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Flyaway

Flyaway

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NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy wrote his own article and published it on FOX News.

NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy
@SecDuffyNASA
.
@POTUS is making it his mission for America to lead in space exploration and beat China.

Read how @NASA is making big changes and solidifying its place as first in the final frontier ⬇️
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Article: NASA at a crossroads: Trump’s plan to refocus, explore, and beat China
By Sean Duffy Fox News
Published September 15, 2025, 5:00 am EDT


https://twitter.com/x/status/1967551367406669968
View: https://x.com/SecDuffyNASA/status/1967551367406669968
 
This obviously includes NASA.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4de02x3wo
The White House has told its agencies to prepare for mass firings if Congress does not avert a government shutdown next week, according to a memo obtained by US media.

In the memo, the Office of Budget and Management directs federal agencies to begin drafting "reduction in force" plans for programmes whose funding will lapse if Congress fails to meet a 30 September budget deadline.
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A memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reviewed by The Hill indicates agencies are directed to “use this opportunity to consider reduction in force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities” under three conditions.

The conditions include discretionary funding lapses Oct. 1, if another source of funding isn’t available and if the programs, projects, or activities are not “consistent with the president’s priorities.” In order to consider firing, all conditions must be met.
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https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5520858-mass-firings-government-shutdown/
And another one from Politico:

White House to agencies: Prepare mass firing plans for a potential shutdown:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/24/white-house-firings-shutdown-00579909
 
Mods please delete if regarded as too politically.

Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation report.

NASA whistleblowers have “already seen safety impacts” from the implementation of the President’s budget request; one whistleblower warns they’re “very concerned that we’re going to see an astronaut death within a few years.”

OMB’s Vought plans to use impoundment to gut NASA under a CR without guardrails, whistleblower docs show
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Ars Technica: Senators try to halt shuttle move, saying “little evidence” of public demand [Sep 29]

"Why should hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars be spent just to jeopardize a piece of American history that's already protected and on display?" wrote Kelly in a social media post on Friday. "Space Shuttle Discovery belongs at the Smithsonian, where millions of people, including students and veterans, go to see it for free."

In a letter sent on the same day to the leadership of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Kelly and his three colleagues cautioned that any effort to transfer the winged orbiter would "waste taxpayer dollars, risk permanent damage to the shuttle, and mean fewer visitors would be able to visit it."

"It is worth noting that there is little evidence of broad public demand for such a move," wrote Kelly, Warner, Kaine, and Durbin.

“Inefficient and unjustifiable”
In the letter, the senators asked that committee chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) and vice chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) block funding for Discovery's relocation in both the fiscal year 2026 Interior-Environment appropriations bill and FY26 Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill.

[...]

Under the terms of the act, NASA has until January 4, 2027 (18 months after the bill's enactment) to transfer Discovery to Space Center Houston. For its part, the Smithsonian says that it owns the title to Discovery and, as the institution is not part of the federal government, the orbiter is no longer the government's to move.
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Warner, Kaine, Colleagues Urge Appropriators to Block Costly, Risky Relocation of Space Shuttle Discovery from Virginia to Texas [Sep 26]

This week, U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine (both D-VA), alongside U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), called on Senate appropriators to block any federal funding from being used to relocate Space Shuttle Discovery from its home at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Virginia to Space Center Houston in Texas. In a letter, the senators warned that such a move would waste taxpayer dollars, risk permanent damage to the shuttle, and mean fewer visitors would be able to visit it.
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Flyaway said:
Mods please delete if regarded as too politically.

Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation report.
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This is the forum for posting political stuff, Flyaway, so I don't see how it could be an issue.

Flyaway said:
Ars Technica: Senators try to halt shuttle move, saying “little evidence” of public demand [Sep 29]



Warner, Kaine, Colleagues Urge Appropriators to Block Costly, Risky Relocation of Space Shuttle Discovery from Virginia to Texas [Sep 26]
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Instead of trying to blow millions of dollars on this idiotic move why not just spend a few million dollars to build a high-fidelity full-scale mockup of the Discovery instead.
 
Casey Handmer@CJHandmer
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If the rumors are true, JPL is about to suffer another huge round of layoffs.

JPL, as an FFRDC, was always a bit separate from the rest of NASA and participated in the endless internecine fights for primacy, with other NASA centers envious of JPL's Mars business, earth science business, and other areas.

Periodically, JPL would do some insane space robotics feat with their own resources as an exercise in business development. For example, the Sojourner rover led to the subsequent rover missions. Perseverance brought the Ingenuity helicopter, but despite years of studies there have been no directed Mars helicopters. Instead, the Mars program got rolled up into Mars Sample Return, which then blew the budget so badly it has been effectively canceled. NASA currently has no other Mars missions in development. Five years ago, only JPL could land robots on Mars. Then China did it on the first try.

Meanwhile JPL, which was bursting at the seams five years ago with Psyche, Perseverance, Europa Clipper, NISAR, and MSR now has nearly nothing going on. JPL has gone through booms and busts before, but in the past its technology was advanced enough that it was critical infrastructure for military space, it had friends in Congress, and its competition from other NASA centers and private space companies was embryonic in comparison.

Unfortunately, I predicted this in a series of papers and a 2021 blog on Starship. JPL got complacent and it has been surpassed in many areas. It's an awful shame but it now seems to have very few champions who can help it out now, when its need is greatest.

It's bizarre to me that US space is running around with its hair on fire trying to figure out how to get humans back to the Moon, and much of NASA has either opted out, or been shut out, of this mission. JPL could have built an awesome human lander if, five years ago, they had been asked to and had had any interest in it. But the understanding was always that JPL would leave human space flight to Johnson, and in return, would get to do space robots. Now, during the shutdown, much of SLS/Orion is deemed sufficiently critical to keep burning money on their dead end project, but JPL, based at the wrong end of California, will find no savior.

I don't have any answers. It's just another chapter in a long, long book of bizarre and unstrategic public space policy. Nature gave us a perfect world with gravity low enough to launch from and surrounded us with a rich solar system full of interesting targets, and we spend most of our time arguing about weak rockets and slow robots, instead of exploring the universe. Maybe Nature had intended for the dinosaurs to build a space program and we just kind of got here unintentionally?
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https://twitter.com/x/status/1974240270356201544
View: https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1974240270356201544
 
So from what little I've read about him Isaacman would be a good choice as the new NASA administrator?
 
NMaude said:
So from what little I've read about him Isaacman would be a good choice as the new NASA administrator?
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Hard to say, but he seems a better choice than some of the names connected with the job.
 
From Blackstar over on NSF:

Although this is mostly about how difficult it is for the Office of Personnel Management to process all the retirements from the federal government, there are some interesting details and observations in here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/13/retirements-buyouts-federal-government-trump/
"This mass exodus — unprecedented in its scale — includes 154,000 federal employees who accepted buyout offers and were largely removed from the payroll as of the end of last month. Some of those are among nearly 105,000 employees who took regular retirement during the fiscal year that ended in September, an 18 percent surge from the previous year."

And:

"One of the OPM employees described a chaotic, ongoing mess.
“No strategic direction, no strategic plan, statutorily required duties gone by the wayside, no backups for things people did when they left … budget questions that can’t be answered, big holes in institutional knowledge, no ability to backfill priority positions,” the employee said."

Although that second part refers to OPM, it's actually applicable to a lot of government agencies--normally when somebody plans to retire, they announce that in advance and their office then comes up with a plan to either replace them with a new-hire, a promotion, or a shifting of responsibilities. That is harder to do with less warning. The "statutorily required duties" part is relevant. One of the things that has happened at NASA and other agencies is that DOGE came in and said "get rid of X, Y and Z." And then the civil servants had to explain why X and Y were required by statute (i.e. law) and that the executive branch couldn't simply not do those things, even if those things were no longer relevant. Somebody had to change the law. I know of examples at two agencies (NASA is one) where they had people doing something required by statute who left (at NASA they took retirement, at the other agency they were fired). This then left a hole in the agency that had to be filled, otherwise Congress would make an angry phone call saying "Why aren't you doing this anymore?"

And then there's the whole story about NASA's strategic planning process, which like every other agency's strategic planning process, has been blown to smithereens.
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As with all of these doom and glooms of the admin's policies, my push back is this:

How much of these layoffs matter? how do they matter? and how does this effects the future operation of the JPL / NASA or whatever agency is being laid off from?

It's not so much of a pushback really as much as it is just a more sober way of thinking about this. On the surface, these things feel arbitrary and indiscrimminant. Beneath the surface, the devil / or not devil is always in the details.

If your assumptions are always that this admin is full of idiots, then sure - the doom and gloom is warranted. If your frustrated that the opacity is concerning - I get it. But realistically, save for a few points of concern here and there, technological realities of defense aren't usually things that partisan politics can alter because they are grounded in very real and immediate consequences. Something strategically important isn't going to be given up on just because a new administration comes into power.

JPL's layoffs could be very very bad - especially if it drives away the people with the tribal knowledge, but even if we assume the worst, where those people go and how they get utilized also matter. For the most part, your specialized human resources tend to just get disbursed back to industry. If needed, you could potentially recover some back. It might never be the same as it was before, but right now all of this is just sort of... unclear.

Who goes and how JPL gets restructured strongly depends on what the admin envisions for JPL/NASA's future. Even for a more pro-industry admin, I really don't think NASA is going away. If they really wanted to disband NASA or JPL, this admin would have no qualms about doing that already.
 
Reddington777 said:
As with all of these doom and glooms of the admin's policies, my push back is this:

How much of these layoffs matter? how do they matter? and how does this effects the future operation of the JPL / NASA or whatever agency is being laid off from?
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They do. Tribal knowledge will be lost. My office went from 8 to 3 people. Lost the lead and manager and almost 100 years office experience and 150 years NASA experience. Two recent hires and one 10 year veteran only remain.
 
Byeman said:
They do. Tribal knowledge will be lost. My office went from 8 to 3 people. Lost the lead and manager and almost 100 years office experience and 150 years NASA experience. Two recent hires and one 10 year veteran only remain.
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NewSpacers don't understand that. I tried to explain that to Nate/Blue Abyssal and others. They won't listen to you or me

I guarantee you it won't just be Marshall that is hurt or killed. That's just the cover story, as is plainly evident.

This is another Saturday Night Massacre--Jared is the Donald's hit-man.

Now do you see why I want a constitutionally funded NASA independent of politicians and their recklessness? These fools want to kill NASA.
 
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publiusr said:
Now do you see why I want a constitutionally funded NASA independent of politicians and their recklessness? These fools want to kill NASA.
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No, this is nonsense and delusional.
A. The |constitution is not a place for this. It is a minimalist set of rules for governing, not to be cluttered with stuff like this.
b. NASA is no different than any other government agency. It doesn't justify or deserve any different treatment.
 
Isaacman Grilled Over NASA Top Job With Duffy Stint Set to End:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...over-nasa-top-job-with-duffy-stint-set-to-end
News and updates on Jared Isaacman’s potential (re)nomination to lead NASA:

Isaacman met Duffy and other staffers last Thursday.

Duffy interviewed Isaacman at President’s direction.

Staffers quizzed Isaacman about ties to private sector, plans to gut NASA and lack of government experience.

Duffy said he is only in this role temporarily and plans to step down.
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https://twitter.com/x/status/1978231771767681438
View: https://twitter.com/EdLudlow/status/1978231771767681438


Those concerns were clear when Duffy met Isaacman — a SpaceX astronaut and investor — on Thursday under instructions from President Donald Trump to interview him for the NASA role, said the people, speaking on condition of anonymity because the discussion was private. Isaacman faced questions from Duffy’s staff on his links to the private sector, what plans he had to make cuts at the agency and his lack of government experience.

At the meeting, Duffy repeated that he only intends to lead the agency temporarily and until the end of the year, two of the people said. A third person cautioned that Duffy said he serves at the pleasure of the president, who gets to decide the timing. [...]

Duffy has interviewed other candidates during the process, including a senior military figure, according to people familiar with the matter.
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publiusr said:
They have the loudest voice these days. And Trump listens to them.
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wrong again
a. SpaceX and Blue Origin are no longer "New Space", they are mainstream
b. Trump doesn't even know , what "New Space" is. they have no say in gov't space policy. Proof please.
c. They do not have the loudest voice. Posts on internet forums are not relevant measure for reality
d. For the influence Musk has had with Trump, he hasn't affected NASA (the current mess is OMB head generated)
 
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