Latest news with #Dreier
Engadget
6 days ago
- Politics
- Engadget
Trump's defunding of NASA would be catastrophic
"This is probably the most uncertain future NASA has faced, maybe since the end of Apollo," Casey Dreier tells me over the phone. Dreier is the chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for the exploration and study of space. On July 10, the Senate Appropriations Committee met to discuss the proposed federal Commerce, Justice and Science budget for 2026. While on average, funding for NASA has accounted for about 0.3 percent of total yearly spending by the federal government since the start of the 2010s, President Trump has called for a 24 percent cut year over year to the agency's operating allowance. By any metric, his plan would be devastating. Adjusted for inflation, it would leave NASA with the smallest operating budget it has had since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel to space in 1961. In the process, it would eviscerate the agency's science budget by nearly half, resulting in the termination of 55 ongoing and or planned missions. It would also leave NASA with its smallest workforce in 70 years. All this, at a time when the agency has been tasked with returning to the Moon and bringing the first humans to Mars. "There's no historical precedent to this level of single year, functionally indiscriminate and dramatic cuts. You lose, in one year, a third of all active science projects. [The Trump administration is] proposing to turn off missions that are performing not just good science, but unique and irreplaceable science. This isn't so they can reinvest the money in some radical new science efforts. No, the money is gone," said Dreier. "It's almost certainly the greatest threat to NASA science activities in the history of the space agency." Dreier isn't exaggerating when he says some missions would be impossible to replace. One of the casualties of Trump's cuts would be the New Horizons probe. In 2015, New Horizons gave us our best look at Pluto ever. Four years later, it performed the farthest flyby in human history. As things stand, it's the only active spacecraft in the Kuiper belt, a region of our solar system that is not well-understood by scientists. Even if NASA were to start working on a replacement today, it would take a generation for that vehicle to reach where New Horizons is right now. It costs NASA about $14.7 million per year to continue operating the probe, a fraction of the $29.9 billion in additional funding Congress allocated to fund ICE enforcement and detainment operations in the president's recently passed tax bill. Another mission that would be impossible to replace is OSIRIS-APEX. If the name sounds familiar, it's because OSRIS-APEX is a continuation of NASA's incredibly successful OSRIS-REx flight. In 2020, the spacecraft visited 101955 Bennu, an ancient asteroid about the size of the Empire State Building, and collected a sample of regolith (rocks and dirt) from its surface using a never-before-tried technique. After OSRIS-REx successfully returned the sample to Earth, NASA decided to extend the spacecraft's mission and fly to another asteroid, 99942 Apophis. In 2029, Apophis will pass about 19,600 miles from Earth. It will be the closest approach of any known asteroid of its size. NASA said the extension would add $200 million to a mission that had already cost it an estimated $1.16 billion. "This project is a pennies on the dollar repurposing of an existing spacecraft. It's the only American spacecraft that will be at Apophis for a once in a generation opportunity to study an asteroid that will just barely miss us," said Dreier. "That seems important to know." At a time when nearly every facet of American life is being upturned, the potential cancellation of dozens of NASA missions might seem a distant concern, but the gutting of the agency's science budget would have a ripple effect on communities across the US. "NASA is an engine for jobs in the country, and for every NASA job, there are many more that are created in the private workforce," said Bethany Ehlmann, Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology. She also serves on the board of directors for The Planetary Society. Professor Ehlmann's claim is supported by NASA's own data. In 2023, the agency employed 17,823 full-time civil servants nationwide. With NASA's private sector support factored in, that year the agency's missions were responsible for sustaining 304,803 jobs across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Put another way, for every full-time equivalent job at a NASA facility, NASA supports at least 16 private sector jobs. "Space science has been broadly supported and impacts roughly three quarters of every congressional district in the country," said Dreier. "It's not just a red or blue state thing." Following last week's Senate meeting, policymakers from both parties said they would push back on President Trump's NASA budget cuts. On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies passed a funding bill that would provide NASA with a total budget of $24.8 billion for 2026, or the same amount it was allocated this year. The week before, the corresponding subcommittee in the Senate passed its own NASA funding bill. The two versions differ on one critical detail. The Senate legislation maintains the agency's science budget at $7.3 billion, while the House version seeks to reduce it by 18 percent to $6 billion. Separately, the House is calling for a 23 percent cut to the National Science Foundation's budget. NSF funds much of the nation's astronomy research. "What I'm hearing from lawmakers is that they understand how important NASA is to industry. They understand how important NASA is to universities in terms of training, and providing grants that train the next generation of the space workforce," said Professor Ehlmann, who was on Capitol Hill last week. The House and Senate will need to come to an agreement for the bill to move forward. Even with many lawmakers in favor of maintaining NASA's budget, a flat budget is still a funding cut when accounting for inflation. Moreover, NASA has already been negatively affected by the Trump administration's efforts to trim the federal workforce. According to reporting Politico published on July 9, 2,694 NASA employees have agreed to leave the agency through either early retirement, a buyout or a deferred resignation. Of those individuals, 2,145 are workers in senior positions and 1,818 are staff serving in missions areas like human spaceflight and science. "Once the workforce is gone, they're gone. You lose a ton of institutional knowledge," said Dreier. The employees who have agreed to leave represent about 15 percent of NASA's 2023 workforce of 17,823. With the July 25 deadline for early retirement, voluntary separation and deferred resignations quickly approaching, that number is likely to grow. NASA's shifting priorities under the Trump administration have also created uncertainty among the agency's contractors. According to former NASA employee and NASA Watch creator Keith Cowing the workforce cuts are already affecting employees. "In the 40 years I've been involved with NASA in one way or another, I've never seen morale so bad," he said. "Is NASA bloated? Yeah, but the way you deal with bloat is to go in with a scalpel and you cut carefully. And yet you have people [like Elon Musk] standing on stage with chainsaws. That is not the way to run government, and it's certainly not the way to create the machinery needed to explore the universe." Whatever happens next, Dreier worries there's the potential for there to be an erosion in public support for NASA. He points to a survey published by Pew Research. In 2023, the organization found that monitoring for asteroids that could hit Earth and tracking changes to the planet's climate were the two activities Americans wanted NASA to prioritize over other mandates. By contrast, sending human astronauts to the Moon and Mars were the least important priorities for the public. The House version of NASA's 2026 budget would boost the agency's exploration budget by 25 percent to $9.7 billion. In Trump's tax bill, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) included language that provided NASA with $4.1 billion for the fourth and fifth flights of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket — the vehicle intended to carry the first NASA astronauts back to the Moon before before private sector alternatives like SpaceX's Starship are ready to fly. With both the Trump administration and House pushing Moon and Mars missions as priorities, Dreier says they're "ironically doubling down on the activities that the private sector is already doing — SpaceX says it's going to send humans to Mars — and abandoning the things that only NASA does. There's no private sector company doing space science." In effect, a NASA budget that sacrifices on scientific research in lieu of Mars missions would be one that invests in things the public says are the least important to it. "I worry that they're moving away from what the public expects their space agency to do, and that as a consequence, it will undermine public investment in NASA," he said. "NASA is usually tied for the number one or two most popular federal agency. People wear NASA t-shirts. No one wears a Department of the Interior t-shirt walking out of the GAP. It's a rare and precious thing to have, and they're risking it. It's not just the future of the agency that's at risk, but the future of the public's relationship with it." When asked for comment on this story, Bethany Stevens, NASA's press secretary, pointed Engadget to a letter from Acting Administrator Janet Petro NASA shared in a technical supplement it published alongside the president's budget request. "We must continue to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars. That means making strategic decisions — including scaling back or discontinuing ineffective efforts not aligned with our Moon and Mars exploration priorities" Petro wrote. The final NASA budget for 2026 is still months away from being finalized. After Tuesday's vote, the two funding bills will move to the full Senate and House appropriations committees for a vote and further revisions. Only after that will every member of each chamber get a chance to vote on the matter. Congress has until September 30 to complete the appropriations process before 2025 funding runs out. President Trump could also decide to veto the bill if it doesn't align with his priorities. Have a tip for Igor? You can reach him by email , on Bluesky or send a message to @Kodachrome.72 to chat confidentially on Signal.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
GoMining wants to make Bitcoin mining liquid, tradable, and rig-free
GoMining wants to make Bitcoin mining liquid, tradable, and rig-free originally appeared on TheStreet. GoMining lets users mine Bitcoin without ever touching a rig. Instead of buying physical hardware, users purchase digital miners—NFTs backed by real hash power from GoMining's data centers. Each miner is unique, customizable by efficiency and size, and fully owned on-chain. By using NFTs rather than traditional tokens, GoMining gives miners the ability to upgrade, trade, and scale their assets—transforming what was once a static process into something dynamic and liquid. 'Most people think NFT, they think it's a JPEG,' says Jeremy Dreier, Chief Business Development Officer at GoMining. 'But it's the underlying technology that allows each individual miner to have ownership over a specific amount of hash power—and every miner is unique.' Miners vary in power, ranging from 1 to 5,000 terahash, and users can choose between different energy efficiency levels. According to Dreier, NFTs were the only token format that made sense for such non-identical, customizable assets. 'The best technology to represent that in a tokenized form is an NFT,' he explains. 'They represent real-world assets—our data center hash power—and allow for true ownership and transferability.' But GoMining isn't just relying on NFTs. The company also operates a utility token that powers the ecosystem, offering users discounts, upgrades, and access to a peer-to-peer miner marketplace. 'When users pay for power and maintenance with the GoMining token, they can get up to a 20% discount,' says Dreier. 'They can also use it to upgrade their miners and make them more efficient over time.' GoMining's marketplace allows users to buy and sell digital miners freely—creating secondary liquidity and flexibility rarely seen in the mining space. 'You're not reliant on hardware life cycles anymore,' Dreier adds. 'It opens up a whole new model for entering and exiting Bitcoin mining.' With deflationary tokenomics and NFTs as digital hardware, GoMining is merging DeFi mechanics with Bitcoin infrastructure—making mining more flexible, more liquid, and a lot more user-friendly. GoMining wants to make Bitcoin mining liquid, tradable, and rig-free first appeared on TheStreet on Jun 12, 2025 This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jun 12, 2025, where it first appeared. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Los Angeles Times
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, 'NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration,' says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on 'practical, quantitative,' even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: 'America will always be the first in space,' he said during his first term. 'We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led.' Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that 'the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that.' Among the 'foreign class of servants,' whom Vance acknowledged included 'some German and Jewish scientists' who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. 'Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles,' Dreier observes. In this White House, however, 'there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency.' A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a 'hoax.' He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its 'misguided ... Global Climate Change programs,' and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is 'very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do' in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. 'Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money,' Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but 'I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates,' Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. 'You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space,' he told me. 'It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes.'
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Contributor: To dumbly go where no space budget has gone before
Reports that the White House may propose nearly a 50% cut to NASA's Science Mission Directorate are both mind-boggling and, if true, nothing short of disastrous. To make those cuts happen — a total of $3.6 billion — NASA would have to close the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and cancel the mission that will bring back samples of Mars, a mission to Venus and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is nearly ready to launch. Every space telescope besides the Hubble and the James Webb would be shut down. According to the American Astronomical Society, some cuts would include projects that help us understand the sun's effects on global communications, a potential national security threat. Casey Dreier, the policy advocate for the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, says, 'This is an extinction-level event for the Earth- and space-science communities, upending decades of work and tens of billions in taxpayers' investment.' Read more: Mars rocks are a science prize the U.S. can't afford to lose In addition, NASA as a whole would see a 20% cut — just as we are moving forward with the Artemis program. Artemis is NASA's step-by-step 'Moon to Mars' human spaceflight campaign. Artemis II is set to launch sometime next year and will send four astronauts on a lunar fly-by, the first time humans have been in close proximity to another celestial body in more than 50 years. While it seems likely that Artemis will continue in some fashion, a 20% overall agency budget cut won't leave any part of NASA unaffected. The president promised a 'golden age of America'; his nominee to head NASA promised a 'golden age of science and discovery.' This would be a return to the dark ages. Taking a blowtorch to space science would also have little effect on the federal budget while setting back American leadership in space — and the inspiration it provides across political divides — by generations. Read more: Earth 1, asteroids 0: The next generation of planetary defense takes shape at JPL The Astronomical Society warns that our cutbacks will outsource talent 'to other countries that are increasing their investments in facilities and workforce development.' And, as Dreier points out, spacecraft would be 'left to tumble aimlessly in space' and billions wasted that have already been spent. 'Thousands of bright students across the country,' he wrote recently, 'would be denied careers in science and engineering absent the fellowships and research funds to support them.' Here's the dollars-and-cents context. NASA's budget since the 1970s "hovers" between 1% and 0.4% of the federal discretionary spending, according to the Planetary Society's analysis, yet for every dollar spent, NASA generates $3 in the national economy. NASA's giveback was worth nearly $76 billion in economic impact in 2023, supporting more than 300,000 jobs. In California alone, NASA and its associated partners in industry and academia provide more than 66,000 jobs, more than $18 billion in economic activity and $1 billion in state tax revenue. NASA's bang-for-the-buck is astronomical, pun intended. Cutting waste is one thing. Evisceration is another. When it comes to science — from public health to climate change — the current administration is doing the latter, not the former. Read more: Saturn's moon looked like a snowy Utah landscape in my mind. The reality is just as compelling Meanwhile, China continues its space ambitions, with plans for a human lunar campaign and its own 'sample return' mission to the Red Planet. For now, fortunately, the bipartisan support for NASA seems to be holding. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, led by the Planetary Science Caucus, have spoken out against this attack on NASA. And the Planetary Society has engaged thousands of passionate activists to fight this battle. Humans yearn for connection to the universe — so we watch launches on social media, we follow the tracks of rovers on Mars and we marvel at creation in pictures transmitted from the James Webb Space Telescope. We borrow telescopes from the public library and look to the heavens. Bending metal — the actual process of making rovers and spaceships and telescopes — drives economic activity. Fascinating results — the data from space science missions — fires the imagination. We choose to go to space — sending humans and probes — and we pursue knowledge because curiosity is our evolutionary heritage. We explore other worlds to know them and, in doing so, we discover more about ourselves. If you agree, let Congress know. That may be the only backstop against dumbly going where no budget has gone before. Christopher Cokinos is a nature-and science writer whose most recent book is "Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow." If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
To dumbly go where no space budget has gone before
Reports that the White House may propose nearly a 50% cut to NASA's Science Mission Directorate are both mind-boggling and, if true, nothing short of disastrous. To make those cuts happen — a total of $3.6 billion — NASA would have to close the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and cancel the mission that will bring back samples of Mars, a mission to Venus and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is nearly ready to launch. Every space telescope besides the Hubble and the James Webb would be shut down. According to the American Astronomical Society, some cuts would include projects that help us understand the sun's effects on global communications, a potential national security threat. Casey Dreier, the policy advocate for the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, says, 'This is an extinction-level event for the Earth- and space-science communities, upending decades of work and tens of billions in taxpayers' investment.' In addition, NASA as a whole would see a 20% cut — just as we are moving forward with the Artemis program. Artemis is NASA's step-by-step 'Moon to Mars' human spaceflight campaign. Artemis II is set to launch sometime next year and will send four astronauts on a lunar fly-by, the first time humans have been in close proximity to another celestial body in more than 50 years. While it seems likely that Artemis will continue in some fashion, a 20% overall agency budget cut won't leave any part of NASA unaffected. The president promised a 'golden age of America'; his nominee to head NASA promised a 'golden age of science and discovery.' This would be a return to the dark ages. Taking a blowtorch to space science would also have little effect on the federal budget while setting back American leadership in space — and the inspiration it provides across political divides — by generations. The Astronomical Society warns that our cutbacks will outsource talent 'to other countries that are increasing their investments in facilities and workforce development.' And, as Dreier points out, spacecraft would be 'left to tumble aimlessly in space' and billions wasted that have already been spent. 'Thousands of bright students across the country,' he wrote recently, 'would be denied careers in science and engineering absent the fellowships and research funds to support them.' Here's the dollars-and-cents context. NASA's budget since the 1970s 'hovers' between 1% and 0.4% of the federal discretionary spending, according to the Planetary Society's analysis, yet for every dollar spent, NASA generates $3 in the national economy. NASA's giveback was worth nearly $76 billion in economic impact in 2023, supporting more than 300,000 jobs. In California alone, NASA and its associated partners in industry and academia provide more than 66,000 jobs, more than $18 billion in economic activity and $1 billion in state tax revenue. NASA's bang-for-the-buck is astronomical, pun intended. Cutting waste is one thing. Evisceration is another. When it comes to science — from public health to climate change — the current administration is doing the latter, not the former. Meanwhile, China continues its space ambitions, with plans for a human lunar campaign and its own 'sample return' mission to the Red Planet. For now, fortunately, the bipartisan support for NASA seems to be holding. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, led by the Planetary Science Caucus, have spoken out against this attack on NASA. And the Planetary Society has engaged thousands of passionate activists to fight this battle. Humans yearn for connection to the universe — so we watch launches on social media, we follow the tracks of rovers on Mars and we marvel at creation in pictures transmitted from the James Webb Space Telescope. We borrow telescopes from the public library and look to the heavens. Bending metal — the actual process of making rovers and spaceships and telescopes — drives economic activity. Fascinating results — the data from space science missions — fires the imagination. We choose to go to space — sending humans and probes — and we pursue knowledge because curiosity is our evolutionary heritage. We explore other worlds to know them and, in doing so, we discover more about ourselves. If you agree, let Congress know. That may be the only backstop against dumbly going where no budget has gone before. Christopher Cokinos is a nature-and science writer whose most recent book is 'Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow.'
