Elon Musk Secretly Working to Take Over NASA

Despite SpaceX already being NASA's largest private contractor, Elon Musk is still hellbent on assuming control over the space agency.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the mercurial CEO is doing much in his power to push NASA to skip its planned journeys to the Moon and focus on Mars instead, highlighting his long-term ambitions of establishing a human presence there.

Exerting his will at the agency could soon become even easier, with billionaire tech founder — and deep-pocketed SpaceX space tourist — Jared Isaacman expected to be sworn in as NASA administrator within the coming months.

Per the WSJ, Musk has reached out to Isaacman to reiterate his desire to work together to get humans to Mars.

The space agency has already suffered greatly due to Musk's efforts to gut the federal government with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. NASA was hit with mass layoffs earlier this year, with affected workers given short notice and denied time-off awards.

According to the WSJ's sources, the White House is still considering canceling NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), a behemoth rocket that's being designed to send astronauts to the Moon before the end of this decade.

It would be a major change of course for the agency, as plans are already well underway. Just last week, the core stage of NASA's SLS rocket for its upcoming crewed Artemis II mission around the Moon was stacked with its solid rocket boosters, taking a major step towards its anticipated launch roughly a year from now.

Freeing up those funds to spend them on its efforts to return to Mars instead could raise plenty of eyebrows, given Musk's enormous conflict of interest. SpaceX officials have been informing people outside the company that the space agency's resources will be reallocated toward Mars efforts, the WSJ reports.

That kind of reassignment could be of great benefit to Musk's company, which is already working on a large rocket designed for interplanetary travel called Starship.

Musk's DOGE has also aimed at gutting the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been responsible for ensuring that Starship launches follow air safety laws.

According to the WSJ, key SpaceX officials are already gaining power at the space agency. Longtime SpaceX executive Michael Altenhofen, who is close to Isaacman, was installed as a senior advisor in January.

But is NASA really ready to ditch plans that have been decades in the making? A spokeswoman didn't rule out the possibility that NASA is still committed to "return Americans to the lunar surface," in a statement to the WSJ.

However, given Musk's animosity toward NASA's Artemis program, the country's upcoming return to the lunar surface could be on thin ice.

"No, we’re going straight to Mars," Musk tweeted in January. "The Moon is a distraction."

In a separate tweet a week earlier, Musk  accused the space agency's Moon program of being "extremely inefficient as it is a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program."

Musk has even called for the early abolishment of the International Space Station, which angered former astronauts.

During his inaugural address, Trump also declared that his administration would be "launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars," indicating he's very much aligned with Musk's vision.

But pulling off an enormous U-turn this far into NASA's plans to return to the Moon could prove extremely expensive and a major setback. Besides, gutting the Artemis program will likely draw the ire of powerful bipartisan supporters in Congress.

"Starship? I want success out of it," representative Brian Babin (R-TX) wrote in a February statement. "But for us to beat the Chinese... it’s going to have to be SLS that does it."

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