Like plenty of the remainder of the federal authorities proper now, NASA is reeling throughout the first turbulent days of the Trump administration.

The final two weeks have introduced a change in management within the type of interim administrator Janet Petro, whose ascension was a shock. Her first act was to tell agency employees to take away variety, fairness, inclusion, and accessibility contracts and to “report” on anybody who didn’t perform this order. Quickly, civil servants started receiving emails from the US Workplace of Personnel Administration that some perceived as an effort to push them to resign.

Then there are the actions of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Final week he sowed doubt by claiming NASA had “stranded” astronauts on the house station. (The astronauts are completely secure and have a experience house.) Maybe extra importantly, he owns the house company’s most vital contractor and, in latest weeks, has change into deeply enmeshed in working the US authorities via his Division of Authorities Effectivity. For some NASA staff, whether or not or not it’s true, there may be now an uncomfortable sense that they’re working for Musk and to dole out contracts to SpaceX.

This concern was heightened late Friday when Petro introduced {that a} longtime SpaceX worker named Michael Altenhofen had joined the company “as a senior advisor to the NASA Administrator.” Altenhofen is an achieved engineer who interned at NASA in 2005 however has spent the final 15 years at SpaceX, most just lately as a frontrunner of human spaceflight applications. He definitely brings experience, however his hiring additionally raises issues about SpaceX’s affect over NASA operations. Petro didn’t reply to a request for touch upon Monday about potential conflicts of curiosity and the scope of Altenhofen’s involvement.

I spent this weekend speaking and texting with NASA sources at numerous facilities across the nation, and the overriding message is that morale on the company is “absurdly low.” Conferences between civil servants and their management, akin to an all-hands gathering at NASA’s Langley Analysis Heart in Virginia just lately, have been fraught with rigidity. Nobody is aware of what’s going to occur subsequent.