It should have been a victory lap for Jared Isaacman. The Nasa administrator was in Washington DC for what he surely hoped would be a celebration with lawmakers and the US president, little more than two weeks after the successful conclusion of the first human journey around the moon in more than half a century.
Instead, last week began with some difficult questions in Congress about the Trump administration’s unpopular plan to slash the space agency’s budget. It ended at the White House with the president appearing to poke fun at his prominent ears, watched by four bemused Artemis II astronauts waiting in vain for any question about their historic mission.
There could have been no better illustration of how Donald Trump has tarnished the aftermath of Nasa’s greatest moment in five decades, and is singularly focused on dismantling the agency’s science programs even as he urges it to plant a Stars and Stripes flag back on the moon before he leaves office in January 2029. At least part of Trump’s hostility to Nasa’s science programs appears to stem from his animus towards the agency’s role in climate research.
Realistically, to alter culture, it is required that the structure of an institution must be modified as well, the personalities and priorities of those who end up leading are selected for by the incentives and structure of an organization. The people who “play the game right” so to speak, end up in leadership and leadership reinforces and defends the structure that got them where they are. But just swapping out leaderships without altering structure and incentives will lead to little change in the long run.
Ultimately nasa does have to play politics to receive funding from congress, that’s always been the case and always will be, there is no space exploration without public funding. That means doing stuff that is exciting to the public and convinces them to pressure congress to support it. I’d argue the flawed issue that has lead to some problems is them playing “job creation” politics which forces them to commit to wasteful facilities and companies that have outlived their usefulness to space exploration.