"Bottom line, somebody in the Trump administration is going to say 'we want NASA and the private sector to collectively, as sort of a national space enterprise, we want them to go further, we want them to go faster, we want them to go more frequently, and we want them to go less expensively," Muncy said.

Lutnick currently serves as chair of Trump’s White House transition team. His most notable moment in recent memory was his declaration on CNN that Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine conspiracist and Covid lockdown critic, would not be Trump’s pick for head of Health and Human Services. Trump nominated Kennedy to that very post last week.

Elon Musk is backing Donald Trump’s transition co-chair Howard Lutnick to lead the Treasury Department, touting the billionaire CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald as a potential secretary who “will actually enact change” from the most powerful economic post in Trump’s cabinet.