Like many of the rest of the federal government at the moment, NASA is faltering during the first turbulent days of the Trump government.
The last two weeks have brought a change in leadership in the form of interim manager Janet Petro, whose Ascension was a surprise. Her first act was to tell employees of the agency to remove and “report” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility contracts about everyone who has not carried out this order. Soon civil servants started to receive e -mails from the American personnel management office that some people push them to resign.
Then there are the actions of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Last week he caused doubts by claiming that NASA had “stranded” astronauts at the space station. (The astronauts are completely safe and have a journey home.) Perhaps even more important, he owns the most important contractor of the space agency and in recent weeks it has become deeply entangled in the operation of the US government through his government efficiency department. For some NASA employees, regardless of whether it is true or not, there is now an uncomfortable feeling that they work for Musk and to carry out contracts to SpaceX.
This care was raised at the end of Friday when Petro announced that an old SpaceX employee named Michael Altenhofen had joined the office “as a senior adviser to the NASA manager.” Altenhofen is an accomplished engineer who left NASA an internship in 2005, but spent the past 15 years in SpaceX, most recently as a leader of human space programs. He certainly brings expertise, but his recruitment also calls concern about the influence of SpaceX on NASA operations. Petro did not respond to a request for comments on Monday about possible conflicts of interest and the scope of the involvement of Altenhofen.
This weekend I spent talking and texting NASA sources in various centers throughout the country, and the compelling message is that it is morally at the desk 'absurd low'. Meetings between civil servants and their leadership, such as an all-hand meeting in the Langley Research Center of NASA in Virginia, have recently been loaded with tension. Nobody knows what will happen.
