**Sarah Al-Ahmed:**
How did we learn about this?
**Casey Dreier:**
Eric Berger from Ars Technica [reported it](https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/white-house-may-seek-to-slash-nasas-science-budget-by-50-percent/). He had multiple sources, and we have our own sources within the government that have confirmed it.
The important thing is that the decision is not finalized at this point. This request from the White House seems likely, but there is still time for that to be revised before the official proposal is released.
**Sarah Al-Ahmed:**
There are some precedents for large cuts to NASA in the past, like the moments after the Apollo program. But you are describing this as an extinction-level event for NASA. What programs and missions do you think are most at risk?
**Casey Dreier:**
I can only speculate, but if you were the NASA administrator or head of NASA Science and you knew you were losing half of your budget, what would you do?
The things that you would want to defend the most would be the missions in their prime phase, so something like Europa Clipper, which just flew by Mars and will not get to its destination for another three to four years. You don't want to cancel that one because it hasn't even had a chance to do its mission yet, and we just spent $5 billion to build and launch it. Missions like this, or like the James Webb Space Telescope, are in the middle of their prime mission.
Then there are the projects that are in their final stages of completion at NASA, being assembled to be launched within the next year or so, like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. With those missions, you're so close to being done and you've already spent all the money. So you’d want to defend those as well.
Everything else is uncertain. The Hubble Space Telescope, New Horizons’ mission beyond Pluto, the Voyager probes, Perseverance, Curiosity. For each of these missions, even if they’re behaving perfectly well and returning good science and there is no actual reason to cancel them, you may have to cancel them.
These would be active missions getting turned off in the midst of their capabilities. And they aren't replaceable. It takes a decade to build some of these things.
In addition, you have the academics and students who get their funding through NASA Science. They would have to ramp that down a significant amount. So you would be talking about sudden mass layoffs in academia, and students being forced to leave graduate school because they would no longer have funding through NASA research grants.
**Jack Kiraly:**
And I'll just add there's no commercial alternative to NASA Science. You can't go on Indeed and suddenly find a bunch of private-sector planetary scientists. This is an activity that the government undertakes because it is a core function of the public sector. Commercial actors are great partners of NASA and have made certain elements of this cheaper. But there is no private sector Mars rover sitting on a shelf somewhere that you can replace Perseverance or Curiosity with. There's no Pluto flyby mission that is just waiting in the wings at some commercial company. These are partnerships between the government and the private sector, or between the government and research institutions. But the government is a key part of that.
**Casey Dreier:**
In the last 20 years we have gone through this astonishing rise of commercial capability in space, particularly in the United States, but also globally. And that's amazing. But science as an activity is not something the private sector does. Going to Europa to search for life won't make you money. This is why we have a public sector space program like NASA to begin with.
I think the closest thing that we've seen is Rocket Lab talking about their mission to Venus. And that's a really cool project that they're doing, but it's an exception that proves the rule. I just had [Peter Beck on Planetary Radio: Space Policy Edition](https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/can-rocketlab-save-msr) the other month and he said, essentially, “Look, this makes us no money. We are doing this because we personally think it's really neat. But any other priority will take precedence over finishing this project. This is a nights and weekends project.”
It is cool that they're still doing it, but it's a completely different approach than what we're talking about with breakthrough exploratory science that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge. That is just not going to be replaced.
And so NASA in the United States is the place to do this. And if we give NASA fewer resources to work with, we will abandon this incredible capability that we have spent the last 65 years building out of nothing.
We have grown up taking this for granted, that we can and will go to other destinations, that we can peer back to the earliest parts of the Universe because we know we want to know about them and it enriches us to learn it. That is an intensely valuable thing that we are able to do. And so to walk away from this in a way that we believe is cavalier would just be a terrible loss.
**Sarah Al-Ahmed:**
This is one of the moments that The Planetary Society was founded for. Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Lou Friedman created this organization specifically because they thought that they had to justify this kind of science.
The value that it gives us is not just about scientific understanding. Many industries are built on top of NASA, and the things that we learn and many of the technologies that we use every day are actually the result of NASA science.
**Jack Kiraly:**
Recent economic impact analyses at NASA showed a three-to-one return on the taxpayer's investment. So, for every dollar that we spend on NASA, we get three dollars back in the economy. That amounts to $75 billion in the US economy in a single year and over 300,000 jobs. And that's outside of the 17,000 civil servants who work directly for NASA. These are people who are supporting that mission or supporting the industries that support that mission.
This touches all 50 states and involves international partners. We're no longer the only ones in space. Multiple space-faring nations and international organizations like the European Space Agency are making great strides and setting really ambitious goals. Meanwhile, a 50% cut to our science program and a 25% cut overall would amount to the U.S. surrendering future leadership in space.