March 30, 2025 (EIRNS)—A Wall Street Journal article on March 29th entitled “Elon’s Musk’s Mission To Take Over NASA—and Mars,” documents the attempt by the SpaceX billionaire to reorient NASA from its present Artemis mission to the Moon and toward a manned mission to Mars. President Trump’s recent appointment of Jared Isaacman, a payments entrepreneur who flew to orbit on SpaceX, came shortly after a call from Musk to Isaacman asking him if he would be interested in the job, which he apparently answered in the affirmative.
Musk has made no secret of the fact that he thinks going back to the Moon, and the entire Artemis mission, is a waste of money and that NASA should be devoting its interest to an eventual manned mission to Mars. He has also been talking this up with the President, portraying it as a singular achievement of his presidency, also with some success. Musk has also indicated that work should be discontinued on Boeing’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which was designed to fly astronauts to the Moon.
In spite of a brief flurry of activity a few years ago around the notion of going to Mars rather than returning to the Moon, the space community has by and large accepted the reasoning laid out so clearly years ago by Lyndon LaRouche and Krafft Ehricke that you can only realistically consider a manned mission to Mars after planting a presence on the Moon, and then use the Moon as an industrial base for further missions. Without that, a mission to Mars with humans becomes at best a mere “showboating” or even possibly a suicidal undertaking. A more serious problem is the overall condition of our industrial base for space exploration. In terms of skilled workforce, capital investment, and underlying space infrastructure we are in much worse shape today than we were in 1969 when we first went to the Moon. And the deleterious effects of the DOGE cuts of the NASA workforce have yet to be felt.
While there has been no public outcry from within the Agency with regard to Musk’s alleged plans, there is no doubt a good deal of consternation over the issue. The potential conflict over the matter may not come to the fore until there are confirmation hearings on the new Administrator. There are already concerns among even some Republican Senators like Ted Cruz, who is worried about the implications for employment at Johnson Space Center in Houston with any radical change of plans in the present program. Cancellation of SLS will also mean that the money that was spent on this important vehicle has been poured down the drain. The Journal article also indicates that there are other candidates in the mix with Musk’s vision, who could be put forward if Isaacman does not get confirmed.