Elon Musk heats up the race to lead NASA

BarcelonaA tweet from Elon Musk has brought to light a long-simmering leadership dispute at NASA. “The person in charge of America’s space program cannot have a double-digit IQ,” he wrote to X on Tuesday, in a dig at Transportation Secretary and acting NASA chief Sean Duffy. “Should the US space program be run by someone whose primary objective is to climb trees?” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO pressed X, mocking Duffy’s past as a tree-climbing competition champion.

The position of NASA director has been vacant since the last person to hold the position, Bill Nelson, resigned coinciding with Donald Trump's arrival at the White House in January 2025, and since then there have been a succession of interim directors. The most recent is Sean Duffy, who was appointed in July 2025 while awaiting a permanent director. But before that, there was another candidate with a better chance of leading the agency: entrepreneur and astronaut Jared Isaacman, who is undoubtedly Elon Musk's favorite.

Many believe that Isaacman's profile, despite not having a previous track record in government management, is more suited to the agency's role than his competitor, who has neither scientific knowledge nor experience in the aerospace field. However, in addition to being the founder of the payments company Shift4 Payments, Isaacman has led several space missions and worked with SpaceX.

In May – while the Tesla CEO was part of the US administration – Isaacman was nominated by the president to lead NASA. But Trump withdrew his nomination coinciding with the end of Musk's term in his government and without a clear explanation. However, in recent days Isaacman's name has gained strength again, in part, due to the insistence of his godfather, which has led to a fight between the astronaut and the current Secretary of Transportation that, according to a report on Monday, The Wall Street Journal, intends to put the space agency under the influence of his department.

But despite his opinion of Isaacman, Musk has interests that go beyond the candidate's suitability for the position. The SpaceX CEO's insistence on discrediting Duffy came the day after the latter said that NASA was looking for a Plan B to land astronauts on the surface of the Moon, precisely because Musk's company is behind on delivery times. In an interview on the American network CBS, the acting NASA administrator assured that he will reopen the bidding to build a lunar lander with other companies such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

Rush to open a base on the Moon

"We will get through this again and win the second space race against the Chinese. We will return to the Moon, and we will set up a camp, a base," said Duffy, who insisted on the need to get ahead of the Asian giant, which plans to send its astronauts to the Moon in 2030. "The race challenges. When our innovators compete against each other, America wins!" he insisted in another post on Tuesday.

The truth is that Durffy's urgency also has another compelling reason: Trump wants the Moon landing to happen before January 20, 2029, when his second term as president ends. This implies building a new lunar lander in less than three and a half years, a very ambitious deadline that will blow up NASA's budget, which is already has suffered a severe wave of cuts that has forced it to abandon other missions already carrying out mass layoffs.

However, since the start of the Trump 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 bid worth $2.9 billion 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 orbit the Moon with astronauts, in April 2026 at the latest, and the one that plans to send two astronauts to the Moon's south polar orbiter, in 2027 at the latest.