BarcelonaA tweet from Elon Musk has brought to the surface a fight for the leadership of NASA that has been going on for a long time. “The person in charge of America’s space program cannot have a double-digit IQ,” he wrote in X on Tuesday, in a jab at Transportation Secretary and acting NASA chief Sean Duffy. “Should someone whose primary goal is to climb trees be running the US space program?” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO insisted to X, mocking Duffy’s past as a champion tree-climber.
The position of NASA director has been vacant since the last person to hold it, Bill Nelson, resigned to coincide with Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House in January 2025, and since then there has been a succession of interim directors. The latest is Sean Duffy, who was appointed in July 2025 pending a definitive director. But before there was another candidate with more numbers to head the agency: entrepreneur and astronaut Jared Isaacman, who is undoubtedly Elon Musk’s favorite.
Many voices are of the opinion that Isaacman’s profile, despite not having a previous management track record in the government field, fits better with that of the agency than that of his competitor, who has no knowledge of science or experience in the aerospace field. Instead, in addition to being the founder of the payments company Shift4 Payments, Isaacman has led several missions in space and worked with SpaceX.
In May – while Tesla’s CEO was part of the US administration – Isaacman was nominated by the president to lead NASA. But Trump withdrew the nomination coinciding with the end of Musk’s time in his government and without a clear explanation. In recent days, however, Isaacman’s name has gained strength again, partly due to the insistence of his godfather, and this has led to a fight between the astronaut and the current Secretary of Transport who, as reported on Monday The Wall Street Journalintends to bring the space agency under the influence of his department.
But despite his opinion of Isaacman, Musk has interests that go beyond the candidate’s fitness for office. The insistence of the CEO of SpaceX in discrediting Duffy came the day after he said that NASA was looking for a plan B to bring astronauts to the surface of the Moon, precisely because Musk’s company is behind schedule. In an interview with the American network CBS, the acting administrator of NASA assured that he will reopen the tender to build a lunar landing module to other companies such as Blue Origin, of Jeff Bezos.
Rush to open a base on the Moon
“We’re going to get this going again and we’re going to win the second space race against the Chinese. We’re going to go back to the moon, and we’re going to set up a camp there, a base,” said Duffy, who stressed the need to get ahead of the Asian giant, which plans to send its astronauts to the moon in 2030. “The race to the moon has begun. Big companies should not be afraid of challenges. When our innovators compete among they, America wins!” he insisted in another post on Tuesday.
The truth is that Durffy’s urgency has at the same time another weighty reason: Trump wants the landing on the moon to occur before January 20, 2029, when his second term as president ends. This involves building a new lunar lander in less than three and a half years, very ambitious deadlines that will blow the budget of NASA, which has already suffered a severe wave of cuts that has forced it to abandon other missions and make mass layoffs.
However, since the start of Trump’s presidency, the agency has been immersed in the Artemis mission, which aims to establish a long-term presence on the Moon for the first time and prepare other missions to go to Mars. SpaceX won the $2.9 billion bid in 2021 to provide a lunar landing system for astronauts on the Artemis III mission. But in December, NASA announced that it was postponing the next Artemis missions: the one that plans to circle the Moon with astronauts, no later than April 2026, and the one that plans to send two astronauts to the South Pole of the Moon, in 2027 at the latest.
