5 days ago
The Trump Administration's Illegal Plan to Defund Carbon Tracking Satellites
We've previously reported on the Trump administration's proposed new budget and the harsh cuts it delivers to NASA for the coming year. Personnel are leaving in droves, and morale is reportedly low as plans must be consistently scaled back or cancelled altogether.
But that budget hasn't been approved yet. In July, lawmakers sent a letter to the newly appointed acting NASA administrator, Sean Duffy, telling him not to implement cuts from the budget until it has passed.
Now, reports indicate that Duffy is continuing to pursue non-final cuts, including the defunding of two atmospheric monitoring satellites, both in the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) series. OCO3 works in tandem with the International Space Station.
Since entering operation, these two satellites have produced some truly worrying data. They help quantify carbon levels in the atmosphere and track the behavior of things like carbon sinks in the oceans. Their insights are used regularly across industries, particularly agriculture.
This NASA-created graphic of OCO2 proves irrefutably that the agency is not spending a lot of money on this project. Credit: NASA
Worse, OCO2 and OCO3 are fully functioning satellites already in space. The vast majority of their costs have already been spent, while they each have many years of operation remaining to return further value. One NASA scientist told NPR: 'Just from an economic standpoint, it makes no economic sense to terminate NASA missions that are returning incredibly valuable data.'
As a motivation, we can only surmise that it might be an extension of the administration's overall hostility toward climate science and any government project that accepts it as real. The administration has a long-standing history of attacking climate science and scientists, as well as refusing to publish government-funded research. Just recently, the current heads of the Department of Energy commissioned a report on how the 'climate consensus' is wrong.
In that vein, these satellites could be shuttered simply to stop them from producing the data they do.
These enormous cuts to NASA are typical of the proposed budget, though. If passed as-is, it would cut the National Institutes of Health by 40% and the Centers for Disease Control would lose 44% of their budget. The National Science Foundation would be cut by 55%. Meanwhile, other reporting suggests that the militarization of space will have no shortage of funding at all.
So, what will NASA spend money on over the coming year? One recently announced option is building nuclear reactors on the moon, which would assist with human colonization and further expansion into the solar system. That mission has not yet received a budget proposal.
