NASA is facing the biggest budget cut in its history. Trump’s new plan has been dubbed an “extinction-level event”. A third of the staff laid off, 41 missions from Venus to Pluto cancelled, and programs that took decades to build and billions to launch, gone overnight.
While the administration claims it’s about taxpayer efficiency and staying one step ahead of China, they’re gutting the very science that made America a space leader to begin with.
And the cost is higher than we imagined. This move could break the international space community’s trust in the US. And once the budget is rolled back, even a new administration will find it next to impossible to undo the damage — setting open and free science back by decades.
With cuts this deep, NASA faces losing a third of its workforce — a brain drain of thousands of highly specialized scientists, engineers, and researchers who've dedicated their careers to US space exploration. Once this talent leaves for private companies or other industries, getting them back will be virtually impossible.
The Science Mission Directorate will suffer the most, facing a whopping 47% cut. This arm is the lifeblood of NASA. They’re responsible for planetary probes like the Mars Perseverance Rover, space-based telescopes including Hubble and James Webb, and near-Earth protection projects like the NEO Surveyor, the infrared telescope set to launch in 2027, tasked with keeping us safe from threatening asteroids and comets.
41 current and future missions would be culled.
One such mission is the New Horizons probe, launched in 2006 to study Pluto and the Kuiper Belt — asteroids that may hold secrets to the origin and development of our solar system. It has been travelling through space for almost 20 years, and yet, just like that, it could be terminated within a matter of months.
In addition to New Horizons, 18 other active projects might be forced to grind to a halt. Among them are the OSIRIS-APEX mission, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid and currently studying near-Earth asteroids, the MAVEN mission, helping us understand the evolution of the Martian atmosphere, the Mars Odyssey, the longest continually-active mission in orbit around another planet, and the Juno mission, which focuses on the origin and evolution of Jupiter, by peering through its cloud cover for the first time. Together, these 19 missions represent $12 billion dollars and a combined 180 years of work. If this budget passes, they’d all be scrapped.
https://youtu.be/spw7nv79L5o?si=Jj-iOvLVBg88ipg2
While the administration claims it’s about taxpayer efficiency and staying one step ahead of China, they’re gutting the very science that made America a space leader to begin with.
And the cost is higher than we imagined. This move could break the international space community’s trust in the US. And once the budget is rolled back, even a new administration will find it next to impossible to undo the damage — setting open and free science back by decades.
With cuts this deep, NASA faces losing a third of its workforce — a brain drain of thousands of highly specialized scientists, engineers, and researchers who've dedicated their careers to US space exploration. Once this talent leaves for private companies or other industries, getting them back will be virtually impossible.
The Science Mission Directorate will suffer the most, facing a whopping 47% cut. This arm is the lifeblood of NASA. They’re responsible for planetary probes like the Mars Perseverance Rover, space-based telescopes including Hubble and James Webb, and near-Earth protection projects like the NEO Surveyor, the infrared telescope set to launch in 2027, tasked with keeping us safe from threatening asteroids and comets.
41 current and future missions would be culled.
One such mission is the New Horizons probe, launched in 2006 to study Pluto and the Kuiper Belt — asteroids that may hold secrets to the origin and development of our solar system. It has been travelling through space for almost 20 years, and yet, just like that, it could be terminated within a matter of months.
In addition to New Horizons, 18 other active projects might be forced to grind to a halt. Among them are the OSIRIS-APEX mission, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid and currently studying near-Earth asteroids, the MAVEN mission, helping us understand the evolution of the Martian atmosphere, the Mars Odyssey, the longest continually-active mission in orbit around another planet, and the Juno mission, which focuses on the origin and evolution of Jupiter, by peering through its cloud cover for the first time. Together, these 19 missions represent $12 billion dollars and a combined 180 years of work. If this budget passes, they’d all be scrapped.
https://youtu.be/spw7nv79L5o?si=Jj-iOvLVBg88ipg2
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
