NASA is an obvious target for Elon Musk’s axe

They say you should do something you love. Jared Isaacman, a tech billionaire nominated on December 4th as Donald Trump’s choice to run NASA, is so keen on space that he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money to go there not once, but twice.

But Mr Isaacman did not go into space using a NASA rocket. Instead he bought propulsion and spaceships from SpaceX, a private firm whose cheap, reusable launchers have revolutionised the space business. Those experiences seem likely to influence how Mr Isaacman would run NASA.

SpaceX’s owner Elon Musk, to whom Mr Isaacman is close, is one of the two bosses of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a presidential advisory commission tasked with cutting wasteful government spending. Everyone likes cutting government waste in theory and NASA offers plenty of targets. Yet, as both Mr Isaacman and Mr Musk are likely to discover, it is cutting waste in practice that is hard.

To see why consider Artemis, the late-running, $93bn-and-counting programme to return astronauts to the Moon. It is organised around the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which is built from upcycled Space Shuttle parts, ostensibly to save money. Yet NASA’s inspector-general reckons the first four flights will cost $4.1bn each—perhaps 20 times the price of one of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rockets.

Artemis is also saddled with a pointless, make-work space station near the Moon, the Lunar Gateway. The crew capsule, Orion, has absorbed over $25bn in funding over 20 years yet still does not function: a problem with its heat shield seems certain to cause delays. Even the relatively simple job of building a mobile tower to hold the SLS upright has been a disaster. Budgeted at $383m, for completion in 2023, the current cost estimate is $2.7bn, to be ready six years late.

Old NASA hands admit Artemis is a mess. But it has proved impossible to kill, or even modify, despite the fact that the state of the art has left it further and further behind. When in 2019 Jim Bridenstine, then NASA’s boss, floated the idea that the Falcon Heavy might be able to get astronauts to the Moon sooner than the SLS, he nearly lost his job.

He was dressed down by Richard Shelby, then a senator from Alabama, home to the NASA centre that manages the SLS. For although NASA is a space agency, it is also a well-engineered machine for distributing pork. When NASA was founded in 1958 it established centres across America, cannily recruiting a phalanx of congressional bodyguards who would be keen to preserve high-paying jobs in their constituencies. These days, as Mr Shelby demonstrated, it is the bodyguards who run the show.

Mr Isaacman and Mr Musk certainly have the experience and the zeal to whip Artemis into shape. Unfortunately, it is far from clear whether that will be enough to overcome Congress, which exercises control over NASA’s budget and which looks on delivering goodies to constituents as a higher purpose.

And while Mr Isaacman and Mr Musk are well-suited to the task in some ways, in others the two friends are the worst people to take an axe to NASA. As the owner of SpaceX, the only plausible alternative, Mr Musk stands to benefit from cancelling the SLS. No matter how justified, it will be impossible to avoid accusations of self-dealing. That will give DOGE’s foes even more ammunition. Do not bet against Mr Trump eventually writing the whole thing off as too much trouble—and Artemis plodding on with its lumbering journey into space.

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