The Thorniest Subject at NASA Right Now
Updated at 8:57 p.m. ET on May 1, 2020.
Like many employers around the country, NASA has kept most of its workforce home during the coronavirus pandemic. But the agency is still pressing ahead on future missions, including Artemis, the effort to return Americans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program ended, and it held a press conference yesterday to announce the companies that had been chosen to design the systems that would land the astronauts on the lunar surface.
One of those companies, SpaceX, seems especially notable in this particular moment—not for its impressive history of rocket launches and landings, but for its chief executive officer’s recent behavior. For weeks now, Elon Musk has been railing against social-distancing measures that public-health officials believe are necessary to stem the transmission of the coronavirus. His stance seems diametrically opposed to the careful response of the agency that just awarded his company one of the first spacecraft contracts of its kind since the 1960s.
On yesterday’s press call, I asked Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, how his approach to COVID-19 will affect his work with SpaceX in the moon effort. “I would need to see specifically what was said,” Bridenstine replied, referring to Musk’s
