NASA Employees Reportedly Started Booing When Elon Musk Was Mentioned at an All-Hands Meeting
Elon Musk has been something of a thorn in NASA's side since long before he became an unelected government official — but it sounds like anger is now bubbling over at the space agency.
According to former NASA astrobiologist Keith Cowing, who for years since his service at the agency has documented its internal politics and drama online, a "round of boos was heard" upon mention of Musk's name during an all-hands meeting at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland yesterday.
Those jeers, Cowing wrote on his NASA Watch blog, were in response to mention of Musk's newly reiterated directive demanding all government employees explain what they did the week prior in bullet points to justify their jobs — or risk being fired.
Over the weekend, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent a second threatening email to federal employees, instructing on Musk's behalf that they explain what they did at work last week to keep their jobs. While that first missive was amended to say that the demand was "strictly voluntary," this new one has no such language.
"The NASA administrator will not be providing any further guidance to NASA employees regarding the latest [five] bullet email that everyone got over the weekend," Cowing wrote, "so NASA employees are pretty much left to make a personal choice."
During the meeting, the NASA staffers were also warned that the youthful hatchet men from Musk's Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have badges to enter the facility at any time they choose, without needing to inform anyone of their entrance.
That's not all the bad blood Musk has kicked up at NASA lately. The billionaire also enraged a cadre of former astronauts last month by issuing repeated digs, including the erroneous claim that Boeing Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams had been left stranded on the International Space Station for "political reasons."
"When you finally get the nerve to climb into a rocket ship, come talk to [us]" former NASA astronaut and senator Mark Kelly tweeted in response to the world's richest man amid insults about his colleague, former ISS commander Andreas Mogensen, and his twin brother and fellow astronaut Scott Kelly.
And even actions at NASA that aren't directly tied to Musk, like reports of leadership at the space agency ordering employees to throw out their LGBTQ pride swag, feel tightly bound up in his ideological mission to crush "wokeness" out of the federal government.
All told, it's an extraordinary villain arc. Just a few years ago, Musk's work at SpaceX was a shining example of NASA working with the private sector to push the frontiers of America's space capability. Now, it seems that a mention of his name at a NASA meeting is enough to draw heckling.
More on Musk cuts: Even NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Is Getting Its Budget Slashed
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