Proposed cuts mean NASA could lose 25% of its budget
A new budget proposal from the White House will cut about a quarter of NASA’s budget if approved by Congress.
The biggest budget cuts are to NASA’s science divisions and legacy human exploration divisions. According to the budget document, the cuts are aimed at beating China to the moon and getting the first humans to Mars.
With these cuts, leading science organizations and advocates are voicing their concerns over just how devastating these cuts would be for NASA science. In a letter to congress, the Planetary Society and partners outlined their opposition and how the proposal would cause “immediate and irreparable damage.”
Casey Dreier, the Chief of Space Policy for The Planetary Society, said these cuts will shut off projects that have been successful and on time, halting some projects that have been active for years.
“Projects that we are relying on our international partners and commercial partners to build out are left with great uncertainty,” Drier said. “The radical ways that you have to cut this much money this quickly require you to turn off perfectly functioning, highly productive spacecraft in midstream. Those aren't efficiencies. Those are wastes.”
Although Congress still has to approve the budget, Drier said the consequences of the proposal still have long-term consequences on NASA right now.
“Even if ultimately the money comes back, say three or six months after being imposed [on] this lower level, can you turn the spacecraft back on that you had to shut off?” Drier said. “Can you find the people you had to let go who know how to run and talk to Voyager built 50 years ago? Can you rebuild that quickly? You probably can't.”
To members of the Planetary Society, Drier emphasized the seriousness of the cuts, and the devastation it would bring not only to NASA, but the nation as a whole.
“I think often about this image of someone hunched over their cell phone in front of the Grand Canyon, swiping away and getting angry at something on social media when some majestic viewpoint just is right in front of them,” Drier said. “This is the national equivalent of doing that. This is a budget of retrenchment, and this is a budget of looking down and inwards. I think our country is better than that, and I think our country needs to be the ones looking outwards, and we still can, and that's if we will not go down without a fight on this.”
Monitoring storms from the ground to space
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, collaborates with NASA on several science-based missions including the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) that helps track terrestrial and space weather alike while thousands of miles above Earth.
These satellites provide a lot of data for scientists -- the images help with forecast predictions to help prepare people for a major storm like a hurricane.
Matt Rosencrans, NOAA's lead Hurricane Seasonal forecaster, said these images of major storms from some of these satellites are what inspired him to pursue a career at NOAA.
“It’s beautiful, but it's destruction underneath it, and it was so captivating to me as a young person,” Rosencrans said. “We can zoom in and take amazing pictures like one kilometer resolution every minute. So, we can really give the forecasters a ton of information about the minute-by-minute changes in the centers of these storms. We're starting to see things we've never seen before.”
Rosencrans explained that weather patterns like hurricanes in the U.S. can be affected by climate in other continents like the monsoons in Africa. Last year, that monsoon brought cold water at the start of the hurricane season in 2024.
“That's why we had the quiet period right around the peak of the hurricane season,” Rosencrans said. “Then as that monsoon…starts to settle back down the south, we got that flurry of activities September, October into early November.”
With less than a month away from the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, Rosencrans urges people to start preparing now because it could be an early season.
“You don't want to get want to get caught without being that preparation early in the season,” Rosencrans said. “Then if you don't use it until later, well, you had it and you're it's less stressed to run out and grab it later.”
The Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1.
