Latest news with #CaseyDreier
Axios
12 hours ago
- Politics
- Axios
NASA's Arizona science spend
NASA spends hundreds of millions of dollars per state on average annually through its scientific missions, and Arizona is among the country's biggest recipients, a recent analysis shows. Why it matters: The space agency's science efforts bear the brunt of the cuts in the Trump administration's proposed budget, down nearly 50% to $3.9 billion. The big picture: Science represents about 30% of NASA's overall budget and includes missions like space telescopes, robotic probes and satellites that gather data about Earth's changing climate. While not always as headline-grabbing as human spaceflight, NASA's science activity has greatly enhanced our understanding of Earth and our celestial neighborhood. By the numbers: From 2022-2024, Arizona averaged the 10th most direct investment from NASA science spending in the country at $120 million per year, and had the ninth most overall spending last year with nearly $107 million, per data from The Planetary Society, a pro-space nonprofit. Nearly half the money in that three-year period ($58 million) went to Arizona's 7th Congressional District, home to the University of Arizona's main campus. Threat level: The Trump administration's proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year would cut nearly $57 million in spending from the state. That would "severely curtail research" at University of Arizona and Arizona State University, The Planetary Society warns, putting 566 jobs at risk and jeopardizing $158 million in economic activity. Zoom out: California (About $3 billion), Maryland ($2 billion), Texas ($614 million), Virginia ($612 million) and Alabama ($586 million) saw the most NASA science spending on average annually across fiscal 2022-2024. Each is home to major NASA facilities. Those numbers represent obligations involving "research grants, contracts and cooperative agreements," the group says. Zoom in: Missions on the chopping block in Trump's NASA budget include the New Horizons spacecraft (first launched to study Pluto and now in the outer solar system) and Mars Sample Return, an ambitious joint American-European plan to collect Martian soil samples gathered by the Perseverance rover and bring them to Earth for further study. Nearly 20 active science missions would be canceled in total, the Planetary Society says, representing more than $12 billion in taxpayer investments. What they're saying: A chief concern, Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier tells Axios, is that already paid-for probes and telescopes would be deactivated even though they're still delivering valuable data, wasting taxpayer dollars already spent to launch and run them. "This is the part where you get pennies on the dollar return," Dreier says. "They keep returning great science for the very fractional cost to keep the lights on. And a lot of these will just be turned off and left to tumble in space."
Scientific American
2 days ago
- Business
- Scientific American
White House Budget Plan Would Devastate U.S. Space Science
Late last week the Trump Administration released its detailed budget request for fiscal year 2026 —a request that, if enacted, would be the equivalent of carpet-bombing the national scientific enterprise. 'This is a profound, generational threat to scientific leadership in the United States,' says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a science advocacy group. 'If implemented, it would fundamentally undermine and potentially devastate the most unique capabilities that the U.S. has built up over a half-century.' The Trump administration's proposal, which still needs to be approved by Congress, is sure to ignite fierce resistance from scientists and senators alike. Among other agencies, the budget deals staggering blows to NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which together fund the majority of U.S. research in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics and Earth science —all space-related sciences that have typically mustered hearty bipartisan support. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The NSF supports ground-based astronomy, including such facilities as the Nobel Prize–winning gravitational-wave detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), globe-spanning arrays of radio telescopes, and cutting-edge observatories that stretch from Hawaii to the South Pole. The agency faces a lethal 57 percent reduction to its $9-billion budget, with deep cuts to every program except those in President Trump's priority areas, which include artificial intelligence and quantum information science. NASA, which funds space-based observatories, faces a 25 percent reduction, dropping the agency's $24.9-billion budget to $18.8 billion. The proposal beefs up efforts to send humans to the moon and to Mars, but the agency's Science Mission Directorate —home to Mars rovers, the Voyager interstellar probes, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Hubble Space Telescope, and much more —is looking at a nearly 50 percent reduction, with dozens of missions canceled, turned off or operating on a starvation diet. 'It's an end-game scenario for science at NASA,' says Joel Parriott, director of external affairs and public policy at the American Astronomical Society. 'It's not just the facilities. You're punching a generation-size hole, maybe a multigenerational hole, in the scientific and technical workforce. You don't just Cryovac these people and pull them out when the money comes back. People are going to move on.' Adding to the chaos, on Saturday President Trump announced that billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman was no longer his pick for NASA administrator —just days before the Senate was set to confirm Isaacman's nomination. Initial reports —which have now been disputed —explained the president's decision as stemming from his discovery that Isaacman recently donated money to Democratic candidates. Regardless of the true reason, the decision leaves both NASA and the NSF, whose director abruptly resigned in April, with respective placeholder 'acting' leaders at the top. That leadership vacuum significantly weakens the agencies' ability to fight the proposed budget cuts and advocate for themselves. 'What's more inefficient than a rudderless agency without an empowered leadership?' Dreier asks. Actions versus Words During his second administration, President Trump has repeatedly celebrated U.S. leadership in space. When he nominated Isaacman last December, Trump noted 'NASA's mission of discovery and inspiration' and looked to a future of 'groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology and exploration.' More recently, while celebrating Hubble's 35th anniversary in April, Trump called the telescope 'a symbol of America's unmatched exploratory might' and declared that NASA would 'continue to lead the way in fueling the pursuit of space discovery and exploration.' The administration's budgetary actions speak louder than Trump's words, however. Instead of ushering in a new golden age of space exploration—or even setting up the U.S. to stay atop the podium—the president's budget 'narrows down what the cosmos is to moon and Mars and pretty much nothing else,' Dreier says. 'And the cosmos is a lot bigger, and there's a lot more to learn out there.' Dreier notes that when corrected for inflation, the overall NASA budget would be the lowest it's been since 1961. But in April of that year, the Soviet Union launched the first human into orbit, igniting a space race that swelled NASA's budget and led to the Apollo program putting American astronauts on the moon. Today China's rapid progress and enormous ambitions in space would make the moment ripe for a 21st-century version of this competition, with the U.S. generously funding its own efforts to maintain pole position. Instead the White House's budget would do the exact opposite. 'The seesaw is sort of unbalanced,' says Tony Beasley, director of the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). 'On the one side, we're saying, 'Well, China's kicking our ass, and we need to do something about that.' But then we're not going to give any money to anything that might actually do that.' How NASA will achieve a crewed return to the moon and send astronauts to Mars—goals that the agency now considers part of 'winning the second space race'—while also maintaining its leadership in science is unclear. 'This is Russ Vought's budget,' Dreier says, referring to the director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an unelected bureaucrat who has been notorious for his efforts to reshape the U.S. government by weaponizing federal funding. 'This isn't even Trump's budget. Trump's budget would be good for space. This one undermines the president's own claims and ambitions when it comes to space.' 'Low Expectations' at the High Frontier Rumors began swirling about the demise of NASA science in April, when a leaked OMB document described some of the proposed cuts and cancellations. Those included both the beleaguered, bloated Mars Sample Return (MSR) program and the on-time, on-budget Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the next astrophysics flagship mission. The top-line numbers in the more fleshed-out proposal are consistent with that document, and MSR would still be canceled. But Roman would be granted a stay of execution: rather than being zeroed out, it would be put on life support. 'It's a reprieve from outright termination, but it's still a cut for functionally no reason,' Dreier says. 'In some ways, [the budget] is slightly better than I was expecting. But I had very low expectations.' In the proposal, many of the deepest cuts would be made to NASA science, which would sink from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion. Earth science missions focused on carbon monitoring and climate change, as well as programs aimed at education and workforce diversity, would be effectively erased by the cuts. But a slew of high-profile planetary science projects would suffer, too, with cancellations proposed for two future Venus missions, the Juno mission that is currently surveilling Jupiter, the New Horizons mission that flew by Pluto and two Mars orbiters. (The Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon Titan would survive, as would the flagship Europa Clipper spacecraft, which launched last October.) NASA's international partnerships in planetary science fare poorly, too, as the budget rescinds the agency's involvement with multiple European-led projects, including a Venus mission and Mars rover. The proposal is even worse for NASA astrophysics—the study of our cosmic home—which 'really takes it to the chin,' Dreier says, with a roughly $1-billion drop to just $523 million. In the president's proposal, only three big astrophysics missions would survive: the soon-to-launch Roman and the already-operational Hubble and JWST. The rest of NASA's active astrophysics missions, which include the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), would be severely pared back or zeroed out. Additionally, the budget would nix NASA's contributions to large European missions, such as a future space-based gravitational-wave observatory. 'This is the most powerful fleet of missions in the history of the study of astrophysics from space,' says John O'Meara, chief scientist at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and co-chair of a recent senior review panel that evaluated NASA's astrophysics missions. The report found that each reviewed mission 'continues to be capable of producing important, impactful science.' This fleet, O'Meara adds, is more than the sum of its parts, with much of its power emerging from synergies among multiple telescopes that study the cosmos in many different types, or wavelengths, of light. By hollowing out NASA's science to ruthlessly focus on crewed missions, the White House budget might be charitably viewed as seeking to rekindle a heroic age of spaceflight—with China's burgeoning space program as the new archrival. But even for these supposedly high-priority initiatives, the proposed funding levels appear too anemic and meager to give the U.S. any competitive edge. For example, the budget directs about $1 billion to new technology investments to support crewed Mars missions while conservative estimates have projected that such voyages would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more. 'It cedes U.S. leadership in space science at a time when other nations, particularly China, are increasing their ambitions,' Dreier says. 'It completely flies in the face of the president's own stated goals for American leadership in space.' Undermining the Foundation The NSF's situation , which one senior space scientist predicted would be 'diabolical' when the NASA numbers leaked back in April, is also unsurprisingly dire. Unlike NASA, which is focused on space science and exploration, the NSF's programs span the sweep of scientific disciplines, meaning that even small, isolated cuts—let alone the enormous ones that the budget has proposed—can have shockingly large effects on certain research domains. 'Across the different parts of the NSF, the programs that are upvoted are the president's strategic initiatives, but then everything else gets hit,' Beasley says. Several large-scale NSF-funded projects would escape more or less intact. Among these are the panoramic Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to unveil its first science images later this month, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope. The budget also moves the Giant Magellan Telescope, which would boast starlight-gathering mirrors totaling more than 25 meters across, into a final design phase. All three of those facilities take advantage of Chile's pristine dark skies. Other large NSF-funded projects that would survive include the proposed Next Generation Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico and several facilities at the South Pole, such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. If this budget is enacted, however, NSF officials anticipate only funding a measly 7 percent of research proposals overall rather than 25 percent; the number of graduate research fellowships awarded would be cleaved in half, and postdoctoral fellowships in the physical sciences would drop to zero. NRAO's Green Bank Observatory — home to the largest steerable single-dish radio telescope on the planet — would likely shut down. So would other, smaller observatories in Arizona and Chile. The Thirty Meter Telescope, a humongous, perennially embattled project with no clear site selection, would be canceled. And the budget proposes closing one of the two gravitational-wave detectors used by the LIGO collaboration—whose observations of colliding black holes earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics—even though both detectors need to be online for LIGO's experiment to work. Even factoring in other operational detectors, such as Virgo in Europe and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan, shutting down half of LIGO would leave a gaping blind spot in humanity's gravitational-wave view of the heavens. 'The consequences of this budget are that key scientific priorities, on the ground and in space, will take at least a decade longer—or not be realized at all,' O'Meara says. 'The universe is telling its story at all wavelengths. It doesn't care what you build, but if you want to hear that story, you must build many things.' Dreier, Parriott and others are anticipating fierce battles on Capitol Hill. And already both Democratic and Republican legislators have issued statement signaling that they won't support the budget request as is. 'This sick joke of a budget is a nonstarter,' said Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, in a recent statement. And in an earlier statement, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Appropriations, cautioned that 'the President's Budget Request is simply one step in the annual budget process.' The Trump administration has 'thrown a huge punch here, and there will be a certain back-reaction, and we'll end up in the middle somewhere,' Beasley says. 'The mistake you can make right now is to assume that this represents finalized decisions and the future—because it doesn't.'
E&E News
3 days ago
- Business
- E&E News
Trump budget would trigger ‘extinction-level event' for NASA
The Trump administration wants to take NASA's budget back to a time before the 1969 moon landing. The proposed White House budget released late Friday would slash about a quarter of the agency's spending and reduce NASA's top-line budget to one of its lowest levels in 60 years when adjusted for inflation. Much of the $6 billion cut from the current $25 billion annual budget would be achieved by decimating research — in particular NASA's work on climate change. Advertisement The White House proposal also would target entire satellite programs for elimination and dramatically curtail U.S. cooperation with foreign science agencies. The number of NASA employees would be cut by about a third, from more than 18,000 down to fewer than 12,000. NASA's science division would bear the brunt of the blow. Its budget would be cut from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion, with major cuts to programs that monitor and process the ways human-caused global warming is transforming America and the world. The proposal is an 'extinction-level event' for one of the world's leading science agencies, said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, which advocates for research and exploration in space. 'It's unprecedented, it's a fundamentally different science program than what we've had for the last few decades, and one that I frankly think is a narrower and less ambitious representation of our national goals,' he said, 'And frankly, it abandons a lot of our joint efforts with our key allies in the process.' Dreier added that cutting climate-related monitoring of the planet will have immediate and negative effects on a broad range of industries, especially agriculture. The cuts will hit communities across the country too, as NASA's science division funds work in every state as well as roughly 80 percent of the nation's congressional districts, according to the Planetary Society. Some parts of the proposal would save a relatively small amount of money at the cost of impairing U.S. efforts to understand the way global warming is changing the planet, critics say. The White House proposal would cut off invaluable streams of data that have been collected during Democratic and Republican administrations. The satellite division would be hard hit too, and those cuts appear aimed at any instrument that tracks human-caused climate change — even though they provide other useful data as well. For instance, the Surface Geology and Biology mission — slated for elimination — keeps tabs on methane and carbon pollution but also uses sophisticated instruments to hunt for critical minerals. Also on the chopping block: the next generation of the LandSat satellite program. LandSat tracks the ways global warming is altering Earth, but it also provides data on water levels and distribution. Trump has not staffed the National Space Council, which provides guidance to the White House and federal agencies as well as the U.S. Space Force — though he may do so soon. It's not clear if the budget is largely the product of the White House Office of Management and Budget or if it was crafted with input from NASA. White House and NASA officials did not respond to a request for comment. Most years, White House budget plans are treated as either a rough draft or a messaging document — as the presidential proposals are often dramatically altered by congressional appropriators. But this year could be different, as congressional Republicans have shown little willingness to break with the White House at the start of President Donald Trump's second term. Even if Republicans do attempt to undo some part of the White House plan for NASA, OMB Director Russ Vought has said his office may simply ignore congressional action and impound funds it does want to spend, which likely would draw a legal challenge. The proposed NASA cuts come at turbulent time for the space agency. The Trump administration recently withdrew its first pick for NASA administrator. That's because White House officials were angry that Jared Isaacman — an ally of Elon Musk — had donated to some Democrats including Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former astronaut, according to reporting from The New York Times. Trump criticized Isaacman for his 'prior associations.' On Tuesday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said a new nominee for NASA chief would be named soon. 'The president wants to ensure that all of his nominees are aligned fully with the America first mission of this administration,' she said. Trump has long dismissed climate science, but during his first term NASA maintained a relatively robust research portfolio into the ways humanity is altering the planet by burning fossil fuels. But his latest budget proposal takes a sledgehammer to climate research, observers say. It's also unprecedented to cut fully functioning satellites in orbit that are producing invaluable data, said Richard Eckman, who retired as a program manager for NASA's Earth Science Division in January after almost 40 years at the agency. The probes typically cost billions of dollars to build and launch and comparatively little to maintain once they're in space. Eckman worked on Sage, one of the instruments slated for elimination, which is bolted to the International Space Station and measures ozone as required under the Clean Air Act of 1990. He said it's clear the White House budget aims to blind the country to the ways climate change is transforming the world. But he said the satellites and instruments slated for elimination produce all kinds of other data too, such as tracking the movement of different climatic zones that affect plant growth and are relied upon by the agriculture industry. The missions being canceled typically take decades to go from an idea to an instrument launched into space, he said. 'Whether you believe in climate change or human-induced impacts on climate or not, these are atmospheric gasses that have an impact on the composition of the earth,' he said. 'It's very depressing to me to think that we're writing off the future of NASA Earth Observing missions from space.'
Axios
3 days ago
- Business
- Axios
The states where NASA spends the most money on science
NASA spends hundreds of millions of dollars per state on average annually through its scientific missions, a recent analysis shows. Why it matters: The space agency's science efforts bear the brunt of the cuts in the Trump administration's proposed budget, down nearly 50% to $3.9 billion. The big picture: Science represents about 30% of NASA's overall budget and includes missions like space telescopes, robotic probes and satellites that gather data about Earth's changing climate. While not always as headline-grabbing as human spaceflight, NASA's science activity has greatly enhanced our scientific understanding of both Earth and our celestial neighborhood. By the numbers: California (About $3 billion), Maryland ($2 billion), Texas ($614 million), Virginia ($612 million) and Alabama ($586 million) saw the most NASA science spending on average annually across fiscal 2022-2024, per data from The Planetary Society, a pro-space nonprofit. Each is home to major NASA facilities, such as California's Ames Research Center and Maryland's Goddard Space Flight Center, which houses the NASA Center for Climate Simulation providing supercomputing resources for climate modeling. The numbers represent obligations involving "research grants, contracts and cooperative agreements," the group says. Zoom in: Missions on the chopping block in Trump's NASA budget include the New Horizons spacecraft (first launched to study Pluto and now in the outer solar system) and Mars Sample Return, an ambitious joint American-European plan to collect Martian soil samples gathered by the Perseverance rover and bring them to Earth for further study. Nearly 20 active science missions would be canceled in total, the Planetary Society says, representing more than $12 billion in taxpayer investments. What they're saying: A chief concern, Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier tells Axios, is that already paid-for probes and telescopes would be deactivated even though they're still delivering valuable data, wasting taxpayer dollars already spent to launch and run them. "This is the part where you get pennies on the dollar return," Dreier says. "They keep returning great science for the very fractional cost to keep the lights on. And a lot of these will just be turned off and left to tumble in space." Between the lines: Trump's proposed NASA science cuts fit into a broader pattern of pulling resources away from scientific endeavors and data collection, especially involving climate change. The White House has also proposed major cuts and culled staff at agencies like NOAA, and is pulling federal funding for climate-related research.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Budget for NASA Is Absolutely Horrifying
Earlier this year, the Trump administration revealed its proposed budget for NASA's fiscal year 2026, indicating brutal cuts of unprecedented proportions are coming. Now, the agency has released new data about the proposal, painting a dire picture of its future. As SpaceNews reports, the documents reveal that thousands of jobs would be cut, and dozens of science missions would be on the chopping block. The cuts — which would drag the budget to its lowest point since 1961, SpaceNews points out, when adjusted for inflation — would result in the firing of roughly one-third of all civil servants. The budget would also slash the space agency's science budget in almost half, "nothing short of an extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States," as Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier told Ars Technica in March. The extent of the proposed cuts is truly baffling, with the Trump administration basically looking to give up on space science altogether in favor of militarizing the Earth's orbit and sending humans to Mars. The so-called "skinny" budget would result in the cancellation of several key space exploration missions, including NASA's Mars Sample Return mission. Other Earth observation programs would also be ripped up, including missions to monitor the planet's gravity field or study tropical cyclones, per SpaceNews. The budget would also cancel planned missions to explore the surface of Mars, as well as existing operations such as OSIRIS-APEX, which is headed to an asteroid called Apophis. While NASA's next major landmark space observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, wouldn't be entirely canceled, it would be allocated less than half of its previously outlined budget. Meanwhile, the space agency would be doubling down on establishing commercially funded ways to get to the Moon and Mars, highlighting the Trump administration's sometimes-cozy relationship with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose space company is bound to reap the benefits. The budget would clear up north of $1 billion for projects connected to sending humans to the Red Planet, indicating the president is willing to closely follow Musk's lead. The proposed 2026 fiscal year budget is now headed to Congress, where it's likely to meet ample opposition. "No one is eager to cut NASA science," Dreier told SpaceNews. "No one is out there openly defending and saying that this is a great idea." In short, if it were to make it through Congress unaltered — which is unlikely, since the agency is supported by many lawmakers — Trump's NASA budget could deal the country's leadership in space an existential blow, allowing adversaries, most notably China, to race ahead. "It sends a signal that America is stepping back from leadership in virtually every science area, including NASA," former NASA associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld told PBS. "The proposal for the NASA science budget is, in fact, cataclysmic for US leadership in science." "What we see is a full-scale assault on science in America," representative George Whitesides (D-CA) added. "It is probably the biggest attack on our scientific establishment in history." "It's a poorly wielded chainsaw," he added. More on NASA's budget: NASA Disgusted by Elon Musk's Disrespect
