As Congress figures out funding for the next year, NASA officials have spent the past several months talking up the new mission—named Artemis, after Apollo’s sister in Greek mythology. As with the Apollo-anniversary coverage, everyone seemed to be on message. Until, that is, the person who ordered the mission strayed.

“For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago,” President Trump tweeted in June. “They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part).”

Read: A short history of presidential vacillation: Mars or the moon

The tweet stunned the NASA community. Trump has been enamored of the Mars-mission idea since he took office, and once asked a NASA official whether the agency could put people on the red planet by the end of his first term. But that conversation unfolded in private and was only revealed in a tell-all book by a former White House official. In contrast, there was no denying the blustery Mars tweet, nor the blatant contradictions in its message.

“I called him after that,” Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, told me of the president. “And I was very clear, ‘I want to be sure we’re in alignment.’ And he was very clear with me: ‘I know you’ve got to go to the moon to go to Mars, but you need to talk about Mars.’”

Mars is the “generational achievement that will inspire all of America,” Bridenstine said Trump told him. In his tweet, Trump seemed to acknowledge that the moon matters when it comes to making it to Mars—“of which the moon is a part.” But Mars, it seems, is a better sell.

Then, last week, another shocking moment: Bridenstine announced he was demoting NASA’s head of human exploration. William Gerstenmaier has worked at NASA since 1977, guiding the agency through spaceflight triumphs and tragedies, and shifting gears every time a new president comes along with different ideas for the nation’s space priorities. The morning of the announcement, Gerstenmaier was on Capitol Hill, testifying before members of Congress about the 2024 plan.

Although the decision came from Bridenstine, Gerstenmaier appears to be a victim of the White House’s impatience with NASA’s progress on the moon mission. The development of the rocket that is supposed to launch the Artemis astronauts, like most major exploration efforts in NASA history, is over budget and years behind schedule. Vice President Mike Pence, who gives the big space-policy speeches on behalf of Trump, is “livid,” according to The Washington Post. “If NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years,” Pence said earlier this year, “we need to change the organization, not the mission.”

Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA

Bridenstine insists that, despite the sudden personnel shake-up, everything is fine at NASA. “We love the work [Gerstenmaier’s] done, and we’re grateful for his service to NASA and to the country,” Bridenstine told The Verge after the announcement. “But I think we’re at a time when we need new leadership.”