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On May 2, the Trump administration announced its intention to impose massive cuts on the Science directorate of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), reducing its budget from $7.3 billion in 2025 to $3.8 billion in FY2026. These cuts will almost certainly entail the abandonment of the Curiosity rover, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Voyager and New Horizon interstellar probes, among others, and derail almost all plans for future American planetary exploration and astronomy missions. Among the cancellations will be the Roman Space Telescope, built at a cost of $4 billion and currently undergoing final assembly in preparation for launch next year, and the Mars Sample Return mission. The Webb Space Telescope, launched just a few years ago and which recently detected a potential biosignature in the atmosphere of an exoplanet orbiting a star 124 light-years away, will have its operations sharply curtailed.
The cuts to NASA’s Science Directorate are part of an overall 24% slash to the space agency’s budget from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. Some of the other proposed program cancellations were justifiable. Topping this list was the useless Lunar Orbit Gateway, a proposed space station to be put in orbit around the moon, whose incorporation into mission plans would only have imposed extra costs and complexities on any lunar exploration program. Also cut were the SLS heavy lift launch system and the Orion capsule. This is sad, because these systems could have had great careers if they had been developed in a timely way when they were proposed decades ago. (I was a member of the team at Martin Marietta that did the conceptual design for what is now SLS in 1988.) But while offering alternatives to Elon Musk’s SpaceX company’s Starship booster and Dragon capsules, coming along now these systems are obsolete and overpriced.
But the cuts to the space science program make no sense. For the past half century, the Space Science Directorate, whose budget has hovered between 20 and 25% of NASA’s total, has been responsible for nearly 100% of the agency’s real accomplishments. However of the $6 billion to be cut from NASA’s $25 billion budget, $3.5 billion will be taken the Space Science Directorate, reducing its budget 48% from $7.3 billion to $3.8 billion, while the remaining unproductive parts of the agency will only face a budgetary reduction of about 13%.
Trump’s allies are circulating a number of lines to get conservatives to line up in support of the hatchet job on science. First among these is the claim that the Science Directorate should be cut because its Earth observation satellites are supposedly a tool for left wing climate alarmists. This is simply untrue. The fact of the matter is that NASA’s Earth scientists have been quite willing to let their discoveries fall where they may, going so far as to show that carbon dioxide emissions accelerated global rates of plant growth by nearly 20% since 1985.
Another argument is that we don’t need the Mars Sample Return mission, or any other program of robotic Mars explorations missions that might be done in its place, because SpaceX will allegedly launch its own Starship robotic mission to Mars in 2026, followed by a human mission in 2028.
This line is wrong, and not merely because those promises are completely unrealistic. The bigger problem is that in the past two years, Musk has redefined himself in hyper-partisan terms. If the human Mars program should remain regarded as a Trump-Musk hobby horse, it is sure to be cancelled as soon as the political fortunes of war shift. The certainty of this programmatic death sentence would be triply assured if Musk’s program was branded with the mark of Cain by being born smeared with the blood of NASA’s murdered Mars exploration program.
In fact, if the humans to Mars initiative is to survive Trump’s administration, it needs to become America’s program, not Musk’s program. That can only be done if it becomes a welcome ally, rather than a hated enemy, of American space science.
The technical path to make this a reality is apparent. While a robotic Starship Mars landing mission cannot be launched in 2026 (because that would not only require Starship reaching orbit, but the development of tanker Starships to refuel it in space) it is conceivable — with a great deal of hard work and luck — that such a mission could launch in 2028. If Starship’s massive payload delivery capability were devoted to land a robotic exploration expedition, consisting say of 20 science rovers and 20 exploration helicopters, with a well-instrumented science lab installed in the Starship itself to which samples could be brought from near and far for examination, the scientific return of the mission would be off the chart. Hundreds of investigative teams with instruments of every description, including drillers, ground penetrating radars and life-detection experiments could participate. This would earn the program the enthusiastic broad bipartisan support of the scientific community.
Starships could also be used to launch a new generation of space telescopes, far more powerful than Hubble or Webb. But doing such things requires expanding the Space Science budget to produce the multitude of rovers, helicopters, telescopes and other exciting payloads whose delivery the advent of low cost heavy lift and heavy payload Mars landing capability will soon enable. But instead the administration is choosing to abort any such possibilities.
It must also be pointed out that by leading the world in space exploration, NASA has drawn some of the best talent from all other nations to our shores. Many of these young scientists and engineers have gone on to create industries, expanding our economy and greatly strengthening our national defense. With the effective termination of NASA’s space science program, this terrific flow of genius is sure to dry up.
The space science program is not merely the crown jewel of NASA. It is the gothic cathedral of our age, carrying the banner of our society’s highest ideal – the search for truth through science. The move to destroy it is a crime against science and civilization. It must be reversed.
Dr. Robert Zubrin an aerospace engineer, is president of the Mars Society and author of 12 books, including most recently The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.
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