Trump’s Nasa cuts would destroy decades of science

Michael Hiltzik, Tribune News Service

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 US 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 US 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 US 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.