NASA's plans to return to the Moon are seemingly on very thin ice.
As Reuters reports, NASA has lost four key senior Artemis officials, further stoking concerns that the space agency may ditch its plans to return to the Moon altogether. Whether they'll ever be replaced remains as dubious as ever; both president Donald Trump and SpaceX-CEO-slash-unelected-White-House-hatchet-man Elon Musk have argued that going to Mars should take priority.
The outgoing officials, according to Reuters, include three senior staffers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, as well as Jim Free, the agency's associate administrator who has championed the Artemis program.
Meanwhile, billionaire tech founder — and SpaceX space tourist — Jared Isaacman, who Trump appointed as the next NASA administrator last year, has been strikingly quiet over the last couple of months.
But in a tweet over the weekend, Isaacman made the case for "sending humans to another planet" — pointedly not the Moon.
The avid space traveler was responding to a post that showed the "clearest image of Mars ever taken" by NASA.
"When I see a picture like this, it is impossible not to feel energized about the future," he wrote.
However, Isaacman stopped short of explicitly saying NASA's current plans to return to the Moon should be canceled, arguing that "groundbreaking technologies in propulsion, habitability, power generation, in-situ resource utilization, and manufacturing" could unlock "mission optionality from the Moon to Mars and beyond."
Nonetheless, it's hard not to see his sudden enthusiasm for the Red Planet as an early warning sign that NASA's existing extraterrestrial travel plans could be on short notice.
Most prominently, Musk hasn't beaten around the bush when it comes to his aversion for the Artemis program, arguing that its "architecture is extremely inefficient" and accusing it of being a "jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program" in a Christmas Day tweet.
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