Tag: deficit

House committee support for threatened NASA missions is actually quite questionable

9:26 am

According to a House appropriations committee spending bill that it approved this week, it appears on the surface that it is canceling the proposed 24% cut by Trump to NASA’s budget as well as endorsing continued funding for some threatened missions. A close look however suggests this congressional support for NASA is somewhat superficial, and might actually be ephemeral.

The key is the language of the bill. From the link above:

The bill was largely unchanged from what the CJS [commerce, justice and science] subcommittee approved July 14. It includes $24.838 billion for NASA, nearly the same as the $24.875 billion the agency received in fiscal 2024 and 2025, and far above the $18.8 billion the administration proposed for fiscal 2026 in May.

Members adopted a manager’s amendment, a package of noncontroversial changes and corrections, on a voice vote. That amendment also made additions to the report accompanying the bill. The report includes language expressing support for several NASA missions targeted for cancellation, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Juno mission at Jupiter and the New Horizons mission in the Kuiper Belt.

The report does not specify funding levels for those missions, but the “continues support” language signals to NASA that it should fund continue operations within the agency’s science budget. [emphasis mine]

It is the vagueness of this language that suggests the support is ephemeral. The courts recently have consistently ruled that if Congress doesn’t specifically mandate spending on a project, the White House is free to move money around as it sees fit. By not expressly outlining funding for Chandra, Juno, and New Horizons, these congressmen are playing a shell game, whereby to their constituents they can point to this vote and claim they wholeheartedly supported NASA and these missions. At the same time, they also appear to be allowing Trump the freedom to go ahead and shut the missions down, as his budget has already proposed.

None of this is yet real. The bill still must be passed by the full House, as well as the Senate. It then has to be signed by Trump. A lot of changes would happen in that process.

Either way, it appears that within the House at least, there is some movement to at least make some budget cuts possible. The sad thing is that the House is not actually cutting the budget, even as it is allowing Trump a way to cut these relatively inexpensive on-going missions. Considering the debt, it would have been much better had the committee actually trimmed NASA’s budget, even a little, while at the same time allocating specific funds to keep these very cost-effective missions alive.

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Yesterday’s Senate hearing on Artemis: It’s all a game!

1:08 pm

Ted Cruz, a typical
Ted Cruz, a typical Congressional porkmeister

The Senate hearing that was held yesterday, entitled “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise: Why Congress and NASA Must Thwart China in the Space Race”, was clearly organized by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to promote a continuation of the SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway parts of NASA’s Artemis program. And he was able to do so because senators from both parties felt the same way. They all want to continue this pork, and don’t really care whether those expensive assets can really accomplish what they promise.

Furthermore, the hearing was also structured to allow these politicians to loudly proclaim their desire to beat China back to the Moon, using this pork. They want the U.S. first, but they are almost all want to do this through a government-run program.

As such, the choice of witnesses and the questions put to them were carefully orchestrated to push this narrative. To paraphrase: “We have to beat China to the Moon! And we have make sure a NASA program runs the effort! And above all, we mustn’t let Donald Trump cut any of NASA’s funding, anywhere!”

It was therefore not surprising that the most newsworthy quote from the hearing was the comments by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine about Starship and how its choice as a manned lunar lander was a bad one, and that it was likely going to the prime reason China will put humans back on the Moon ahead of us.
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Juno detects the aurora of the moon Callisto in Jupiter’s atmosphere

10:19 am

Though previous observations had detected auroras on Jupiter produced by three of its four Galilean moons — Io, Europa, and Ganymede — scientists had until now been unable to detect a similar aurora produced by the fourth, Callisto.

The Jupiter orbiter Juno finally accomplished this observation for the first time.

[T]o image Callisto’s footprint, the main auroral oval needs to move aside while the polar region is being imaged. And to bring to bear Juno’s arsenal of instruments studying fields and particles, the spacecraft’s trajectory must carry it across the magnetic field line linking Callisto and Jupiter.

These two events serendipitously occurred during Juno’s 22nd orbit of the giant planet, in September 2019, revealing Callisto’s auroral footprint and providing a sample of the particle population, electromagnetic waves, and magnetic fields associated with the interaction.

The research paper describing this detection has just been published.

These secondary auroras are caused by Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field.

The Juno mission itself is about to end. NASA did not approve a mission extension, and next month the science team will send the spacecraft into Jupiter’s atmosphere, where it will burn up. We will then have to wait five years for Europa Clipper to arrive in Jupiter orbit, followed a year later by Europe’s Juice orbiter.

While the propaganda press is condemning this decision, there is some logic to it. Juno has mostly completed its work. While new knowledge can certainly be gained if it remained operations for three more years, the amount of knowledge will be relatively small. And NASA does face a budget crunch. Better to spend its money on other things that can produce more bang to the buck.

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New Horizons placed in hibernation, possibly forever

9:05 am

The science team running the New Horizons probe, now more then 5.7 billion miles from Earth, has placed the spacecraft into what will be its longest hibernation period so far, with the possibility that it could even last forever.

New Horizons, which had been in active data-collection mode since April, will now remain in hibernation. Pending a final Fiscal Year 2026 budget, the spacecraft may be awoken in late June 2026. This will be the longest hibernation period of the mission so far, surpassing the previous mark of 273 days from June 2022 to March 2023.

But the spacecraft won’t be completely at rest; New Horizons will continue to take round-the-clock measurements of the charged-particle environment in the Sun’s outer heliosphere and the dust environment of the Kuiper Belt using three different onboard scientific instruments. These data will be transmitted back to Earth when New Horizons wakes up. [emphasis mine]

Though the NASA press release puts up an optimistic front, it is very likely that this hibernation period will last significantly longer than planned, due to those budget negotiations. Trump’s budget proposes eliminating all funding for New Horizons, which will mean this hibernation period will be permanent. There will be no money to hire anyone to reactivate it.

Even if the budget is cut, it is probable that NASA management in the future will provide some cash. At the moment there is little for it to observe on a daily basis. All that needs to be done is to turn it on for short periods to download the heliosphere data. Management could simply decide to turn it on once every five years or so.

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Virginia’s politicians whine about a NASA plan to close the visitor center at Wallops

10:09 am

Chicken Little on the march! Virginia’s representatives are now in a panicked tizzy because it appears NASA is considering closing the visitors center at the Wallops Island spaceport on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Members of Virginia’s congressional delegation were shocked by news of the potential closure of the NASA Wallops Flight Facility Visitor Center and worry it will negatively impact the Eastern Shore’s economy.

Employees at Goddard Space Flight Center and Wallops received word last week that management planned to close several facilities, including NASA Wallops Flight Facility Visitor Center — and federal workers asked for congressional support to preserve the local landmark.

Congresswoman Jen Kiggans, a Republican who represents Virginia’s 2nd District, said the proposed closure came as a shock. In a statement, she said was committed to supporting NASA Wallops staff. “This is an unacceptable and drastic step that will have a significant impact on local employees, residents, and visitors,” Kiggans said. “My staff and I are in contact with NASA to better understand the reasoning behind this reported decision as it is contradictory to the proposed House budget. Wallops has long been a vital part of our community, and we will do everything we can to support the work that’s done there and the people who work there.”

Nor is Kiggans the only politican whining. The article includes similar quotes from Democrat senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, as well as local state representative Rob Bloxom. All make the absurd claims that closing this one visitor center will destroy American civilization in Virginia.

And as usual for our propaganda press, no alternative opinions are offered. The only side that gets pushed is the pro-spending side.

What crap. NASA’s job is to foster a vibrant American space industry, by either developing or encouraging the development of actual technologies that can be used for this purpose. A visitor center has nothing to do with this job.

Moreover, such a visitor center employs a relatively small number of people. The economy of the Eastern Shore is not going to collapse by its closure. In fact, the economy won’t really notice it is gone in any significant way.

If we can’t cut the budget in this small way, we will never cut anything, and the country is doomed.

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NASA’s work force is shrinking by about 4,000

10:11 am

The number of NASA employees that have accepted the Trump offer to leave has now grown to more than 4,000 people, reducing the entire workforce from 18,000 to 14,000.

Nearly 4,000 employees, or more than 20% of NASA’s workforce, have applied to leave the agency, NASA confirmed to CBS News Friday. About 3,870 employees have applied to depart NASA over two rounds through the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, NASA disclosed. The deadline for applications to the program is midnight Friday.

With those deferred resignations, NASA’s civil servant workforce would shrink from about 18,000 to 14,000 personnel. This figure also includes about 500 employees who were lost through normal attrition, the agency said.

It is certain that while Trump is office these workers will not be replaced. While most of the press and pro-government activists will claim this is terrible news, it is actually the best thing that can happen. Since NASA is now trying to use the capitalism model across the board, it doesn’t need that many employees. It is hiring the private sector to do most of its work. It doesn’t take that many people to review and issue a contract.

So, even if Congress rejects Trump’s proposed 24% cut to NASA’s 2026 budget and funds it entirely at the same levels as in 2025, the money will be more effectively used.

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Like the Senate the House appropriation committee rejects Trump’s NASA cuts, but differently

9:20 am

The NASA 2026 budget approved this week by the House appropriation committee has rejected the 24% cut proposed by the Trump administration, in a similar manner as the parallel Senate committee.

However, the two congressional committees are not in agreement on any of their spending proposals.

The totals recommended by the two committees are similar — $24.8 billion in the House, $24.9 billion in the Senate — but the specifics are different in many cases.

For example, the House wants to spend $300 million for NASA’s very messed-up Mars Sample Return project, while the Senate eliminated it entirely. The House also increases NASA’s manned exploration budget over Trump’s proposal, while the Senate cuts it. In science spending the House is less generous than the Senate, though both houses reject Trump’s cuts. In education the House agrees with Trump, zeroing out that funding, while the Senate wants to increase the ’25 budget slightly.

Before the 2026 budget is approved the two houses will have to negotiate an agreement to make their numbers match. What has usually happened in past negotiations is that the houses agree to approve the highest spending numbers in any budget item so that nothing gets cut and the budget continues to go up uncontrollably. We should not be surprised if our corrupt Congress does exactly that.

Even so, we should expect Trump to force significant changes at NASA, including budget reductions. Recent Supreme Court rulings have confirmed the president’s right to reorganize and even eliminate bureaucracies, as long as Congress doesn’t specify a particular spending item.

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Government employees: The most spoiled and privileged individuals on Earth

9:50 am

NASA: home to the privileged and perfect
NASA: home to the privileged and perfect

Timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, NASA employees and many of their supporters gathered yesterday for protests, demanding that their jobs be saved and that Congress not only cancel Trump’s proposed budget cuts to NASA, that Congress even consider increasing the budget because the work they do is so so SO vital.

The protests appeared to be organized by several groups, all claiming to be “grassroots” but all seeming to be well funded and comparable to other recent government protest groups at other agencies, issuing sanctimonious “declarations” that claim the cuts “to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security.”

Yet, the Trump cuts would only reduce NASA’s staffing of 17,000 by about 2,600 employees. How horrible!

This quote from the first link above is typical of the attitude of these government workers:
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House follows Senate in canceling most of Trump’s proposed NASA budget cuts

9:45 am

Like pigs at the trough
Like pigs at the trough

The House appropriations committee’s draft budget for NASA has followed the Senate appropriations committee in canceling all of Trump’s proposed NASA budget cuts, though it has shifted that funding significantly from science to manned space operations.

The House Appropriations Committee released the draft text of their version of the FY2026 Commerce-Justice-Science bill that funds NASA today. Like their Senate counterpart, the House committee would essentially keep NASA at its current funding level instead of imposing the severe 24.3 percent budget cut proposed by the Trump Administration. The CJS bill also includes almost $2 million for a White House National Space Council even though the Trump Administration has yet to establish one.

Unlike the Senate, which mostly kept the budget the same across all NASA departments, this House draft budget would reduce science and aeronautics spending from about $8.2 billion to $6.8 billion. Trump had requested only $4.5 billion for these departments.

In turn, the House would increase Trump’s request for NASA’s manned operations from $10.8 billion to $11.9 billion. Note that Trump’s proposed budget had already called for an increase here, so the House is clearly shifting funding to manned space in an enthusiastic manner.

At the same time, the House continues funding for the SLS and Orion programs Trump wishes to cancel. Both of these projects are over budget and behind schedule. Neither is very useful in the long run for exploring the solar system. If the House truly wanted to save money, it could easily fund all the cuts in science by cutting the billions spent yearly on these pork projects, and still lower NASA’s budget in total.

Based on the draft budget’s language [pdf], it is unclear whether the House has also funded the Lunar Gateway space station, as the Senate has, another useless pork project that Trump wishes to cancel.

I should note that the appropriations committee’s overall draft budget [pdf] does reduce the federal budget by about 2.8 percent. This is a marked change from past budgets, which often claimed (a lie) to cut spending but really only reduced the rate of budget growth. It appears the House is finally making some effort to shrink the size of the budget, though that effort is quite wimpy.

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Senate committee moves to cancel most of Trump’s proposed NASA budget cuts

9:03 am

Like pigs at the trough
Like pigs at the trough

We’ll just print it! Though disagreements prevented the Senate’s appropriations committee from approving the 2026 bills covering the commerce, justice, and science agencies of the federal government (including NASA) , the committee yesterday appeared poised to cancel most of Trump’s proposed NASA budget cuts and even add more spending across the board.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), the top Democrat on the CJS subcommittee, said this morning the bill would fund NASA at $24.9 billion, slightly above its current $24.8 billion level, with the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) remaining level at $7.3 billion.

By contrast, the Trump Administration wants to cut NASA overall by $6 billion, from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. SMD’s portion would drop 47 percent, from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion.

The disagreements centered not on NASA, but on the Trump administration’s effort to cancel a very expensive new FBI headquarters building in the Maryland suburbs and instead shift the agency to an already existing building in DC. Van Hollen opposed this, and the ensuing political maneuvering forced the committee to cancel the vote.

This bill would once again continue full funding for SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway. It also includes funding for NASA’s very messed-up Mars Sample Return mission (which comprises the large bulk of the money added back in for science). From this it appears that the Republicans in the Senate are quite willing to join the Democrats in spending money wildly, as they have for decades. They have no interest in gaining some control over the out-of-control federal budget, in any way, as Trump is attempting to do.

What remains unknown is this: Who has the support of the American people? The election suggests the public agrees with Trump. History suggests that this support for cutting the budget is actually very shallow, and that while the public says it wants that budget brought under control, it refuses to accept any specific cuts to any program. “Cut the budget, but don’t you dare cut the programs I like!”

It is my sense that the public’s view is changing, and it is now quite ready to allow big cuts across the board. The problem is that the vested interests in Congress and in the DC work force are quite powerful, and appear to still control the actions of our corrupt elected officials.

Thus, the more of that work force that Trump can eliminate as quickly as possible, on his own, the more chance he will have to eventually bring this budget under some control.

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Coalition of space companies begs Congress to fund office designed to track satellites

9:54 am

A coalition of 450 space companies has now submitted letters to both the House and Senate begging Congress to not kill the funding for an office in NOAA created during the first Trump administration and designed to help manage satellite traffic in orbit.

A coalition of space industry associations representing hundreds of companies is urging Congress to reject Trump Administration plans to kill the nascent Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS). Developed through NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce, TraCSS began beta testing last fall to provide data to civil and commercial satellite operators to avoid collisions. Just as the system is finally taking shape, it is targeted for elimination in the FY2026 budget request. The Senate Appropriations Committee takes up that proposal on Thursday when it marks up the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill that includes NOAA.

This new office was first conceived as a replacement for the tracking that the U.S. military has been doing since Sputnik was launched in 1957, information that it provides free to the industry. It appears Trump in his second administration has now concluded this new NOAA office is essentially redundant and therefore unnecessary.

The letters to the House [pdf] and Senate [pdf] urge Congress to reinstate the $65 million in spending for this NOAA office, but offer no suggestions on what to cut to fund this extra cost. Instead, like all such lobbying efforts, it expects Congress to simply print money to pay for the expense.

Meanwhile, it remains a valid question why this additional office is needed if the military has been doing the job quite successfully for the last three-quarters of a century. The letters argue this is a job better suited to a civil agency, but why? The military has to do it anyway for security reasons. Why waste money on a duplicate effort?

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Senate reconciliation budget bill includes Cruz’s big spending additions to NASA

9:36 am

Senate NASA budget increases

According to a tweet yesterday by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), the reconciliation budget bill that was passed by the Senate included the budget additions that Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had proposed to save SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway.

The graphic to the right lists these budget numbers. It is not clear whether the launch taxes on payloads that Cruz proposed were also included, though likely not based on the rules under which the reconciliation bill was passed.

This additional money for these projects contradicts directly the NASA 2026 budget proposal put forth by Trump that aimed to cancel Lunar Gateway and end SLS and Orion after only two more flights. Their existence in this passed Senate bill suggests that Congress is cool with the idea of spending this money and continuing these projects, even though they do nothing but waste taxpayer money and get us no where in space.

It also appears from the language in the graphic that the Senate is eager to also spend more money on NASA’s Mars sample return project, even though NASA itself still has no idea how to accomplish the task.

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House committee moves to eliminate Trump budget cuts to Space Force

10:45 am

Useless: In its first review of Trump’s proposed budget cuts for the Space Force, the House Appropriations Committee, under Republican leadership, immediately moved to not only eliminate those cuts, but to increase the Space Force budget another $300 million.

And these turkeys are adding this money even though they admit, due to Congress’s incompetent budget process, they really have no way to determine exactly how the money will be spent.

The House Appropriations committee took the first step in crafting a FY2026 bill to fund the Department of Defense today, albeit reluctantly. Appropriators from both parties lamented the paucity of data they have about what the money will be used for, but decided to move ahead and mark up their bill at subcommittee level this afternoon. Full committee markup is scheduled for Thursday. President Trump’s request would cut about $2.5 billion from the U.S. Space Force’s budget, but the committee would restore it and add a little more.

According to the new budget put forth by this committee, the Space Force will have a budget of $29 billion, more than even the highest budget figure proposed for NASA.

This is what we can expect now from the Republican leadership in Congress. They will cut nothing, but instead restore all the spending that Trump attempts to eliminate, even money that is expressly designed to help leftist causes. They are worse than useless.

What these idiots don’t realize that if the country goes bankrupt, it will become impossible to accomplish anything. A smart person would realize it is better to only get part of what you want now (so you can maybe get the rest later) than to try to get it all immediately and instead end up with nothing at all.

But then, these are Congressmen. The word “smart” is the last word I would use to describe them.

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The Senate, led by Ted Cruz, endorses NASA’s failed SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway

9:48 am

Let’s all go bankrupt! A bill introduced today by Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, rejects the Trump budget plan to phase out NASA’s failed SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway programs that have cost so far tens of billions for decades without accomplishing anything, and instead expands funding over the next decade to these and many other projects and agencies at NASA.

The bill would allocate $2.6 billion to Lunar Gateway, $4.1 billion to build two more SLS rockets, $20 million to build one more Orion capsule, $1.25 billion more for ISS to continue its operations as is, and $1 billion to upgrade or expand facilities at five NASA centers in Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

This pork-laden bill would also fund a Mars Telecommunications Orbiter for $700 million and add $325 million to the $843 million contract NASA has with SpaceX to build the de-orbit vehicle for bringing ISS down in a controlled manner once it is retired.

What this bill tells us is that these Senators, led by “lying” Ted Cruz (to use the nickname Trump pinned on him during the 2016 presidential election campaign), are still unwilling to face the realities of the national debt, and want to spend money we don’t have in order to make believe they are grand explorers sending Americans into space. Instead, these idiots are simply funneling cash to their states in order to bribe voters to vote for them.

As Elon Musk so correctly noted, there is an election coming in 2026. Maybe it is time to throw them all out.

What this bill also tells us is that Trump is going to find it very difficult to get the budget under control. The Senate doesn’t care if the country goes bankrupt. They intend to spend our money like it grows on trees, to hell with the future. Shame on them.

Sadly, these senators know they have the backing of almost the entire press corp, which is why they are doing this. They figure they will get great press for “saving” NASA, even if it bankrupts the country. Worse, it appears the press is all for helping them do so.

R.I.P. America.

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Scientists release the first year’s data from the Pace orbiter

10:07 am

Pace global data, August 2024
Click for original movie.

Launched in early 2024, the Pace orbiter was designed to track the evolution of the leaves of trees globally throughout the entire year. NASA has now released the data from the first twelve months, showing the seasonal changes of trees as the Earth rotates the Sun and the seasons change globally.

The map to the right is a screen capture from one of many videos showing these changes. The green indicates the global spread of tree cover in the middle of August in the northern hemisphere as well as in the equatorial regions of South America and Africa. Other movies focusing on North America, South America, Europe, India, etc, can be viewed here.

PACE measurements have allowed NASA scientists and visualizers to show a complete year of global vegetation data using three pigments: chlorophyll, anthocyanins, and carotenoids. That multicolor imagery tells a clearer story about the health of land vegetation by detecting the smallest of variations in leaf colors.

…Anthocyanins are the red pigments in leaves, while carotenoids are the yellow pigments – both of which we see when autumn changes the colors of trees. Plants use these pigments to protect themselves from fluctuations in the weather, adapting to the environment through chemical changes in their leaves. For example, leaves can turn more yellow when they have too much sunlight but not enough of the other necessities, like water and nutrients. If they didn’t adjust their color, it would damage the mechanisms they have to perform photosynthesis.

In the visualization, the data is highlighted in bright colors: magenta represents anthocyanins, green represents chlorophyll, and cyan represents carotenoids. The brighter the colors are, the more leaves there are in that area. The movement of these colors across the land areas show the seasonal changes over time.

You can read the full paper describing the first year’s data here.

The Trump budget presently funds Pace for two more years of observations, at about $26 million per year. This is an obvious example of a satellite whose life should be extended for as long as possible. This long term data would likely confirm other data that indicates the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is greening the Earth, helping plant life that provides us oxygen to breath and food to eat.

To do so, however, other cuts in NASA will have to be found to pay for that extension. I once again wonder about the half a billion NASA spends for its “Mission Enabling Services”, which covers NASA’s human resources division, public relations department, and its equal opportunity division, as well as other more useful departments. Surely some money from these bureaucratic divisions could be found to finance this actual useful research.

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Understanding Trump’s proposed NASA cuts, in the larger context of the overall federal budget

1:44 pm

U.S. debt as of June 4, 2025
U.S. debt as of June 4, 2025. Click for original.

For my entire life it has always been the same: Whenever any politician or elected official proposes any cuts to the federal budget, and most especially when those cuts are aimed at a popular government agency like NASA, the news reports in the mainstream press are uniformly hostile.

Trump’s proposal to cut NASA’s budget by 24% in 2026 has been no different. Here are just a few headlines:

This list is only a sampling, but they are typical of almost all the reporting now and that always happens when big cuts are proposed in any government program. The spin is always the same: “These cuts are horrible, their acceptance would be the act of a barbarian, and by doing so will certainly cause the fall of civilization!”

Above all, the focus is always on the cuts themselves, and never on the larger picture.

I am not going to do that. I have reviewed in detail the proposed cuts to NASA, and am now going to take a detailed look, but will do so by considering the larger context of the overall federal budget and the need to get its spending under control.

And out of control that budget is, as indicated by the screen capture above of today’s US Debt Clock. The United States is bankrupt. If we don’t gain some control over federal spending in a very near future some very bad things are going to happen, and soon. And those bad things will likely shut down luxury items like NASA entirely, not just impose some cuts to its overall budget.

All Trump is doing is attempting a first stab at this problem. The real question is whether he has made a rational and reasonable attempt, or whether it should be revised in some manner.

This is the perspective I bring to this issue. I just wish others would do the same.
» Read more

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Trump’s NASA budget cuts and rejection of Jared Isaacman for NASA administrator signal a very bright future for American space

1:09 pm

To most Americans interested in space exploration, my headline above must seem extremely counter-intuitive. For decades Americans have seen NASA as our space program, with any cuts at NASA seen as hindering that effort. Similarly, Isaacman, a businessman and private astronaut who has personally paid for two flights in space, had initially been nominated by Trump to become NASA administrator expressly because of that commercial space background. For Trump to reject such a person now seems at the surface incredibly damaging to NASA’s recent effort to work with the private sector.

All of that seems true, but it really is not. Both of these actions by Trump are simply what may be the last acts in the major change that has been engulfing the American space industry now for the past decade.

Jared Isaacman

Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk
Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk in September 2024

First, let’s consider Isaacman. Before Trump had nominated him for NASA administrator, he had been a free American doing exactly what he wanted to do. As a very wealthy and successful businessman, he had decided to use that wealth to not only fly in space — fulfilling a personal dream — but to also use those flights to raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s hospital, whose work he considered priceless and wanted supported. He ended up flying two space missions, becoming the first private citizen to do a spacewalk, while also raising more than $200 million for St. Jude’s.

Isaacman’s second flight was also the first in what he hoped would be his own long term manned space program, which he dubbed Polaris. The first mission did this spacewalk from a SpaceX capsule. The second would hopefully do a repair mission to Hubble, or if rejected by NASA some other work in orbit. And the third would fly in SpaceX’s Starship around the Moon.

As this program was funded entirely by Isaacman and used no government funds, it was generally free from criticism. If anything, Americans hailed it as ambitious and courageous. He was following his own American dream, and doing it on his own dime.

This history however made him appear on the surface to be a perfect choice for NASA administrator under Trump, especially in a time where America’s space effort is shifting more and more to the private sector.

Everything changed however once Trump nominated him. He had to suspend his private Polaris program. He had to kow-tow to politicians, telling them what they wanted to hear. And he was no longer his own boss.
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Trump budget proposes putting a final end to the delayed and blocked Thirty Meter Telescope

12:01 pm

There is a lot more to report, and I will do so in a day or so, but I thought it worthwhile to quickly note the the proposed science cuts in the proposed Trump budget for 2026 includes the elimination of all funds for Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii.

In the budget request, NSF [National Science Foundation]… says it will back only one of the two $3 billion optical telescopes that the astrophysics community wants to build. That honor goes to the Giant Magellan Telescope already under construction in Chile. Its competitor, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), “will not advance to the Final Design Phase and will not receive additional commitment of funds from NSF,” according to the budget request.

The NSF has never had enough money to finance both telescopes. The fact that TMT has been blocked for more than a decade by DEI protesters in Hawaii, with the aid of the state government (controlled entirely by Democrats), makes funding it pointless, and a waste of the taxpayers’ money. It long past time to pull the plug.

As I say, there is a lot more details to report in this budget proposal, including its effort to slash a lot of science government spending, but that will have to wait for later essays. I can promise you one thing, however: I will not do what the rest of the press does, and write a knee-jerk propaganda piece in support of that spending. The science mafia at NASA and the NSF and other agencies has funded a lot of junk in the last few decades. It is time for a reckoning.

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Trump administration releases its proposed NASA budget for 2026

10:29 am

The Trump administration today released [pdf] its proposed federal budget for the 2026 fiscal year, calling for an overall reduction in federal spending by about 7.6%, with NASA getting a budget cut of about 24%.

A summary of the budget can be found in this NASA press release. The main bullet points are these:

  • SLS and Orion will be retired after flying the two more missions. Whether those flights will be manned or not however is left vague.
  • Lunar Gateway will be shut down
  • The Mars Sample Return mission will be cancelled.
  • The overall manned budget for interplanetary development is increased, and now includes a line item of $1 billion for “Mars-focused programs”.
  • Flights to ISS are reduced (cutting a half billion from this budget) to facilitate the “transition to a more cost-effective commercial approach to human activities in space as the space station approaches the end of its life cycle.”
  • Eliminates “low-priority climate monitoring satellites”, shifting the focus to getting such data from commercial sources.
  • Major budget cuts are proposed for many other departments, and also include a major restructuring of NASA’s entire operation to “streamline the workforce, IT services, NASA Center operations, facility maintenance, and construction and environmental compliance activities.”

Below is a screen capture from the budget proposal detailing these cuts.
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The American Geophysical Union: the privileges of government-paid scientists must come above the Constitution and the ordinary citizens who pay the bills

2:08 pm

The American Geophysical Union, where science is no longer practiced
The American Geophysical Union, where
science is no longer practiced

In a public letter issued late yesterday, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) announced it has joined a lawsuit attempting to make the salaries, jobs, and various research grants of scientists immune from cancellation or the budget cuts that have been ordered by the elected president of the United States, Donald Trump.

Plaintiffs assert that such a sweeping Executive Order — which would impact hundreds of thousands of federal workers — goes far beyond the authority of the President to direct, and that such a massive reorganization of federal agencies must be planned in accordance with law and approved by Congress. AGU’s role in the case will involve illustrating the extensive ways in which scientists and the public will be irreparably harmed by the execution of the President’s order, in particular through proposed mass terminations at NOAA, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, the Environmental Protectional Agency, and the National Science Foundation.

“This Executive Order is demanding layoffs on such a massive scale that they will have drastic, cascading effects on our members, the global scientific community, and the public,” said Janice R. Lachance, Interim Executive Director and CEO of AGU. “From forecasting severe weather and ensuring healthy crops to preventing uncontrollable wildfires and preparing communities for sea level rise, fully functioning federal scientific agencies are critical.” [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrases show the priorities. The public comes last. More important are “federal workers,” the “members” of the AGU, and “the global scientific community.” Moreover, the letter reeks of privilege and smug superiority. It assumes that the paychecks from the taxpayers must never end, no matter what. The very idea that the president — duly elected by the American people and whom the Constitution vests with the sole power to run the executive branch of the federal government — should actually do what he promised the voters during the campaign actually offends them. “We come first! To hell with what the public wants!”

None of this should surprise anyone. The AGU, along with most national scientific organizations, has been corrupted by leftist politics for decades. It threw out the fundamentals of objective science years ago when it declared that it will reject any paper that does not support the theory of human-caused global warming. Its PR department has consistently reinforced this unscientific bias, pushing global warming in practically every press release.

And if you still have doubts about its leftist agenda divorced from objective science, you need only read its own description at the end of yesterday’s letter, outlining the organization’s priorities:
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Maybe it finally is time we actually made these major budget cuts at NASA

12:05 pm

Chicken Little rules!

This past weekend the pro-government propaganda press has been in an outraged uproar concerning unconfirmed rumors and anonymous reports that the Trump administration is considering major cuts to NASA’s many science divisions and projects, cuts so large that several space missions, such as Mars Sample Return and the Roman Space Telescope, would have to be canceled. Here are just a few examples, with the first few the ones that broke the story:

Of this list, the Politico story is the most amusing. Suddenly this leftwing news outlet loves Musk again, since he is expressing opposition to these cuts. Just days before he was the devil incarnate because of his partnership with Trump in cutting government waste. Now that he might oppose these NASA budget cuts will lefties start buying Teslas again? Who knows? The depth of their thinking is often quite shallow and divorced from rationality.

As is typical of the propaganda press, all these stories focused on quoting only those opposed to the cuts, from Democrats in Congress to leftist activist organizations. Very few offered any alternative points of view. These reports were thus typical of the propaganda press and the Washington swamp whenever anyone proposes any cuts to any government program: We are all gonna die! Civilization is going to end! Only evil people would dare propose such ideas!

The truth is that there are many ample and rational reasons to consider major budget cuts to most of NASA programs. Like the rest of our bloated federal government, NASA is no longer the trim efficient government agency it was in the 1960s.
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The man who has been running NASA’s manned Artemis program resigns

9:31 am

Late yesterday NASA officially announced that Jim Free, who has been running NASA’s manned Artemis program for the past year, has decided to resign.

Only a month or so ago the people at NASA had assumed that Free would take over as the agency’s acting administrator during the transition from Bill Nelson, appointed by Biden, and Jared Isaacman, appointed by Trump. Instead, Trump’s transition team gave this job to Janet Petro, who had been head of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Free has been seen as a headquarters guy who has for years favored the old big space companies like Boeing and who also has favored SLS and Orion and the old way of doing things, whereby NASA designs, builds, and controls everything instead of simply buying what it needs from the private sector.

There have also been reports that “three key officials” at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama have also submitted their retirement papers. This would suggest that the earlier proposals by Trump’s NASA transition team to shrink or eliminate many of NASA’s numerous centers scattered across the country are being seriously discussed, and possibly being implemented.

Many news sources have concluded that the decision by the Trump administration to delay its major layoffs at NASA was because the Trump administration was reconsidering these major changes. I disagree. I think it is holding off because the new administrator has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, and it decided he should have a say in these reductions and changes. The retirement and resignation of these old school NASA management types further tells us that major changes are coming.

Overall, my guess is that a major reorganization of NASA — including the elimination of many of its centers — could reduce its overhead by $5 to $10 billion per year. Part of those savings could be used to reduce the deficit, but some could also be used to increase the amount of money available for all of NASA’s goals. I made this point fourteen years ago, and nothing has changed since then except that NASA has wasted billions over that time accomplishing nothing with SLS and Orion.

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Another Democrat demonstrates her stupidity and ignorance, demanding NASA’s acting administrator revoke Musk’s access to headquarters

9:57 am

Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-New York)
Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-New York), describing
her terror when ordinary Americans walked through the
Capitol on January 6th, almost all of whom simply took
pictures. Click for video.

Proving she knows nothing about the Constitution and the powers it gives to the President, congresswoman Grace Meng (D-New York) earlier this week sent a letter to NASA’s acting administrator Janet Petro demanding that Petro revoke any access to the agency’s headquarters by Elon Musk as part of his work auditing government operations as part of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Meng’s letter [pdf] is quite entertaining, especially because it repeats the new Democratic Party talking point that somehow because DOGE employees, including Musk, were “unelected” their access is inappropriate. How stupid. Except for the president, everyone who works in the executive branch of government is “unelected.”

That Meng also thinks NASA’s acting administrator has the power to block access to someone hired specifically by the president to do this work shows us how ignorant she is of the Constitution and basic law. Petro can’t cancel Trump’s orders, even if she wants to. Trump is her boss, and if he tasks Musk and DOGE to audit NASA’s books, she must comply.

There is only one part of Meng’s demand that makes some sense, where she demands Petro “set clear and public ground rules” to keep Musk from getting access to proprietary information of other space companies. Musk certainly has a conflict-of-interest issue at NASA, and such rules make sense. I am also quite sure that Musk is well aware of this issue, and will purposely leave the DOGE audit to others.

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DeSantis: Put NASA headquarters in Florida

9:53 am

At an event yesterday Florida governor Ron DeSantis proposed moving NASA headquarters to Florida, saving the half a billion dollars NASA now wants to spend to build a brand new gold-plated new headquarters building in Washington.

[DeSantis:] “They have this massive building in Washington, D.C., and like nobody goes to it. So why not just shutter it and move everybody down here? I think they’re planning on spending like a half a billion to build a new building up in D.C. that no one will ever go to either. So hopefully with the new administration coming in, they’ll see a great opportunity to just headquarter NASA here on the Space Coast of Florida. I think that’d be very, very fitting.”

The NASA transition team for the Trump administration is already sent out a trial balloon about cutting the size of NASA headquarters considerably. That team has also proposed eliminating NASA centers in California and Maryland and consolidating their work into the Marshall Center in Alabama.

Note the trend: All these moves shifts money from decidedly Democratic states to Republican ones. The announced goal would be to reduce NASA’s overhead, but at the same time the moves would take money and power away from Democrat strongholds.

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Alabama Republican congressman introduces spaceport funding bill to help a non-spaceport

10:00 am

In an example of the typically corrupt behavior of the Washington swamp, Alabama Republican congressman Dale Strong yesterday introduced a bill dubbed the Spaceport Project Opportunities for Resilient Transportation (SPACEPORT) act that has a lot of high-minded goals, but is mainly designed to funnel federal money to local regions. To quote Strong himself:

“The U.S. is the global leader in space, and North Alabama is at the forefront of that effort,” Strong said. “As former Chairman of the Madison County Commission, I worked closely with local city officials and commercial space stakeholders to secure Huntsville International Airport’s designation as the first entry site for space vehicle landings. I understand the preparation, coordination, and support required to safely and efficiently manage space launches and reentries. North Alabama is ready to leverage our unparalleled civil, commercial, and national security space expertise to support space infrastructure projects and the future of space exploration.” [emphasis mine]

Huntsville International Airport is not a spaceport. Giving it cash for this is nothing more than pork and a waste of the taxpayer’s money.

Strong’s bill is merely a proposal, and has been announced I think mostly to give this guy a photo-op. Nonetheless, it shows that we cannot trust any politician to do what they say. The Republicans always run on cutting the budget, but here we have a Republican eagerly proposing we spend money we don’t have in order to provide pork to his district. It is essential that his own constituents tell him in no uncertain terms that this kind of legislation is not what they hired him for. If they don’t, then things in Washington will only continue to do downhill.

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Ten stupid academic studies funded by the federal government

9:18 am

Campus Reform last week posted a list of ten academic studies funded by federal government that any sane person would not only consider stupid, but an utter waste of money.

Number 1 on the list was a grant of almost a half million dollars to researchers at Reed College in Oregon to study the gambling habits of pigeons. The researchers claimed the study would shed light on human gambling behaviors, but if you believe that then you would likely also fork over your life savings to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

Of the ten studies listed, the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded four each, while the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Cancer Institute funded one each.

National Cancer Institute’s study is surely going to help cure cancer, as it gave $7 million to the con artists faking as researchers at Stanford University to build an AI toilet equipped with cameras to scan the user’s waste and backside.

The studies were done at a range of other major universities, including Cornell, the University of California, the University of Illinois, and the University of Connecticut. Most are publicly funded institutions.

This list demonstrates clearly the bankruptcy of the government agencies involved and justifies any effort to slash their budgets by significant amounts. It does more however. It shows us the bankruptcy of the academic community as well. If scientists at major universities think this drivel is valid research, then we know they are teaching their students garbage as well. The public funding to these colleges should be slashed also.

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NASA reconsiders cancellation of overbudget and behind schedule robotic refueling mission

8:59 am

Due to some pressure from Congress (which wants the 450 jobs the project employs), NASA is now reconsidering its cancellation of the On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (OSAM) 1 mission, designed in the late 2000s to demonstrate the robotic refueling of a dead satellite but is so overbudget and behind schedule that in the interim private enterprise accomplished the same goal now repeatedly for a fraction of the cost.

Language in the final fiscal year 2024 appropriations bill, released just days after NASA’s cancelation announcement, which fully funded OSAM-1 at $227 million, directed NASA to adjust the mission to launch in 2026 within the spending profile NASA included in its 2024 budget request. That could be done, the report accompanying the bill suggested, through “potential de-scoping of some non-essential capabilities,” adding that if it is not possible, NASA should conduct another continuation review in September.

In other words, Congress wants NASA to keep this project, even if it means cutting the budget of other more useful and valuable missions.

OSAM has cost a billion dollars so far, and after almost fifteen years has not yet flown. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman’s MEV servicing robot has already provided fuel to several dead satellites, while orbital tug startups are flying missions and developing the same refueling capabilities for far less. The industry doesn’t need this demonstration mission anymore. It has already demonstrated it, and done so better.

Moreover, why the heck does OSAM require 450 people? That number is absurd, and likely exceeds the payrolls of all the orbital tug companies plus Northrop’s robotic servicing division combined.

There is hope for the American taxpayer. The legislative recommendations above come solely from the Senate. The House appears less interested in spending this money. And NASA has not yet decided what it will do.

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Senate gives NASA cash to stop its tantrum

9:35 am

Surprise, surprise! As expected after NASA proposed major cuts in several missions, such as the Chandra Space Telescope and the OSAM demo robotic refueling mission, the subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee has rejected those cuts and instead proposed that NASA not only get everything it asked for, it be forced to take more money than it requested.

I am certain that NASA is not going to complain, as this was its plan from day one. The cancellation of Chandra was intended as a toddler’s tantrum that our weak Congress was certain to bow to and come up with the cash. It has now done so.

The report directs NASA to spend at least $98.3 million on Hubble and up to $72.1 million on Chandra, similar to the budgets for those missions in recent years, emphasizing the ability of the telescopes to work in conjunction with the James Webb Space Telescope.

In this case the Senate action makes some sense, as these cuts would have been penny wise and pound foolish. But NASA knew that. If the Senate was really interested in controlling the budget (which it is not) it would have funded Chandra and Hubble as described, but demanded cuts from NASA elsewhere.

Instead the Senate committee not only demands that these telescopes be maintained, it doles out extra money the nation doesn’t have for other projects that NASA wanted to cut for entirely legitimate reasons. OSAM for example was conceived more than a decade ago as a mission designed to demonstrate robotic refueling in space. After spending a billion and a decade, it had still not flown, and during that time private companies had not only successfully demonstrated this capability several times for far less, they had done so in a far simpler and more profitable manner. The technical need for OSAM was gone. Why spend the additional billion we can’t afford for a project that will prove nothing?

Congress, especially the Senate, likes wasting money however, and so the appropriations committee in an entirely bi-partisan effort is pushing to revive OSAM, as well as several other projects that have either gone over budget or NASA had deemed correctly were unaffordable.

The dark age has already begun in many ways, but its official start will be marked by future historians by the date the United States undergoes a full financial collapse, due to its government’s unwillingness to rein in a national debt that is now in the many many trillions and growing uncontrollably each day.

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In the NASA budget now approved, Congress demonstrates once again its utter bankruptcy

9:44 am

Negotiators for both the House and Senate have now released a federal budget for the 2024 fiscal year that includes NASA’s budget, and in doing so clearly illustrates by that NASA budget how utterly incompetent, irresponsible, and useless this Congress continues to be.

First of all, this budget is for this fiscal year, that actually began six months ago in October 2023. That Congress can’t come up with a budget on time has not only become routine, those budgets continue to arrive later and later, or not at all.

The budget itself was an attempt to fix things, because it actually is a detailed budget made up of six appropriation bills that the House began developing last year, rather than a massive omnibus bill that no one had reviewed or read. The goal with each bill was to reduce actual spending across the board — as much as 28.8% — not simply slow the growth of that spending.

However, that effort this year has been a failure. The use of continuing resolutions to keep the government running at previously high levels for the first six months of this fiscal year has largely defeated that effort. Do not expect the budget to shrink in 2024 in any major manner at all.

The budget for NASA also gives us a good window into Congress’s bankruptcy.
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Dragonfly mission to Titan delayed by a year because of budget shortfalls

9:26 am

Even as NASA gave engineers approval to move forward on building the helicopter set to fly on the Dragonfly mission to the Saturn moon Titan, it also revealed that the mission’s launch has been delayed by at least one year because of budget shortfalls.

In a presentation at a Nov. 28 meeting of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG), Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said agency leadership decided to postpone formal confirmation of the mission earlier this month, a milestone where the agency sets an official cost and schedule for the mission.

The delay in confirmation by NASA’s Agency Program Management Council (APMC), she said, is based on uncertainty about how much money will be available for the mission and other parts of NASA’s planetary science portfolio given broader budget pressures on the agency. “Because of these incredibly large uncertainties in FY ’24 and FY ’25 funding and budgets, the decision was made at that APMC to postpone the official confirmation,” she said.

The launch had been scheduled for 2027. When it will launch now is unclear.

Apparently (and not surprising since this is a NASA project) the mission is beginning to cost more than originally predicted. Furthermore, this shortfall is enhanced by the cost overruns from the Mars Sample Return mission. In fact, it appears that these cost overruns are impacting NASA’s entire planetary program, causing delays on many smaller missions in order to fund Mars Sample Return and the Europa Clipper mission (set to launch next year). Just as Webb wiped out most of NASA’s astrophysics missions in the 2000s and 2010s, this handful of big planetary missions is wiping out most of NASA’s planetary program.

The announced delay is also a typical NASA’s negotiating tactic with Congress, trying to pressure elected officials to cough up more money. For decades NASA would announce the need for crippling cuts to major and popular science projects unless Congress allocates it more cash for its most expensive projects, and for decades Congress has gladly done so. No one ever asks whether those expensive projects might be better off redesigned, or cancelled.

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