NASA’s future in the balanceby Jeff Foust
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| According to The Planetary Society, 41 individual projects, both standalone missions and contributions to other missions, are slated for termination in the 2026 budget proposal. |
This year was different. There was no “State of NASA” speech, no briefing, no press release, and not even a formal advisory in advance. Instead, at about 4 pm EDT on Friday the 30th, NASA posted the documents on its website with zero fanfare.
Looking at the document, one can understand why NASA didn’t want to publicize it. The budget cancelled missions and programs right and left to achieve the $6 billion in cuts from the agency’s 2025 budget of about $24.9 billion.
Those cuts were most visible in science. According to The Planetary Society, 41 individual projects, both standalone missions and contributions to other missions, are slated for termination in the 2026 budget proposal. They range from Mars Sample Return (MSR), the multibillion-dollar program that the skinny budget already disclosed would be canceled, to many ongoing missions in extended phases whose annual budgets are in the low millions of dollars each.
“It’s generally pretty much what we expected,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, said in an interview shortly after the release of the budget. That was based on the overall budget reductions for science included in the skinny budget, which slashed science spending by 47% from 2025.
The skinny budget had listed only two missions, MSR and Landsat Next, for termination (Landsat Next, the document said, would be restructured in some way to lower its costs, with work continuing another line item.) The detailed budget showed how far-reaching the proposed cuts were,
Some of the missions slated for cancellation are large, like the Earth System Observatory line of missions, still largely in early phases of development. Also cancelled was the Astrophysics Probe program, also in its early phases now—NASA selected two concepts for further study last year—but which would have a full cost of about $1 billion.
The budget, released almost four years after NASA selected two Venus missions in its latest Discovery program competition, DAVINCI and VERITAS, would cancel them both. It would also cancel NASA’s contribution to EnVision, a European Space Agency mission to Venus launching around the same time.
However, small missions in development also got the axe, like the Compton Spectrometer and Imager as well as Ultraviolet Explorer missions in astrophysics. It also seeks to cancel NASA’s role in ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission to Mars, where NASA offered to provide thrusters for the landing platform, radioisotope heating units and a launch to replace components that Roscosmos had provided.
A wide range of missions already operating and in their extended phases would be terminated in the budget. The biggest of them is the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which a year ago NASA was considering budget cuts that astronomers warned were tantamount to cancellation. The new budget simply zeroes out the budget for Chandra. The Hubble Space Telescope would continue, but with some modest funding cuts.
The scale of those terminations surprised even Dreier. “I’d say some of the surprises were things like MAVEN, Juno, New Horizons; these really unique and arguably infrastructure-related assets,” he said. MAVEN, a Mars orbiter, is also used as a communications relay. Also terminated in the budget proposal is OSIRIS-APEX, the extension of the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission that will go to the asteroid Apophis just after its close Earth flyby in 2029.
He was also surprised that the budget would effectively end NASA support of plutonium-238 production needed for radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) and heating units. “The argument is that we no longer need a presence in the outer solar system, so we don’t need plutonium any more,” he said.
| A table tucked away in the back of the 462-page budget document notes that NASA has 17,391 civil servants in fiscal year 2025. In fiscal year 2026, that would fall by a third, to 11,853. |
There was one bit of good news for science in the budget. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which leaked budget documents in April suggested would be terminated, is funded in the budget. However, it does do at a lower level than projected: $156.6 million for fiscal year 2025, versus a projected $376.5 million that NASA said last year the mission would need in 2026 as it worked towards a launch as soon as the fall of 2026.
“NASA is actively evaluating cost-saving strategies and identifying schedule optimization opportunities to enable the mission to proceed with this reduced funding level,” the budget document said. But Dreier noted that the spacecraft is now nearly complete, with most of its overall budget already spent: “Cutting it in half and expecting to save money, that doesn’t make sense.”
Many of the other reductions in the NASA budget had already been telegraphed in the skinny budget: ending SLS and Orion after Artemis 3, cancelling the Gateway, potentially reducing the size of crew on the International Space Station, and slashing many space technology programs.
The skinny budget had hinted at new investments in Mars technology, and the budget does more than $1 billion for projects associated with human Mars exploration. That amount includes $200 million mission for “a near-term entry, descent, and landing demonstration for a human-class Mars lander” and another $200 million for commercial payload deliveries to Mars. The budget documents, though, provide few specifics about those new initiatives: the section on new Mars technology investments is less than a page.
The budget includes $864 million for a new “Commercial Moon to Mars (M2M) Infrastructure and Transportation Program”. That would go towards developing a commercial system to replace SLS/Orion as well as early work on “a space suit appropriate for use by astronauts on the Martian surface.” The program will also fund lunar and Martian relay satellites and be the new home of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, currently hosted by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
With all those cuts come job reductions. A table tucked away in the back of the 462-page budget document notes that NASA has 17,391 civil servants in fiscal year 2025. In fiscal year 2026, that would fall by a third, to 11,853. Some field centers would see even larger cuts: the Goddard Space Flight Center would lose nearly 50% of its civil servant workforce, while the Ames Research Center would lose nearly 40%.
The document, though, says little about those cuts. It makes only passing references to “workforce impacts” and “workforce reshaping efforts” without discussing how they would be implemented.
The budget proposal will likely face strong opposition from Congress. Some members, primarily Democrats, have criticized the budget. “This sick joke of a budget is a nonstarter,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), ranking member of the House Science Committee, said in a statement Monday. “Republicans need to join Democrats in fighting for the programs they once supported, and their communities thrive on.”
“We've heard from Republican offices that this is dead on arrival, absolutely deader than dead on arrival,” Dreier said.
For about 24 hours, the budget proposal appeared to be the first major challenge for NASA’s expected next administrator, Jared Isaacman. Just before the Memorial Day holiday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) filed cloture on Isaacman’s nomination, a procedural move intended to set up a vote on the nomination this week. By the end of this week, most expected Isaacman to be sworn in.
He would have faced strong questions about how much he supported this budget proposal, which would now be his. He had deflected questions about potential budget cuts during his confirmation process, stating that he was not involved in its development, but noted that a potential cut of neatly 50% to NASA science “does not appear to be an optimal outcome.” Did he still believe that now that he was running the agency and handed a budget with such a massive cut?
| “After a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA,” Trump announced. |
We won’t find out. While there had been no public issues that threatened his nomination, on Saturday afternoon Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist with some influence on the Trump Administration, posted that “Deep State operatives are trying to derail President Trump’s NASA Administrator pick” ahead of the confirmation vote, suggesting it was an effort to drive a wedge between Musk, who had lobbied for Isaacman to be nominated, and President Trump.
Within hours, the White House confirmed that Isaacman was out. “It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement.
That statement, though, gave no reason for why the White House was withdrawing the nomination, and even left open the chance that Isaacman had decided to withdraw.
Trump provided a few more details later Saturday evening. “After a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA. I will soon announce a new Nominee who will be Mission aligned, and put America First in Space,” he stated.
Those “prior associations” were not identified, but appear to be a reference to Isaacman’s past donations to Democratic candidates and party offices. Those donations, though, were publicly known for months, which led to speculation again that the decision was linked to fraying ties between Trump and Musk, as the latter exited his formal role in the administration just a day earlier.
Whatever the reason, the decision leaves NASA without a permanent leader just as it faces the steepest budget cuts in its history. That has demoralized the agency’s workforce and sent shock waves of concern through the rest of the space community.
Isaacman “ran into the kind of politics that is damaging our country. Republicans and Democrats supported him as the right guy at the right time for the top job at NASA, but it wasn’t enough,” said Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), himself a former astronaut, in a post Monday. “It’s incredibly frustrating that this administration did this to him and his family but I know he’s not done yet and he has a lot left to offer space exploration and our nation.”
Isaacman himself took the high road in his own online comments about the withdrawal, saying the six months since Trump announced his intent to nominate Isaacman “have been enlightening and, honestly, a bit thrilling.” He added, “I’ll always be grateful for this opportunity and cheering on our President and NASA as they lead us on the greatest adventure in human history.”
But right now, few other people are cheering on NASA as the one-two punch of the budget cuts and withdrawn nomination create a dark mood unlike any seen at NASA outside of spaceflight tragedies. The agency’s future is at stake as it enters uncharted fiscal waters with no one at the helm.
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