Why did Trump suddenly pick Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to become temporary head of NASA?
The reason for Trump’s sudden decision yesterday to name Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator, replacing long-time NASA manager Janet Piro — who had held the job since Trump took office — remains unclear.
This article suggests the president wanted someone with more political clout who was also part of his inner circle.
Two articles (here and here) imply the decision was related to the recent clashes politically between Trump and Musk, adding that Duffy and Musk have been reported to be in conflict over air traffic controller issues. Picking Duffy thus directly reduces Musk’s influence at NASA.
The truth is that we really don’t know exactly what motives brought Trump to make this appointment. It could be that Trump wants someone in charge who will have the political clout to push through his proposed NASA cuts. It also could be Trump wants someone with that clout to review those cuts and change them.
The bottom line is that NASA remains a political football, a situation that in the end had done decades of harm to the American space industry. The sooner it can be made irrelevant and replaced by a commercial, competitive, and (most important) profitable space industry, the better.
We really don’t need a “space agency.” We didn’t have such a thing when we settled the American west.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The reason for Trump’s sudden decision yesterday to name Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator, replacing long-time NASA manager Janet Piro — who had held the job since Trump took office — remains unclear.
This article suggests the president wanted someone with more political clout who was also part of his inner circle.
Two articles (here and here) imply the decision was related to the recent clashes politically between Trump and Musk, adding that Duffy and Musk have been reported to be in conflict over air traffic controller issues. Picking Duffy thus directly reduces Musk’s influence at NASA.
The truth is that we really don’t know exactly what motives brought Trump to make this appointment. It could be that Trump wants someone in charge who will have the political clout to push through his proposed NASA cuts. It also could be Trump wants someone with that clout to review those cuts and change them.
The bottom line is that NASA remains a political football, a situation that in the end had done decades of harm to the American space industry. The sooner it can be made irrelevant and replaced by a commercial, competitive, and (most important) profitable space industry, the better.
We really don’t need a “space agency.” We didn’t have such a thing when we settled the American west.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Railroads were the agency –and now it is SpaceX Force propping up new firms. Yes we do need an agency, just like we need a military at some level.
Now, if you are consistent, maybe American wars need be donation only?
Bob, on the topic of manned spaceflight, I absolutely agree with you — NASA has become more of a hindrance than a groundbreaker and a waste of funds and talent. But the agency’s work on robotic spacecraft, involving planetary exploration and space-based astronomy, remains unparalleled. If somehow the first mission could be scrapped in favor of commercial human space efforts, while the agency could retain missions to succeed such triumphs as the Mars rovers, the Cassini and Juno probes, and even the twin Voyagers, we could enjoy the best of both worlds, so to speak. In any event, that’s what I personally hope will happen.
Phil Berardelli: Once I would have agreed with you whole-heartedly about NASA’s planetary and astronomy programs. Now I am far more skeptical. The budgetary and managerial disasters of Webb and Mars Sample Return suggest these agency programs no longer function like they once did.
We must not allow ourselves to be blinded of present problems because of past successes. I am now open to other options, and would not cry if NASA disappeared entirely.
Robert wrote: “We really don’t need a “space agency.” We didn’t have such a thing when we settled the American west.”
There are a few differences between the American west and space, the most obvious being the cost of getting there. The American west was settled by (mostly) families. The cost was relatively low, as the families were generally poor or middle class, and they had to pay all the costs themselves (land may have been granted to them, though). The cost to space is much higher than a middle class family can afford. How could a U.S. space agency help with that? I think it cannot, so it sounds as though I agree with Robert, that we don’t need a space agency, as it is not very helpful and could be a detriment.
But I don’t. The U.S. government could “need” a space agency in order to perform the things in space that the U.S. government wants to do. If the government wants to be wasteful of taxpayer money on space projects like Webb and MSR, then that is up to the taxpaying voter to complain about. Congress and presidents have allowed all this waste to occur, and we are watching as Ted Cruz insists that we waste money on Artemis. Congress insists that America beat China to the Moon, so if that is their priority then that is an example of why We the People need to have our own control of our own activities in space.
I still think that NASA could transform itself into an agency that helps space companies in the same way that NACA did. We advanced quickly in aeronautics right up until the NACA was turned into NASA, so we know that government can be helpful when it wants to be.
What might be better, however, is a commercial “space agency” operation that provides space companies with the facilities and resources that they need to advance their interests in space, in a similar way that incubators do for entrepreneurs. This gets the control out of the government’s hands and into the hands of the customers — the space companies. After all, when we let government be in charge, all we got was what government would allow us to have, and now that We the People are taking charge, we are starting to get what We want.
The less that government controls space and the more that We the People control it, the better off We the People are.
So, if settling space is far too expensive for families to afford to settle it, like the American west and its wagon trains, how do we get space settled? Do people become indentured servants to companies who pay their fare to the space settlement (similar to the 2016 movie Passengers)? If so, can we prevent that from turning into another slavery institution? Somehow Robert’s book Conscious Choice now seems to me more important than when I first read it. I am starting to see nefarious scenarios play out in my head. Will we make the same mistakes as in the past when we settle space, and what new mistakes could we make that we should try to anticipate and avoid?
I think I overthought this topic, and now I have to try to get some sleep with these scary thoughts running through my head. Rats.
My U.S. history is a little thin since I haven’t studied it much in 50+ years. While the U.S. Government didn’t have a “Western Exploration Agency”, it did send out expeditions into the West. One of note is the Capt Lewis and Lt Clark expedition to the Pacific. It was the Army but a special “Corp of Discovery” that did it. With the rise in private space flight, the space flight part of NASA could shrink. And for the remaining exploratory efforts, the Government could contract with private space to build and launch what is desired but with tighter contracts. If “private space” fudges up like Boeing with Starliner the private company eats the profits to fulfil their obligations.
There is the Aeronautics side of NASA which funds research that is publicly available. We need to keep that or otherwise we end up back in the world trade secrets and oppressive patents. If the Wright Brothers had been able to squash heavier-than-air flight unless it was theirs or extreme royalties were payed, we might still be flying wood and cloth aircraft.
This is a good point by Edward.
Now, it is true that, had government adopted a pro-commercial industry posture right from the start, rather than pulling up the drawbridge and opening fire on any telecoms who drew near to the parapets, the cost of getting to space could have been dropped a lot earlier than it ended up being when SpaceX finally arrived on the scene.
That said, even now, it’s still not exactly cheap to get your payload to orbit, let alone beyond. We still have a ways to go.
And then there is the cost of the actual payloads. In the days of yore (pre-WW2), as Bob has repeatedly pointed out, private interests funded almost all of our science, research, and exploration, but it’s also true that, even now, building any machine to do serious gathering of data in space requires a lot more money, even adjusting for inflation, than it cost for the Rockefeller Foundation to pay for the Hale Telescope or for Sir Felix Booth to fund the Ross Expedition of 1829. Comsats would be easier to fund and achieve economy of scale on, of course, because there’s an actual business case for those. I think we *could* be doing it for cheaper than we often do now, but to go back in time . . . I doubt that would have been possible with the Voyagers, which were about as cheap as possible (given the TRL’s of that time) for the science output we needed, and which had to be launched as early as they were to take advantage of the “Grand Tour” planetary alignment.
None of this, of course, can possibly justify the porktacular disasters that are Artemis and Mars Sample Return.
I still seem to be overthinking.
Artemis is government’s project to return to the Moon so that America can beat China. That may be a worthy goal for government to perform (or maybe not so worthy), but what about commercial interests on the Moon?
Do we yet have any interests for doing things on the Moon that cannot be performed on Earth or in orbit? Is there a market for lunar exploration or lunar material? Radio telescopes could be located just over the limb of the Moon (“limb” is astronomer-speak for the curved edge of a celestial object), giving them radio silence in almost every frequency except for deep space probes. Optical telescopes (near- or far-side) would be free of almost all reflective satellites, even those in Geostationary orbit. Articles and books have been written promoting various uses and advantages for lunar facilities and lunar bases or stations. Can commercial-space companies make a profit on lunar missions? So the question is: Are commercial companies likely to send people to the Moon any time soon?
We already have one company that is determined to send people to Mars. The stated purpose is to make humanity multi planetary so that we can nuke all life on earth. An unstated purpose is to demonstrate how inexpensively we can travel around the solar system. If there is profit to be made on Mars, then surely there is profit to be made on the Moon.
Could it be that a commercial-space company could beat both China and NASA to put the next person on the Moon?
Maybe not NASA. It looked for all the world that SpaceX had delayed its first launch attempt of Starship until after NASA got its SLS rocket into space. Did SpaceX want to not embarrass NASA by getting their big rocket into space before NASA got theirs there? If America’s space companies don’t want to embarrass NASA by beating it at any of its goals or objectives, then that limits what America’s space companies can do, either limited in timing or in achievement.
That makes for another reason in favor of Robert’s case for not having a government space agency, one that competes with the goals of commercial space. Could it be that the U.S. government slammed the door on American private commercial space companies in the 1960s because it feared the competition, such as from AT&T?
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/july-10-2025-quick-space-links/
(See Robert’s comment on the last space-link entry)
Now that the U.S. government is allowing private commercial-space companies, we see that such a fear would have been well founded. In less than two decades of commercial space activity in earnest, We the People are doing great things in space, launching far more payloads than the U.S. government, and working toward far more than the U.S. government ever funded as goals.
We the People are not yet launching as many private manned missions into space as government does, but a decade ago We couldn’t launch any at all. We the People are better funded and are more innovative than government is or has been. We may be half a century later than We could have been, but at least we are making our own progress now.
*Whew!* Now that space no longer seems to be the potential disaster it seemed last night, I think I can get some much needed sleep tonight.
Here’s the thing Edward
Imagine if SpaceX outcompetes everyone–libertarian zealots kill NASA—and SpaceX falls to a future administration
That erosion of capability will be fatal.
You don’t rely on private donations to have a military–and space as a national asset deserves a similar national commitment whether a bloody suit makes money or not.
I bet China loves the idea of NewSpacers killing NASA–as they see knee-jerk libertarianism as a form of suicide on our part.
No thanks