federal workforce within a year of Trump taking office.