First, some context.When Trump says the government is letting commercial companies use Kennedy Space Center, he’s referring to rental agreements between these firms and the feds to use government-owned launch facilities. SpaceX rents launchpads at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for its missions. Blue Origin, the spaceflight company run by Jeff Bezos, plans to use a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to launch its New Glenn rocket. The recent rocket launch Trump referred to is the maiden flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which took off in February from the famed launchpad that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon. (SpaceX didn’t disclose how much the test flight cost, but says future launches will cost $90 million.)

The surprising part of Trump’s remarks is when he seems to suggest that commercial companies are better off paying for rocket launches because they’re doing it more cheaply than NASA.

This is not what NASA wants to hear.

NASA is currently working on its own rocket system, and it’s really expensive. The Space Launch System, or SLS, is an expendable launch vehicle that the space agency says will someday carry humans to the moon and Mars. NASA is building a crew capsule to go along with it, the Orion. Development costs are in the billions, and each launch will take about $1 billion.

One of the model rockets on the table at Thursday’s meeting was the SLS. And yet here was Trump, known for his love of doing things on the cheap, appearing to say that maybe the rocket his own space agency is building is too expensive.

The White House declined to answer a question about how SLS staff should interpret Trump’s comments about the financial differences between SpaceX and NASA. “NASA will continue to leverage the great work being done by its commercial partners as we lead the world in exploration of the solar system,” an official said, and pointed to a memorandum Trump signed last December about the future of the country’s space ambitions that the space-exploration community saw as a sign of his support.

Trump has long shown an appreciation for commercial spaceflight companies, and his administration wants these firms, among other things, to eventually take over parts of the International Space Station. But for some in the space community, Trump’s latest remarks underscore the idea that the president is poorly informed about the status of NASA projects. The president often speaks about programs in broad, sweeping terms.

“It’s not like he was outright bashing NASA, but clearly there was something there when he was comparing rocket prices,” said an engineer who works on the Orion capsule for one of the mission’s contractors, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “The most generous interpretation, I think, is ignorance of the subject on the president’s part. If he doesn’t understand the underlying tension in the space community between public and private space endeavors, then he wouldn’t realize he was saying something controversial.”