I believe NASA does use RHEL, I remember a story last year where they were moving some systems from SUSE to RHEL.

My guess is that IBM was so difficult to deal with that they decided to move away from RHEL wherever they could. Perhaps getting the actual support they purchased was too much of a challenge.

If IBM is pissed, they should take a good hard look in the mirror before they malign other distributions.

https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/support/kb/news/transition-to-...