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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.

What happens when a billionaire has more control over America's space program than the agency that put a man on the moon?

Franklin Four, a staff writer for the Atlantic, has written a new piece titled The Man Who Ate NASA. It traces how Elon Musk, through his company, SpaceX, has become not just a partner to NASA, but in many

ways it's replacement. Last year alone, 95% of rocket launches in the U.S. came from SpaceX.

That includes missions for the Pentagon, for intelligence agencies, and the International Space Station.

And now the power shift is accelerating. Just this week,

nearly 4,000 NASA employees, that's 20% of its workforce, opted to leave under the Trump

administration's deferred resignation program. The administration has also proposed slashing NASA's

budget. Four argues that these moves signal something larger, the dismantling of

NASA as a symbol of American idealism. For decades, the agency embodied the belief that,

through public investment and collective effort, we could accomplish the impossible. Today,

Four writes, that vision has been ceded to private ambition, and in its place is a space program increasingly shaped by Elon Musk's obsession with colonizing Mars.

In addition to being a staff writer for the Atlantic, Franklin Four is also the author of several books, including The Last Politician, Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future.

Franklin Ford, welcome back to fresh air.

So great to be here.

So let's talk about the latest news.

4,000 of NASA's employees have opted to leave.

That's 20% of the workforce, which sounds pretty massive. How significant is that

number to the overall agency? It's crushing on several different rounds. The first is, when you

...