CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A top executive in charge of returning NASA astronauts to the moon is suddenly retiring.
After 35 years, NASA announced Wednesday that Associate Administrator Jim Free is leaving the space agency in the coming days.
Free spoke in December about the future of the Artemis program.
“Our campaign of human exploration, science, and discovery that began with Artemis I continues with journeys to the moon and then, journeys on to Mars,” Free said.
As NASA’s third highest-ranking executive, Free defended what critics call an outdated and wasteful rocket -- the Artemis program’s SLS.
In an interview last year on “60 Minutes,” Free responded to NASA’s own inspector general who said at a cost of $4 billion per launch, the SLS is unsustainable.
“We didn’t necessarily agree with their conclusions,” Free told correspondent Bill Whitaker. “We feel like we’ve taken an affordable path to do these missions. We believe that the rocket we have is best matched for the mission. And frankly, the only one in the world that can take crews to the moon,” he said.
Free is the biggest name to leave NASA since a new Reduction In Force directive went into effect February 11.
It doesn’t expire until next February, so it’s not known how many NASA workers could be off the job by the first Artemis launch with astronauts, if that even stays on schedule with the Trump administration potentially considering a new direction for the space agency.
CBS News space consultant Bill Harwood talked about the role the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may have on NASA’s future.
“You’ve got Elon Musk, the chairman, the founder of SpaceX, who’s in charge of this committee that’s looking at what they call government waste,” Harwood said. “We don’t know yet what’s going to happen when they get around to NASA, so I think there’s a huge wait-and-see mood right now in the space industry to find out just what’s going to happen and how that’s going to affect all of these contractors.”
NASA’s next update on the Artemis program with reporters is scheduled for March 7.