Staff Reports
America woke up to a public spat this week that should worry every patriot who believes in strong national institutions. Elon Musk publicly scolded the White House’s handling of NASA after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — recently named acting NASA administrator — announced plans to reopen the Artemis III lunar-lander contract, saying SpaceX has fallen “behind.”
Duffy told reporters he was reopening the contract because timelines have slipped and because the administration wants to beat China back to the moon, a thinly veiled justification for shrugging off the massive private investment and engineering muscle SpaceX has brought to the table.
Musk didn’t take the attack lying down; he fired back on X, mocking the idea that legacy contractors or rivals who have never delivered a payload to orbit should be handed America’s space future, and he warned that political bungling risks handing the advantage to foreign adversaries.
This is more than petty name-calling — as Politico reported, the feud exposes a broader plan inside the Beltway to hollow out NASA’s independence, fold it into bureaucratic departments, and reward insiders instead of backing the technological winners who actually get things done. That’s not governance; it’s cronyism dressed up as “competition.”
Conservatives should be clear-eyed: surrendering America’s lead in space for the sake of Washington turf wars is strategic malpractice. We’re in a real race with China, and every delay born of political theater gives Beijing more time to build capability and leverage — a truth even Duffy admitted when he said speed matters.
President Trump now has a simple choice: stand with the engineers and entrepreneurs who actually build American power, or let the swamp reassign NASA’s mission to the whims of political appointees and friends of the administration. History will judge whether he preserved America’s century-leading space program or let it be gutted.
If conservatives care about liberty, jobs, and national security, we must demand that the Administration stop playing games and back a NASA that champions results, not inside deals. The American people — and our children’s future — deserve nothing less than leadership that treats space as a strategic front, not a political piñata.
