Under Trump, NASA meetings on hold, missions up in air

NASA is a methodical institution that plans its missions years or even decades in advance, enjoys a famously loyal workforce and carries out its tasks with the kind of precision required to hurl humans into orbit, drive rovers on Mars or build telescopes that can see nearly to the dawn of time.

But at the moment, NASA employees and contractors don’t know what tomorrow will bring – or even if they’ll have jobs. With President Donald Trump’s return to power and the billionaire space entrepreneur Elon Musk patrolling government agencies, the world’s premier space agency has entered a murky realm.

In the days ahead, the agency’s expensive moon rocket, the Space Launch System, could be shelved. NASA’s ambitious plan to send astronauts back to the moon on multiple missions could be scaled back if Trump and Musk push for a rapid pivot to Mars. Even the long-term location of NASA headquarters is up in the air: The agency’s lease in Washington expires in three years, and the headquarters could soon be relocated, possibly to Florida or Texas.

Much of NASA’s immediate future may be in the hands of Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order saying a DOGE Team Lead will be installed at agencies, with authority over hiring decisions.

By Thursday, DOGE had arrived on-site at NASA.

“We anticipate that they will start reviewing our contracts to find efficiencies,” NASA acting administrator Janet Petro wrote in a message sent to employees late Friday and obtained by the Washington Post.

Trump’s order requires agencies to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.” In her memo Friday, Petro wrote, “NASA intends to comply with this and all executive orders.”

Members of the space community have expressed fear that the administration could ask for deep cuts to the $25 billion agency when the president submits his budget request to Congress.

“Our immensely successful research enterprise is under attack,” said Garth Illingworth, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz and one of the scientists who decades ago conceived of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Already some workers have accepted the government’s “deferred resignation” offer, although the agency hasn’t said how many. Adhering to one of Trump’s executive orders, NASA said remote work must end no later than Feb. 28 for employees across the country. That could cause a wave of departures.

“NASA is about to lose a ton of experienced people who, up until now, have been considered a national asset,” said a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center engineer who has been with the agency for two decades. He requested anonymity, saying he and other employees are afraid to speak publicly for fear of retaliation.

After Feb. 28, NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said in an email, supervisors can approve “situational telework for employees to accommodate personal needs, e.g., medical appointments or inclement weather.”

NASA enjoys an unusual degree of bipartisan support – Republicans and Democrats cherish the aerospace dollars the agency spends in centers and research institutions across the country – and has managed in recent years to float above the most intense political battles. But it is still an executive branch agency that must comply with Trump’s executive orders and other mandates from administration officials.

That includes Trump’s executive orders to end any programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and terminate employees who worked on them. Like scientists and engineers across the government and in academia, NASA officials have for many years embraced efforts to diversify their ranks.

The agency did not offer details about the specific programs affected by Trump’s DEI order or the number of employees involved.

“NASA is committed to engaging the best talent to drive innovation and achieve our mission for the benefit of all. As new guidance comes in, we’re working to adhere to new requirements in a timely manner,” NASA’s Warner said.

In the wake of the administration’s orders, NASA on Jan. 31 paused all activities of many advisory organizations, including scientific groups that focus on planetary science. These groups look at specific targets of research, such as Mercury, Venus, Mars or the moon. This is a temporary pause “pending a review to ensure compliance with recent presidential actions,” Warner said.

One of the groups affected, the Mercury Exploration Assessment Group, known as MExAG, was supposed to gather Feb. 4 for three days of talks about the first rock from the sun. Meeting planners expected about 60 people to show up at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Research Laboratory in suburban Washington. After Trump issued his executive order on Jan. 20, the MExAG group’s leaders canceled discussions that touched on DEI. They thought that would satisfy the Trump administration’s requirement.

“We thought our meeting was compliant,” said Stephen Parman, a geophysicist at Brown University. He said he was speaking solely in his capacity as a professor, and not on behalf of the MExAG, of which he is vice-chair.

The Jan. 31 NASA decision forced the Mercury experts to cancel the entire meeting. The cancellation was previously reported by SpaceNews and other websites.

“The main thing I worry about is the effect on the young planetary scientists,” Parman said. “For them, this is a great meeting to meet more experienced scientists. To have it just shut down, it sends kind of a negative impression of the field. And then I worry about good people leaving the field.”

Trump has nominated Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, to serve as NASA administrator. Isaacman has been a customer of Musk’s SpaceX, having twice flown to orbit on private missions via SpaceX’s rockets and capsules.

Although he is a nontraditional choice for the job, Isaacman’s nomination drew applause across the space community. He is likely to win Senate confirmation easily.

His selection will surely accelerate the growth of the commercial space industry. Musk’s company, SpaceX, was NASA’s second-largest contractor in fiscal year 2023, outpacing even titanic aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Just two decades after it was a tiny start-up that had yet to launch anything, SpaceX is now the global leader in rocket launches.

Amid the recent turmoil, some NASA webpages were removed or altered in an attempt by the agency to comply with orders from Trump and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In one case highlighted by the online site NASA Watch, a NASA webpage that provided a historical account of the first class of astronauts that included women and people of color disappeared.

In an email Monday, Warner said the agency is “looking at content that was previously removed out of an abundance of caution, and restoring content as appropriate.”

NASA missions such as the troubled Mars Sample Return effort, intended to haul samples of Martian soil back to Earth, were vulnerable even before Trump returned to power. NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which is supposed to send astronauts to lunar orbit next year and then to the surface in 2027 as part of the Artemis program, is agency-owned hardware. Its development over the past decade-plus has cost tens of billions of dollars. Critics have declared it a white elephant and a waste of taxpayer dollars in an era when commercial companies can provide launches at a much lower cost.

But Artemis, NASA’s lunar program, still has strong bipartisan support. Speaking to reporters this week, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, seemed to offer support for Artemis while leaving open the possibility of a significant change in how the mission is carried out.

“I think we’ll continue to see innovation, What is important is that we keep moving forward to the stated objectives, and we do so with cause,” Cruz said.

Asked if he would support a directive to end the rocket program, he said, “those conversations are ongoing.”

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Hannah Natanson and Christian Davenport contributed to this report.