Acting head of NASA, Sean Duffy, has taken fire from Elon Musk following an announcement by NASA that it intends to take bids for moon landers that would go to the Moon in addition to those submitted by SpaceX.

After NASA’s decision to solicit more bids for the project, Musk made numerous sarcastic tweets about Duffy, calling him “Sean Dummy” and questioning if a person of such low intellect (a “two digit IQ”) should run the country’s space program. He even created a viral Twitter poll that included a joke about Duffy climbing trees – more than 100k people voted on the issue in less than two days.

NASA Opens Artemis Mission to Competition

The reason Duffy is in the spotlight at all is because NASA is trying to get back to the moon before China does, and he appeared on Fox News and CNBC to say that the space program needed to hurry, and he also mentioned that there are many commercial companies that can help make this happen, among them Blue Origin and others.

In 2021, NASA awarded a $2.9 Billion dollar contract to SpaceX to send the first woman and man back to the moon in its Starship system. However, SpaceX has struggled with testing the technology and there are serious doubts about whether it will meet the deadline of having humans on the moon by 2030.

Politics, Rivalries, and the Future of NASA Leadership

It is possible that the reason for Musk’s anger toward Duffy is based in politics. There have been reports that Duffy is lobbying to become the permanent head of NASA, despite being in an interim position right now, in addition to serving as the Secretary of Transportation. One of the people that Musk supported, billionaire Jared Isaacman, had his own nomination pulled by President Trump and it appears the reason for this was due to Isaacman donating money to Democratic candidates.

When Musk publicly resigned from the president’s advisory board around the same time Isaacman’s nomination was pulled, there were clearly larger issues at work here. NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens stated that Duffy is helping in the vetting of candidates for a permanent head of the agency, and that he has not indicated that he wants to remain the acting director.

There are questions surrounding the direction of NASA’s space exploration agenda at this moment in history, as well as the influence of both Musk and Trump. While Musk continues to assert that SpaceX is the only viable option to complete the moon mission, Duffy believes that it will benefit the United States to allow multiple companies to compete to see who can do better.