Nasa losing senior officials tied to flagship Moon programme

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WASHINGTON: Since Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are playing mission with Mars, NASA has lost four key senior officials near their flagship Moon program, according to NASA. There has been more uncertainty.

The agency on Saturday, NASA’s Associate Administrator Jim Free, who was a central voice defending the Agency’s Artemis Moon program, will retire effectively on Saturday.

And in Huntsville, Alabama, three key officials of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center – one of the agency’s 10 field centers and the center of its Artemis Moon program – announced their retirement internalized on Tuesday , According to the person familiar with this announcement.

The role in MSFC said the role of the MSFC – the heads of purchase, finance and information – was in the capacity to act in by nails and other NASA officials. No change was announced for free.

A NASA spokesman did not return the comment requests.

Leadership Shakeup has added more uncertainty about NASA’s direction as Musk, CEO of Space X, who has long been imagined as staff missions on Mars, deductions NASA’s record staff. NASA oversees review as a “special employee” of records. And the program.

Musk’s Space X has $ 15 billion in contracts with NASA, which includes a contract to descend humans on the moon with a starch rocket.

Some agency officials expected their last departure because many of Trump’s advisers criticize the elements of NASA’s Moon program, such as its space launch system, a more budget but operational Moon rocket.

In recent months, Kasturi and Trump have urged Mars on potential missions as a potential alternative to the moon, which is a nearby heavenly organization that Trump has set as a NASA’s primary space research target in his first presidential term, Which was served as long -term moon bases. Providing ground for remote Mars missions.

But with Mask’s almost billions of dollars support for Trump and his influential new role in the White House, the Red Planet has been talked about preferring new, more difficult missions that the agency is at risk of upset Since Trump’s first term has re -developed its structure and an annual budget of about $ 25 billion to focus on the moon.

Jeff Bezos, whose space company has a multi -billion dollar contract with NASA to land on the moon after Space X’s stars in Blue Origin, told Reuters in January that the Trump administration has to stay along with the moon program Should

But the Trump administration quickly liberated Janet Petro, who was the Director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, in the role of acting, preventing the future moon program from many agency officials. Seeing the move as an attempt. Changes

Petro has said that hundreds of NASA employees have accepted the offer of purchase by the Trump administration.

NASA’s pile has been whipped in the Shakes and Loming Strategic Shift Agency for about 18,000 employees who have been whipped this month to change the expectations of blind holidays.

NASA employees were expected to fire nearly 1,000 new employees on Tuesday with a probationary status, according to the Trump administration’s order.

But until Tuesday night, after scientists and staff’s pushbacks, Petro told senior officials that NASA would be at least temporarily exempt from the order, according to two persons familiar with the matter.

Trump’s nominee for NASA, private astronauts and billionaire businessman Ishaq Man is preparing for his confirmation hearing in the US Senate in Washington this week.