Trump’s plan to kill dozens of NASA missions threatens US space supremacy – Baltimore Sun

By Loren Grush, Bloomberg News

NASA’s car-sized Perseverance rover has been roaming the surface of Mars for four years, drilling into the alien soil to collect dirt it places in tubes and leaves on the ground.

Engineers designed Perseverance to be the first step in the agency’s exploration of the Red Planet. In the future, more robotic spacecraft would arrive to sweep up the capsules and rocket them back to Earth, where scientists could look for signs that Mars once was, or is, a world with life.

The wait for answers may be about to get longer. President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration would cancel the planned follow-on mission, potentially abandoning the tubes for decades to Martian dust storms.

The White House is calling for a roughly 50% cut to NASA’s science spending to $3.9 billion, part of an overall pullback that would deliver the lowest funding level in the agency’s history and kill more more than 40 NASA science missions and projects, according to detailed plans released last month. The Trump administration has also left the agency without a permanent leader and without a vision for how America’s civilian space policy is going to work with U.S. allies and compete with China and other rivals.

The cuts would follow a shift in how the American public thinks about space. NASA has long enjoyed a unique place in U.S. culture, with its exploits celebrated by movies, theme parks and merchandise — but companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have begun to capture more attention.

For decades, NASA’s scientific undertakings have provided critical groundwork for researchers seeking to understand the structure of the universe, study how planets form and hunt for evidence that life might exist beyond Earth. Pictures from NASA craft like the Hubble Space Telescope and the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope have inspired and delighted millions.

Now, the agency’s position at the vanguard of discovery is facing foreclosure. Among the other programs set to lose funding are a craft already on its way to rendezvous with an asteroid that’s expected to pass close to Earth in 2029, and multiple efforts to map and explore the acidic clouds of Venus. Researchers worry that abandoning missions would mean investments made by earlier generations might be lost or forgotten.

“Once you launch and you’re operating, then all those costs are behind you, and it’s relatively inexpensive to just keep the missions going,” said Amanda Hendrix, the chief executive officer of the Planetary Science Institute, a nonprofit research organization. “So I’m very concerned about these operating missions that are still producing excellent and really important science data.”

The Trump administration’s narrower vision for NASA comes as it is seeking to reduce waste and jobs in the U.S. government. Critics have faulted NASA over sluggish management of key programs, spiraling costs and delays.

Still, the administration is eager to pour more money into putting people in space. It wants to use $7 billion of the $18.8 billion it would allocate to NASA overall to ramp up efforts to return people to the moon, and invest $1 billion more in sending people to Mars.

“This is a NASA that would be primarily human spaceflight focused,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for space science and exploration, said of the proposed changes. “This is a NASA that would say, ‘The universe is primarily the moon and Mars,’ and basically step away from everything else.”

There are signs that the administration’s proposed cutbacks won’t satisfy lawmakers who view space as vital to U.S. interests. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who leads a committee that oversees NASA, has proposed legislation that would would provide nearly $10 billion to the agency.

“American dominance in space is a national security imperative,” Cruz said in a statement to Bloomberg. “The Commerce Committee’s bill carefully invests in beating China to the Moon and Mars — while respecting every taxpayer dollar. It’s rocket fuel for the commercial space companies and NASA that are working to keep America ahead of China in the Space Race.”

As Trump’s spending proposal moves through Congress, NASA has been left without a strong leader who can press its case after the president withdrew his nomination of billionaire commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman to run the agency.

In a recent interview on the “All-In Podcast,” Isaacman appeared to suggest Trump pulled his nomination because of his close ties to Musk, who had a public falling out with the president. Trump threatened to cancel SpaceX’s government contracts amid the row, but has since backed down.

“Stopping Jared from becoming confirmed is only going to hurt NASA’s ability to push back on budget cuts,” Jim Muncy, a space consultant and lobbyist with PoliSpace, said before Isaacman’s nomination was pulled.

Spaceflight Shift

For decades, NASA handled every step of launching rockets, probes and people into space, from developing, building and launching vehicles, to running missions. Only the government had the resources and the capacity to shoulder the risks without returning a profit.

That all changed in recent years with the emergence of a vibrant U.S. space industry dominated by wealthy entrepreneurs with a passion for spaceflight and the financial wherewithal to withstand repeated failure.

Over time, NASA has ceded more design, development and production work to those companies. SpaceX is carrying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, and sending probes into deep space from a rented launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. After helping to spur the development of SpaceX hardware, NASA is now one of the company’s biggest customers.

“This has kind of been the tension with the rise of commercial space,” said Mike French, a consultant for the Space Policy Group. “NASA has gone from ‘We’re operating these things; we’re building these things’ to ‘We’ve gotten really good at buying these things.’”

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