Latest news with #PlanetarySociety
Washington Post
6 days ago
- Science
- Washington Post
Why are we abandoning our research on Mars?
Louis Friedman is co-founder and former executive director of the Planetary Society. The three big questions about life — What is life? How did life originate? Is there extraterrestrial life? (Are we alone?) — are the raison d'être of space exploration. Life is why we explore. Yet despite exploring for all of human history, we have found only one example of life (that of Earth) and don't know how it came to be. The mystery of how chemistry begot biology — that is, how the molecules of the universe came together to create life — is still undetermined. We do not even know whether life is an inevitable result of the chemical and physical processes of our universe or a random mathematical accident of nature — rarely repeated, if at all.
Yahoo
12-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Senate bill under debate aims to restore NASA budget funding, Artemis and science missions
Amid a NASA staffing exodus and looming potential budget cuts, U.S. Senate leaders signaled they want to protect the agency's annual funding and pursue Artemis rocket launches to the moon en route to Mars, along with an array of science-based missions. A proposed bill — which remains in the negotiation stage — would fund NASA at $24.9 billion for the 2026 fiscal year, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, said Thursday, July 10, during a Senate Committee on Appropriations hearing. That's slightly more than this year's sum of $24.8 billion — and significantly more than the White House's proposal to cut NASA's budget to $18.8 billion next year. The White House plan represented a 24% reduction, including a 47% cut to science missions and activities. Cape Canaveral: Is there a launch today? Upcoming SpaceX, NASA, ULA rocket launch schedule at Cape Canaveral "Certainly, it's way too early to declare victory on anything. Because the House still has to consider their version. We have to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions. And it's got to make it to the president's desk before it actually becomes the budget of the United States," said Jack Kiraly, director of government relations with the Planetary Society. "But it's a huge step forward for everybody that wrote a letter, that made a phone call, that visited their (congressional) members, that made their voice heard. This is a major step forward in protecting science funding," Kiraly said. Released in May, the White House budget proposal called for slashing NASA agency-wide funding by $6 billion, including phasing out the "grossly expensive and delayed" Space Launch System rocket-Orion capsule program after three flights. Thursday's Senate appropriations discussion occurred the day after Politico reported 2,694 NASA civil staffers have agreed to leave the agency via deferred resignation, early retirement and other offers. Of that sum, at least 2,145 are senior-level employees. NASA employed nearly 18,000 people earlier this year. "What would've happened if 2,000+ senior NASA leaders were pushed out before the moon landing? We would've lost the space race to the Soviets," U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, said in a Wednesday tweet. He is a retired NASA astronaut who flew into orbit on four space shuttle missions. "And now we risk losing the next space race to China," Kelly said. In another agency move Wednesday night, President Donald Trump announced Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy will serve as NASA's interim administrator, "even if only for a short period of time." NASA's last permanent administrator was Bill Nelson, who was appointed by President Joe Biden and stepped down in January on the day of Trump's inauguration. Trump initially nominated Polaris Dawn commander and astronaut Jared Isaacman to run NASA, but Trump dropped him from consideration in May. Meanwhile, NASA and SpaceX crews continue preparing for the upcoming Crew-11 mission, which is expected to launch July 31 at the earliest from Kennedy Space Center. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov will journey into low-Earth orbit for a long-duration stay aboard the International Space Station. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, chairs the Senate Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over NASA and dozens of other agencies. "For NASA, the bill reflects an ambitious approach to space exploration, prioritizing the agency's flagship program, Artemis, and rejecting premature terminations of systems like SLS and Orion before commercial replacements are ready," Moran said during Thursday's hearing. "We make critical investments to accelerate our plans to land Americans on the lunar surface before the Chinese, but also in the technologies and capacity to land astronauts on Mars," he said. "This bill protects key science missions that are fundamental to furthering our understanding of the Earth and better stewards of our natural resources, and supports critical programs not only to drive discovery, but to safeguard the Earth from natural disasters," he said. Van Hollen said NASA's funding would be used "to explore the solar system, to advance our understanding of climate change, promote innovation and sustainability in aeronautics, and protect our planet." "We rejected cuts that would have devastated NASA science by 47% and would have terminated 55 operating and planned missions," Van Hollen said. Details in the Senate appropriations bill remained under negotiation Thursday afternoon with no resolution, and Kiraly said the text has not yet been released. On Monday, the Planetary Society publicly released a letter from all seven living former heads of NASA's Science Mission Directorate opposing the proposed 47% science cutback in Trump's spending plan. The letter called for bipartisan Congressional support for NASA science, citing the import of investments in the next generation of U.S. scientists and engineers. "Global space competition extends far past Moon and Mars exploration. The Chinese space science program is aggressive, ambitious, and well-funded. It is proposing missions to return samples from Mars, explore Neptune, monitor climate change for the benefit of the Chinese industry and population, and peer into the universe — all activities that the FY 2026 NASA budget proposal indicates the U.S. will abandon," the letter said. Separate but related to the Senate debate, Trump signed the Republicans' "big, beautiful bill" last week, featuring a huge package of federal tax and spending policies. Introduced by Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the Senate version of the bill included $10 billion in NASA funding, much of which had been slated for deletion in the White House budget proposal. Highlights include: $4.1 billion to fund two Space Launch System rockets for the Artemis IV and V missions, which the White House budget had proposed to eliminate. "This funding would not preclude integrating new, commercial options if and when they become available," the provision said. $2.6 billion to fully fund the Gateway lunar space station, which was also slated for elimination. $885 million for infrastructure improvements at regional centers, including $250 million at Kennedy Space Center. $325 million to fund a deorbit vehicle to safely bring down the International Space Station, which is nearing the end of its useful life. "That is money that will be spent. No questions asked: $10 billion being spent on NASA to make sure we stay space-dominant," U.S. Rep. Mike Haridopolos, R-Indian Harbour Beach, said in a phone interview earlier this week. He chairs the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. Kiraly said this $10 billion must be obligated by the end of the 2029 fiscal year, and he described it as supplemental in nature. Regarding NASA's discretionary budget, he said "we're in the trenches now of the annual appropriation process, the thing that spools up every spring and summer." Haridopolos said he supports the "big, beautiful bill's" NASA outlay, and congressional discussions remain "very early in the budget process" that will not wrap up until fall. Asked about NASA's science missions, he said he wants to hear return-on-investment details for taxpayers during upcoming House hearings to justify their spots in the budget. "I'd imagine that most, if not all, would make that cut," Haridopolos said. "I feel very good about our chances. People are acting like they've already lost. Historically, it's been the opposite. The initial number comes out, Congress works and does its best to fill any issues that might come up," he said. "But these folks who are worried about these cuts need to really justify the program to make sure we can make it through these tough votes that are going to come up in the fall," he said. For the latest news from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center, visit Another easy way: Click here to sign up for our weekly Space newsletter. Rick Neale is a Space Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Neale at Rneale@ Twitter/X: @RickNeale1 Space is important to us and that's why we're working to bring you top coverage of the industry and Florida launches. Journalism like this takes time and resources. Please support it with a subscription here. This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Senate appropriations bill aims to protect NASA's budget from cutbacks
Yahoo
04-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
America Is Killing Its Chance to Find Alien Life
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In April, scientists announced that they had used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to find a potential signature of alien life in the glow of a distant planet. Other scientists were quick to challenge the details of the claim and offered more mundane explanations; most likely, these data do not reveal a new and distant biology. But the affair was still a watershed moment. It demonstrated that humans have finally built tools powerful enough to see across interstellar space and detect evidence of biospheres on distant worlds—in other words, tools truly capable of discovering alien life. Given the telescope technologies we astronomers have now and the ones we'll build soon, within a few decades, humans might finally gather some hard data that can answer its most profound, existential question: Is there life beyond Earth? What's arguably even more remarkable is that unless something changes very soon, the humans making that epochal discovery might not be NASA and the American space scientists who power it. The U.S. space agency is facing a funding and personnel crisis that the Planetary Society has called 'an extinction-level event.' The Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget—a version of which passed Congress and now awaits the president's signature—slashes NASA's funding by almost a quarter. That means, adjusted for inflation, NASA would get the same level of funding it had in 1961, before John F. Kennedy called for the United States to put a man on the moon. The modern version of NASA has far more on its plate: maintaining the International Space Station, hunting for Earth-killing asteroids, and using its Earth-observing satellites to help farmers monitor soil conditions. The president's budget also calls for an aggressive push to land humans on both the moon and Mars. It's hard to see how the agency can safely and accurately fulfill its current responsibilities—let alone develop advanced (and expensive) scientific equipment that would advance the search for alien life—with such reduced funding. ('President Trump's FY26 NASA Budget commits to strengthening America's leadership in space exploration while exercising fiscal responsibility,' a NASA spokesperson wrote in an email to The Atlantic. 'We remain fully committed to our long-term goals and continue to make progress toward the next frontier in space exploration, even as funding priorities are adjusted.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) Almost all of NASA's divisions face dramatic cuts, but the proposed nearly 50 percent slash to its Science Mission Directorate poses the greatest threat to hopes of future grand discoveries, including finding life on other worlds. SMD's engineers and scientists built the rovers that helped scientists show that Mars, now a freezing desert, was once warm and covered in rushing water. The researchers it funds developed probes that revealed vast subsurface oceans on some of Jupiter's moons. SMD is also where you'll find the folks who built the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and a flotilla of other instruments. These extraordinary machines have provided views of colliding galaxies 300 million light-years away, captured the death throes of stars like the Sun, and recorded portraits of interstellar clouds that birth new generations of stars and planets. In 2023, the scientists and engineers of the SMD were tasked with building the all-important Habitable Worlds Observatory, designed specifically to find alien life on planets light-years away. Slated to launch sometime in the 2040s, the HWO is planned to be about the same size as the JWST, with a similar orbit beyond the moon. Unlike the JWST, the HWO's sophisticated detectors must be able to tease out the light of an exoplanet against the billions-of-times-brighter glare of its host star, a signal as faint as the dim glow of a firefly flitting around a powerful field light at the San Francisco Giants' Oracle Park, but detected from all the way across the country in New York City. But now, many astronomers fear, NASA might never get the chance to build HWO—or carry out a slew of other missions that maintain the U.S.'s strong advantage in space science, as well as keep it ahead in the hunt for alien life. Under Donald Trump's plan, NASA would be forced to abandon 19 'active' missions. These include Juno—which is revolutionizing astronomers' understanding of Jupiter and could help them understand similarly monstrous worlds in other solar systems with other Earth-like planets—and New Horizons, a mission that took nearly 10 years to reach Pluto and is now flying into uncharted space at the edge of the solar system. The budget also decimates the future of space-science exploration. Scientists have been desperate to get back to Venus, for example, after a chemical compound associated with life was potentially detected high in its atmosphere in 2020; the two missions that would get us there are axed out of the administration's budget. The plan for the Nancy Roman Telescope, which would test key technologies necessary for the HWO, is so withered that many astronomers worry the telescope might never leave Earth. Worst, the development for the HWO takes an 80 percent cut in the president's proposed budget, going from $17 million in 2024 to just $3 million in 2026, before rebounding in 2028. The HWO represents one the most ambitious projects ever attempted, and the technological innovation needed to build it, or probes that might land on Jupiter's ocean moons, get measured across decades. In order for such missions to succeed, investments have to remain steady and focused—the opposite of what the Trump administration has proposed. Amid all the difficulties the country faces, the losses in space science might seem trivial. But American science, including space science, has paid enormous dividends in keeping the nation strong, prosperous, and worthy of the world's respect. If the original budget passes, one in every three of NASA's highly skilled workers will lose their job. The agency, in turn, will lose decades of hard-core technical experience: Not many people know how to blast a robot science rover from Earth, have it cross hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, and then land it—intact—on the surface of another planet. As the cuts take hold, plenty of NASA scientists might be forced to take jobs in other countries or early retirements they didn't want, or simply be let go. And the agency will be set back decades more into the future by choking off funding to young researchers at every level. Just as the U.S. is stumbling and falling back in its efforts to find alien life, astronomers around the world are preparing for the steep climb. The European Space Agency has a list of missions aimed at studying exoplanets. China has announced a 2028 launch date for Earth 2.0, a space telescope designed to find Earth-size exoplanets in the habitable zones of their stars. If it succeeds, that mission would put China on a path to building its own version of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. In my work as an astrophysicist, studying the possibilities of life on exoplanets, I travel around the world representing American science. In those travels, I consistently find people in other countries wearing two icons of American culture: the Yankee cap and the NASA logo. That a kid in Florence or a middle-aged guy in Bangkok would wear a NASA T-shirt is testimony to the power of its legacy. NASA—with its can-do spirit and its willingness to dream like no other organization in the history of the world—is America. If protected and nurtured, it would almost certainly lead the charge to answer that most existential question of life beyond Earth. But if this administration's shortsighted budget passes, it might be some other nation that discovers we are not alone in the universe. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
04-07-2025
- Science
- Atlantic
America Is Killing Its Chance to Find Alien Life
In April, scientists announced that they had used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to find a potential signature of alien life in the glow of a distant planet. Other scientists were quick to challenge the details of the claim and offered more mundane explanations; most likely, these data do not reveal a new and distant biology. But the affair was still a watershed moment. It demonstrated that humans have finally built tools powerful enough to see across interstellar space and detect evidence of biospheres on distant worlds—in other words, tools truly capable of discovering alien life. Given the telescope technologies we astronomers have now and the ones we'll build soon, within a few decades, humans might finally gather some hard data that can answer its most profound, existential question: Is there life beyond Earth? What's arguably even more remarkable is that unless something changes very soon, the humans making that epochal discovery might not be NASA and the American space scientists who power it. The U.S. space agency is facing a funding and personnel crisis that the Planetary Society has called ' an extinction-level event.' The Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget—a version of which passed Congress and now awaits the president's signature—slashes NASA's funding by almost a quarter. That means, adjusted for inflation, NASA would get the same level of funding it had in 1961, before John F. Kennedy called for the United States to put a man on the moon. The modern version of NASA has far more on its plate: maintaining the International Space Station, hunting for Earth-killing asteroids, and using its Earth-observing satellites to help farmers monitor soil conditions. The president's budget also calls for an aggressive push to land humans on both the moon and Mars. It's hard to see how the agency can safely and accurately fulfill its current responsibilities—let alone develop advanced (and expensive) scientific equipment that would advance the search for alien life—with such reduced funding. ('President Trump's FY26 NASA Budget commits to strengthening America's leadership in space exploration while exercising fiscal responsibility,' a NASA spokesperson wrote in an email to The Atlantic. 'We remain fully committed to our long-term goals and continue to make progress toward the next frontier in space exploration, even as funding priorities are adjusted.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) Almost all of NASA's divisions face dramatic cuts, but the proposed nearly 50 percent slash to its Science Mission Directorate poses the greatest threat to hopes of future grand discoveries, including finding life on other worlds. SMD's engineers and scientists built the rovers that helped scientists show that Mars, now a freezing desert, was once warm and covered in rushing water. The researchers it funds developed probes that revealed vast subsurface oceans on some of Jupiter's moons. SMD is also where you'll find the folks who built the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and a flotilla of other instruments. These extraordinary machines have provided views of colliding galaxies 300 million light-years away, captured the death throes of stars like the Sun, and recorded portraits of interstellar clouds that birth new generations of stars and planets. In 2023, the scientists and engineers of the SMD were tasked with building the all-important Habitable Worlds Observatory, designed specifically to find alien life on planets light-years away. Slated to launch sometime in the 2040s, the HWO is planned to be about the same size as the JWST, with a similar orbit beyond the moon. Unlike the JWST, the HWO's sophisticated detectors must be able to tease out the light of an exoplanet against the billions-of-times-brighter glare of its host star, a signal as faint as the dim glow of a firefly flitting around a powerful field light at the San Francisco Giants' Oracle Park, but detected from all the way across the country in New York City. But now, many astronomers fear, NASA might never get the chance to build HWO—or carry out a slew of other missions that maintain the U.S.'s strong advantage in space science, as well as keep it ahead in the hunt for alien life. Under Donald Trump's plan, NASA would be forced to abandon 19 'active' missions. These include Juno—which is revolutionizing astronomers' understanding of Jupiter and could help them understand similarly monstrous worlds in other solar systems with other Earth-like planets—and New Horizons, a mission that took nearly 10 years to reach Pluto and is now flying into uncharted space at the edge of the solar system. The budget also decimates the future of space-science exploration. Scientists have been desperate to get back to Venus, for example, after a chemical compound associated with life was potentially detected high in its atmosphere in 2020; the two missions that would get us there are axed out of the administration's budget. The plan for the Nancy Roman Telescope, which would test key technologies necessary for the HWO, is so withered that many astronomers worry the telescope might never leave Earth. Worst, the development for the HWO takes an 80 percent cut in the president's proposed budget, going from $17 million in 2024 to just $3 million in 2026, before rebounding in 2028. The HWO represents one the most ambitious projects ever attempted, and the technological innovation needed to build it, or probes that might land on Jupiter's ocean moons, get measured across decades. In order for such missions to succeed, investments have to remain steady and focused—the opposite of what the Trump administration has proposed. Amid all the difficulties the country faces, the losses in space science might seem trivial. But American science, including space science, has paid enormous dividends in keeping the nation strong, prosperous, and worthy of the world's respect. If the original budget passes, one in every three of NASA's highly skilled workers will lose their job. The agency, in turn, will lose decades of hard-core technical experience: Not many people know how to blast a robot science rover from Earth, have it cross hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, and then land it—intact—on the surface of another planet. As the cuts take hold, plenty of NASA scientists might be forced to take jobs in other countries or early retirements they didn't want, or simply be let go. And the agency will be set back decades more into the future by choking off funding to young researchers at every level. Just as the U.S. is stumbling and falling back in its efforts to find alien life, astronomers around the world are preparing for the steep climb. The European Space Agency has a list of missions aimed at studying exoplanets. China has announced a 2028 launch date for Earth 2.0, a space telescope designed to find Earth-size exoplanets in the habitable zones of their stars. If it succeeds, that mission would put China on a path to building its own version of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. In my work as an astrophysicist, studying the possibilities of life on exoplanets, I travel around the world representing American science. In those travels, I consistently find people in other countries wearing two icons of American culture: the Yankee cap and the NASA logo. That a kid in Florence or a middle-aged guy in Bangkok would wear a NASA T-shirt is testimony to the power of its legacy. NASA—with its can-do spirit and its willingness to dream like no other organization in the history of the world—is America. If protected and nurtured, it would almost certainly lead the charge to answer that most existential question of life beyond Earth. But if this administration's shortsighted budget passes, it might be some other nation that discovers we are not alone in the universe.
Times
28-06-2025
- Science
- Times
‘Nasa is being savaged' — budget cuts and politics put space exploration in jeopardy
I t put a man on the moon, sent a rover to Mars and unlocked some of the greatest secrets of the universe. But for all Nasa's past achievements, team spirit is in the doldrums. 'It's not a happy time to work at Nasa right now,' said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society. 'There's very low morale and a huge amount of uncertainty.' The agency has been thrust into chaos by President Trump's proposed budget cuts, his rift with his former ally Elon Musk, and a U-turn on the nomination of Jared Isaacman as Nasa administrator. It should have been a time for optimism. Nasa is preparing to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972 — and this time it was to be no fleeting trip. It was to include moonbases and research stations in which astronauts would live and work, and a permanent space station orbiting the moon called the Lunar Gateway.
