After each federal employee received an email asking them to list his recent achievements, the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk warn who did not respond would be dismissed. NASA said rather that the answer was optional and that its leadership would deal with the issue.
Two weeks after the confrontation, the space agency reached an orbit route on a SpaceX rocket.
This is another indicator that, despite an aggressive thrust of the Trump administration and the musk to considerably reduce public spending and the federal workforce that have led to certain public disputes, the spatial scientific missions of NASA – and its relationship with SpaceX, the dominant launch provider in the United States – have so far remained relatively not.
The space agency narrowly escaped the mass dismissal of its probationary employees and has remained outside the political reticulation of the Musk Government Department, which works to reduce funding in agencies like the National Health Institutes and the Environmental protection agency.
He also survived a few quarrels tense with the CEO of SpaceX, including the Musk call to Boarding the international space station As soon as possible, before its scheduled dating date in 2030.
However, tangible threats to the status quo of the space agency are looming on the horizon, according to experts in space policy, including potentially important budget cuts and staff reductions through the normal government processes.
“There is a lot of this very disturbing and very symbolic culture war … that makes a lot of attention,” said Casey Dreier, head of the space policy of the Planetary Society, a non -profit organization based in Pasadena pleading for the science of space and exploration. “But the biggest problem is the most daily, NASA will get the money he needs to make the projects she said to do.”
SpaceX launched two NASA spacecraft on Tuesday – both from part of the agency Explorers' programDesigned to provide frequent flight and funding possibilities for spatial scientific missions – on its Falcon 9 rocket.
It included a spacecraft from the NASA jet propulsion laboratory at La Cañada Flintridge which will study the Rapid expansion that occurred during the first fraction of the universe And a mission of the Southwest Research Institute, a private non -profit organization based in Texas and Colorado, which will explore the dynamics of the solar wind.
Despite the public clashes, a spokesperson for NASA said that the agency's relationship with the Musk company remained strong.
“NASA works with partners like SpaceX to build a economy in low terrestrial orbit and make our next giant jumps in exploration at the Moon and Mars for the benefit of all,” the spokesman said in a statement. “To date, NASA has invested more than $ 15 billion in SpaceX for its work as part of many agency contracts.”
Falcon 9 has become one of the most prolific and reliable rides in space (and unlike SpaceX Development dishes rocketIt does not explode frequently). A large part of the rocket's success is thanks to a partnership of almost two decades with NASA.
The space agency financed the development of the rocket in 2006 as part of a Push to promote a booming private industry Before the retirement of the space shuttle. Two years later, SpaceX was the first private company to reach space with a rocket supplied by liquid, using a pioneer at the Falcon 9 scale.
In the years that followed, NASA has given billions of spacex contracts in terms of shuttle and, later, astronauts towards and since the ISS; Launch the scientific missions far beyond the orbit of the earth; And now develop a spaceship for Deep the ISS In 2030 and the Starship rocket to bring humans back to the moon.
While SpaceX excelled in the development of rockets, other private launch companies – and NASA itself – had trouble following.
In 2014, NASA Boeing rewarded $ 4.2 billion and SpaceX $ 2.6 billion to develop capsules to launch astronauts at ISS. But while SpaceX launched 10 missions to the ISS with NASA astronauts to date, Boeing has only succeeded in one sloppy crew test which left two American astronauts on the ISS without return, to SpaceX agreed to bring them home.
(In particular, this involved another incident between NASA musc, in which the first described astronauts as “blocked”, Despite the latter's insistence that it was a bad characterization.)
Meanwhile, the successor to the NASA space shuttle, the spatial launch system, has accumulated billions of cost and years of delays. Rocket rocket boosters and engines were originally to cost $ 7 billion over 14 years of development and flights. This has reached at least $ 13.1 billion over 25 years, according to a report of the office of the Inspector General of NASA.
The result: over the years, the American space agency has become more and more dependent on SpaceX and Musk for access to space.
Then the Trump administration DOGE has created – A temporary organization at the executive office (and not an official department of the government) – and has scored Musk as an employee of the special government to direct it.
The administration began to fire employees probationary – government employees during their first year of a new role, which are not yet considered as employees apart National Park ServiceAmerican agency for international development, and more recently, the Oceanic and atmospheric national administration.
On February 18, NASA employees prepared for a similar cup, but it never came. The agency announced that it had worked with the staff management office to avoid layoffs and that around 5% of the workforce had voluntarily resigned in the context of a separate program to reduce the size of the federal workforce.
Instead, the agency began to undertake a longer -term reduction in books A decree. The agency, in A document describing the processsaid he intended to proceed in a way that “minimizes the negative impact on employees and limits the disturbances of the missions, programs, operations and critical organizations of critical agencies”.
The agency is associated with OPM and DOGE to reduce the reduction and has no reduction objective in a specific percentage, said a spokesperson for NASA in a press release.
During a cabinet meeting, Musk said Doge's objective is not to be “capricious or unfair” and said that the temporary organization had no target number. Instead, he wants to keep “all those who do an essential job and who does this work well”.
Nasa started layoffs on Monday With 23 employees in the offices of advisory sciences and policies, as well as a branch of diversity, equity and inclusion.
JPL employees, an entrepreneur of the government funded by NASA but managed by Caltech, are exempt from the reduction, confirmed NASA and the JPL. However, the laboratory remains at the whims of federal funding for its missions.
While, publicly, the scientific financing of NASA has not experienced the same level of control or cuts as other scientific agencies, the Congress has a budgetary due date with rapid approach and, in accordance with the White House, the chambers controlled by the Republicans are established on the reduction of federal expenses.
The implications for NASA scientific programs could be important.
In an example of a budgetary proposal for the 2023 financial year, the director of Trump of the management and budget office proposed half reduce NASA's scientific budget – which would far exceed the budget reductions prior to the agency's scientific programs.
As a general rule, NASA's scientific budget follows the trends in the rest of the discretionary budget, which does not include compulsory expenses such as health insurance and social security which is managed outside the typical budget process.
“People love NASA, but in general, NASA's budget does not give up the trend of the global non -defense discretion,” said Dreier. “If this pie becomes larger, the slice of NASA becomes a little larger, but if it becomes smaller, the slice of NASA does not remain large.”
When the congress has difficult choices to make on the programs to be financed, it is often the scientific and technological side – and not the side of human space flights – of the agency which sees the largest cuts.
In particular – with representatives who jockeying to bring funding to their own voters – the conservative states are home to the biggest human space flight centers in NASA, such as Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Texas. More liberal states are home to many science centers, such as JPL and Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which manages the Explorers program.
And in scientific expenditure, it is the major flagship scientific missions, such as the James Webb space telescope, which survive, while smaller missions, such as those of the Explorers program, are found on the Cup block.
The biggest missions often have many more defenders across the country ready to defend the programs and to arouse the backlash if they are canceled.
The senate has not yet held a hearing For the choice of Trump's NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, a Musk and SpaceX trading partner who went up to space on a Falcon 9 rocket in 2021 as part of the first space mission with a fully civilian crew.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comments.
