A tumultuous start to a new administration at NASAby Jeff Foust
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| “We are taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump's executive orders,” Petro’s memo stated. |
But a couple of hours later, the new Trump White House released a statement listing its choices for interim heads of agencies. For NASA, the White House picked not Free but instead Janet Petro, director of the Kennedy Space Center, to serve as acting administrator. There is no requirement that the associate administrator, the highest-ranking civil servant at the agency, serve as acting administrator, and new presidents can, if they prefer, select someone else. But the choice of Petro took many by surprise: according to some sources, even senior leadership at NASA, which no doubt approved the website changes, were unaware that the Trump Administration picked Petro.
The confusion about who was in charge of NASA led the agency to send a brief statement to reporters that evening: “The Trump Administration has named Janet Petro the acting administrator of NASA, effective Monday. Petro has served as the center director of the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.” A spokesperson added that NASA would “work to get additional information to you as soon as possible” about the transition, but the agency didn’t release that additional information as of the end of the week.
That confusion was just part of an unconventional transition. While previous transitions usually publicized who served on the “agency review teams” assigned to NASA to examine programs—and sometimes uncover problems—the incoming Trump Administration elected not to do so. (The identities of the people on that team gradually came to light, including Jim Morhard, NASA deputy administrator in the first Trump Administration, and entrepreneur and longtime space advocate Charles Miller.)
That team did not appear to spend much time at NASA. In an interview in mid-December, outgoing NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy—who served on the Biden Administration’s NASA transition team—noted that while the agency had been informed of who was on Trump’s team, she knew little else about any work they were doing. The transition, she concluded, would be “very compressed.”
The first week of the Trump Administration was tumultuous at NASA, but for reasons not directly linked to space policy. One of the first executive orders issued by President Trump after taking office was to end efforts related to diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI, sometimes with the addition of accessibility, for DEIA) across the federal government. DEI plans, the White House claimed, “demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination,” and the order directed agencies to shut down those efforts and terminate those working on them.
By Wednesday, those efforts were underway at federal agencies, including NASA. Over the course of Wednesday afternoon, people reported that the website for NASA’s Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity was no longer accessible, returning a “404” error indicating the page had been removed. (Or, as NASA’s site put it: “The cosmic object you were looking for has disappeared beyond the event horizon.”) Because of the intricacies of content delivery systems and caching, some people reported the site was still active while others reported it was down, a superposition that persisted until late in the day, when the site was inaccessible to all.
The same was true for sites at NASA centers associated with diversity efforts. “Office Of Diversity and Equal Opportunity has been decommissioned,” stated the site for the office at the Langley Research Center.
| “At NASA and Kennedy Space Center, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility has been paramount to mission success,” Petro said in a 2021 interview. |
An exception, for a time, was one at JPL, which is run by Caltech and not NASA. It remained up through late in the week, highlighting the lab’s diversity efforts and that it had a chief inclusion officer. By the weekend, though, the page listed only generic “benefits and perks,” with no mention of diversity and inclusion.
As the NASA DEI sites were going offline, agency employees received a memo from Petro, the acting administrator. “We are taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump's executive orders,” the memo stated. “These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.”
The memo included what, to many employees, was ominous language. “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language,” it stated, calling on employees to report any changes in contract language or job titles made since the November election to an email address at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
“There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information,” the memo stated. “However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.” The memo didn’t elaborate on what those “adverse consequences” might be.
Some who disapproved of the memo turned their frustration and anger towards Petro, but the story is more complicated. The memo that Petro sent to NASA employees was identical to a “template employee letter” included in a memo from Charles Ezell, acting director of OPM, on Tuesday, directing agencies to take measures like removing “outward facing media” about DEIA efforts by Wednesday and report information to the office on DEIA-related positions and contracts.
Petro herself has previously praised NASA’s DEIA efforts. “At NASA and Kennedy Space Center, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility has been paramount to mission success,” Petro said in an interview with the publication Engineering News-Record in November 2021, several months after becoming director of KSC. “The entire NASA leadership team stands behind this commitment.”
It was also important to her personally, she added. “Since the beginning of my professional journey, I have been in the minority of the organization I belonged to—whether it was flying helicopters in the Army or working as a mechanical engineer or program manager in a commercial aerospace company,” she stated. “I often found myself either the only female, or only one of a couple. There weren’t many minorities either.”
She concluded that, as the center’s director, “I am committed to leading Kennedy Space Center to have a diverse and inclusive environment where everyone can thrive.”
By the end of the week, NASA was working through other aspects of the implementation of the DEIA executive order, including ending contracts and notifying researchers they no longer must include inclusion plans in their grant proposals. The agency was also working on other executive orders, one that placed a hiring freeze on the federal workforce and another that instructed agencies to end remote work arrangements.
“Please continue to remain focused on the mission,” Petro wrote in a memo to employees late Friday, citing ongoing projects and those in development. She added that “our commitment to NASA’s mission remains the same. We all share the aim of ensuring the government of the United States is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of the nation.”
 In his second inaugural address, President Trump said that American astronauts would “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” (credit: White House) |
The uncertain future of Artemis
Unlike some of her predecessors, Petro is not likely to serve as acting administrator for long. At the same time as the White House announced Petro would be acting administrator, it formally nominated Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator, as Trump announced in December (see “Artemis reentry”, The Space Review, December 9, 2024.)
Isaacman has kept a low public profile since that original announcement. He did speak at the Spacepower Conference in December but avoided discussing in details the nomination or his plans for NASA. “I know we can’t be second” in space, he said at the event, urging companies to “crack the code on something other than what we’ve been doing for a while.”
| “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” Trump said. |
His nomination continues to have broad support from industry. Members of Congress, including the senators who will take up his nomination, have been quiet, but none have publicly expressed opposition to him. There have been, though, some critiques of Isaacman from conservative groups, who noted that Isaacman has given political donations to Democrats, including in the 2024 election cycle (one of the recipients of his donations was former Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides, a Democrat, who won election to the House to represent a Southern California district.) Those groups also noted that Isaacman’s payment processing company, Shift4, had diversity initiatives now frowned upon by the new administration.
The Senate Commerce Committee has yet to schedule a confirmation hearing for Isaacman, but barring any unforeseen delays he is likely to be confirmed in the next couple of months. He will then take office as a new debate rages about the future of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign and potential human missions to Mars.
The idea of scrapping a return to the Moon in favor of Mars was something Trump suggested he would pursue on the campaign trail last fall, and he added new fuel to that debate in his inaugural address. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” Trump said, comments that generated a line of applause from the audience and support from SpaceX’s Elon Musk, sitting with other VIPs behind the podium.
Trump offered no other details in his speech, including no timetable, although many assumed he wanted astronauts on Mars while he was still in office. While sending humans to Mars in the next four years does not technically violate the laws of physics, it does run afoul of precepts of sound engineering. The next launch window for a Mars mission is late 2026, too soon for even Musk to consider a crewed mission: he said last year he was instead considering launching uncrewed Starships in that opportunity. The following window, two years later, would be too late to get humans on Mars before January 20, 2029, even if all the other obstacles to a crewed mission could be overcome by then.
Those challenges would not prevent the administration from shifting the focus of NASA’s human spaceflight efforts from the Moon to Mars, or at the least making major changes to Artemis. “Regarding space, the Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient, as it is a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program,” Musk posted on social media on Christmas Day. “Something entirely new is needed.”
For now, NASA is proceeding with Artemis as-is. Last week, the agency selected nine companies for studies of lunar logistics and surface mobility for later phases of Artemis, when NASA anticipates a longer-term presence on the Moon. The studies will cover topics ranging from cargo handling to trash management.
| “I haven’t met Mr. Musk yet, but we’ll see what sort of changes he pushes for,” Rep. Ivey (D-MD) said. |
“These contract awards are the catalyst for developing critical capabilities for the Artemis missions and the everyday needs of astronauts for long-term exploration on the lunar surface,” Nujoud Merancy, deputy associate administrator for the Strategy and Architecture Office in the agency’s exploration directorate, said in a statement.
Any major changes to Artemis would likely face opposition by some members of Congress. Notably, the vice chair of the commerce, justice and science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, which funds NASA, in the new Congress is Rep. Dale Strong (R-AL), whose district includes the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Another member of that subcommittee is Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD), who has NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in his district. In comments after a brief appearance earlier this month at the American Astronomical Society conference outside Washington, he said he was not tracking any particular threats to the Earth and space science work done by his center, or to Goddard itself. “I haven’t met Mr. Musk yet, but we’ll see what sort of changes he pushes for,” he said.
Ivey added he had not yet met Isaacman, and didn’t expect to until after Isaacman goes through the Senate confirmation process, but was interested in what he had in mind for the agency. “I don’t mind a fresh start.”
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