“NASA has never had a scientist as administrator; you and I would have had fun,” he said.

Now, nobody knows where NASA’s rockets are going on their biblical smoke pillars. Donald J. Trump’s one mention of the space program during his campaign was to tell a kid that potholes on Earth need fixing first.

But he also campaigned on the promise to “make America great again,” and hardly anything in recent history says that more clearly than the Apollo moon landings. That has some space buffs hoping that a Trump administration will put its weight behind another grand adventure in space, most likely a return for good to the moon.

At the same time, there is no evidence that Congress would give NASA any more money than it is already getting to carry out these adventures. Mr. Trump’s potholes, a military buildup and tax cuts beckon.

Early in December, the first member of Mr. Trump’s transition “landing team,” Christopher Shank, policy director for the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and a former member of NASA arrived at its headquarters to begin taking stock of the agency. He did not respond to an email request for an interview and none of the other members of the team, which now numbers seven, have commented publicly.

Even NASA insiders are reduced to reading tea leaves and possible smoke signals, clues scattered by Mr. Trump and Republican space and science insiders during the last year. In a recent speech in Washington, Bob Walker, a former congressman who advised the Trump campaign on space, reiterated his desire for NASA to concentrate on basic science and exploration and farm out climate research, which he has referred to as “politicized science,” to other agencies like NOAA. That’s a notion that alarmed climate scientists regard as either naïve or cynical.