White House May Seek To Slash NASA's Science Budget By 50 Percent

More details: Found here

Headlines:

This includes NASA. As expected, the president's plan for the space agency includes some significant shakeups, including a desire to move elements of NASA headquarters to field centers around the country. However, in perhaps the most drastic change, the White House seeks to massively cut funding for science programs at the space agency.

Multiple people familiar with the White House proposal said cuts to NASA's "Science Mission Directorate" could be as high as 50 percent. These sources emphasized that no decisions are final, and there are some scenarios in which the cuts to NASA's science programs would be less. But the intent is to slash science.

The associate administrator who runs NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Nicola Fox, appeared in Houston on Thursday for a news conference about a lunar landing . Afterward, Ars asked her about the implications of cutting science funding in half.

However, as word of these potential cuts spread through the scientific community this week, they have set off alarm bells and generated a response that indicated otherwise.

"If this is implemented, it would be nothing short of an extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States," said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society. "Losing this much money, this fast, has no precedence in NASA's history. It would force terrible decisions, including turning off scores of active, productive, irreplaceable missions, halting nearly all new mission development, and decimating the country's space science workforce."

In many ways, NASA's science directorate is the crown jewel of the space agency. Nearly all of the most significant achievements over the last 25 years have been delivered by the science programs: Ingenuity flying on Mars, New Horizons swooping by Pluto, images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, the return of samples from asteroids and comets, Cassini's discovery of water plumes on Enceladus, a continuous robotic presence on Mars, and so much more. Even the recent lunar landings by Firefly and Intuitive Machines were funded by NASA's science directorate.

#news