NASA science saved: Inside the 2026 budget victory

Sarah Al-Ahmed: NASA science is saved for now, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. After months of uncertainty, the US Congress has overwhelmingly passed a budget that restores near full funding for NASA science, rejecting proposed cuts that would've ended dozens of missions. The last year brought uncertainty and lasting losses, but the space community spoke up and it made the difference. In this episode, I'm joined by Jack Kiraly, The Planetary Society's Director of Government Relations and Ari Koeppel, our AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow.

They'll break down what actually passed and what this moment means for the future of US space exploration. And later in the show, we'll check in with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist for What's Up, including a look at the recent return of astronauts from the International Space Station and what we know about that situation. If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it. I've been waiting almost a year to say this, you guys.

The space community saved NASA science. We actually did it. And it's worth taking a moment to explain just how close NASA science came to the edge over the last year. In early 2025, the White House released a budget proposal through the Office of Management and Budget that would've cut NASA's science budget by nearly half. The largest single year reduction ever proposed. And those numbers weren't just abstract. They translated into termination plans for dozens of active missions, deep cuts to research grants, and months of uncertainty that rippled through NASA centers, universities, and the global space science community.

If allowed to come to fruition, it would've meant a profound retreat from US leadership and space science. Even though Congress moved to push back, making it clear that they intended to reject the cuts in both the House and the Senate, the damage was already underway. NASA spent much of the year not knowing what was going to happen, unable to plan long-term. More than 4,000 civil servants and thousands of contractors left the agency. We lost over one fifth of all NASA workers. Mission teams were forced to prepare shutdown plans, instead of actually doing science.

For many researchers, students, and early career scientists, it felt like the ground wasn't just shifting beneath them, but falling out from under their feet. At the same time, something unprecedented and magical happened. Tens of thousands of people, including listeners like you, took action. Advocates from every US state and more than a hundred countries around the world contacted Congress. They showed up in Washington. They made it clear that space science matters to us. What followed was the largest grassroots advocacy effort for space science and earth history. And then in January 2026, Congress moved with stunning speed.

In just a few days, lawmakers passed H.R. 6938 by overwhelming bipartisan margins, restoring near full funding for NASA science. It protected missions across Planetary Science, astrophysics, earth science, and heliophysics. The bill includes details not only on which missions were protected, but also on how NASA has to spend its money and how much accountability the agency is going to face going forward. It also raises big questions about recovery looks like after a year of what I can only kindly call instability and how vulnerable NASA might be when the next budget cycle begins.

So, to help us understand what actually passed and what comes next, I'm joined by Jack Kiraly, our director of government relations and Dr. Ari Koeppel, our AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, who have both been on the ground in Washington DC during this fight. Hey, Aria and Jack, thanks for joining me.

Jack Kiraly: Hi, Sarah.

Ari Koeppel: Hey, Sarah. Happy to be here.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right out the gate, I just want to say congratulations. This has just been such a massive and absolutely relieving victory.

Jack Kiraly: Thank you. I still can't believe it, right? I don't feel well-rested. It's like we've been going for so hard for so long on this issue and it feels good. It feels good to be on the other side of this, but there's also a lot to look back on that happened.

Ari Koeppel: Yeah, Jack, I was actually in the House last week watching the House of Representatives vote on this bill before it was passed off to the Senate. And when you sit in the gallery and watch the vote, you can see the names and tallies of each individual member. And I'm watching and I'm seeing, okay, voting, voting yay, voting yay, voting yay, voting yay. And it was just like, "Wow, there is this overwhelming majority. This is totally surprising given all the controversy around appropriations this year. How could there possibly be such a big majority?" And then I remember, oh yeah, this is what we've been advocating for.

So, that cathartic moment of being able to sit there and watch all these representatives from all around the country, from both sides of the aisle vote for this bill to support science across the board was really exciting. Even though I just joined this effort in September and you've been doing it all year, it still feels like something I can be proud of.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Absolutely. I mean, you've been key on this effort walking around Washington DC, joining Jack, being in the office, but it wasn't just us. This took a coalition of many organizations, people all around the world. In fact, this was the largest grassroots advocacy effort for space science in history, at least that we know of, right? So, I don't know. You're right, it feels really relieving, but also like, what do I do now after all this time? And I hate taking this victory lap without Casey Dreier here, our chief of space policy, who unfortunately, I guess has been speaking so much, he is absolutely hoarse and cannot even have a conversation right now.

Jack Kiraly: So, send your well wishes to Casey. Hopefully, he's better by the time this episode airs. But I mean, I've seen his calendar. He's constantly on the phone with journalists and reporters and folks all around the country and around the world even. And he's been really one of the key messengers of this effort to save NASA science. And so, he deserves a little, maybe a bi-week when it comes to talking on a podcast.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But in the end, it all came together. And for much of 2025, NASA has been operating under the Damocles, right? There was this looming proposal to cut NASA's science budget nearly in half and the agency by an entire quarter, which has forced teams to really reconsider whether or not their missions are going to go forward and has pushed a lot of talent out the door. But we did have hope at the end of last year when both the House and the Senate and their budget proposals basically rejected these cuts out, right? But now after all these months of anxiety, we've finally made it to this incredibly fast series of votes.

So, let's actually talk about what happened in Congress over the last few days. What is H.R. 6938 and how does that differ from the White House's original proposal?

Jack Kiraly: H.R. 6938 is what is known as a mini bus as opposed to an omnibus. So, for folks that have paid attention to the many times we've talked about appropriations in not just the last year, but many years, the appropriations, the allocation of money from the US Treasury, like the tax dollars that we send to the federal government, Congress, according to the US Constitution, is in charge of allocating, it's the Article I responsibility of the Congress to allocate these fundings through the process of appropriations. And Congress takes that very seriously.

The way that it's organized right now is that there's 12 different subcommittees of jurisdiction, each one covering a different set of agencies and activities within the larger federal government. NASA and the National Science Foundation, actually all the science agencies, NOAA, USGS, Department of Energy Office of Science, all exist within what's called Commerce Justice and Science. And so, it's lumped in also with the Department of Commerce and Department of Justice. And that's been the case, I think 2007 was when the most recent time in which they changed. The subcommittee of jurisdiction covers NASA. And omnibus would be a bill that includes all 12, right?

It's instead of going through and passing each of those 12 bills individually, Congress sometimes creates an omnibus, which is all 12 bills in one package. So, they only have to vote the one time or go through the process one time. A mini bus is a subset of that, right? And so, this mini bus included three subcommittee jurisdictions, right? Had commerce justice science, yay, had energy and water, so Department of Energy and water programs, as well as the Department of Interior and Environmental Protection work within the federal government. And so, that three bill mini bus came to be over the course of the last couple months. House and Senate introduced budgets in July, as they typically do.

President's budget request comes out sometime between February and May every year, and then June and July timeframe, Congress responds and Congress did and then didn't really do anything with it. They voted it out of subcommittee, voted it out of Maine committee, but neither the House or the Senate fully passed their own budget. And so, it sat in this weird limbo space. This is why we had that government shutdown, the historic government shutdown after the end of the fiscal year and on September 30th. This mini bus is the result of ongoing negotiations from probably as late as last summer up until its release on, I believe it was January the 5th.

And it was the day that Congress was coming back from the holiday break. They had left town at the end of December, not having completed appropriations. But clearly, both from what I know of activities on the Hill and what the leadership of the Appropriations Committee have reported out in public, is they were spending their holiday break, hard at work, negotiating a bill that included things that everybody liked, little bit that everybody doesn't like, right? That's the nature of compromise. You're not going to be happy 100% of the time. That's how the government is supposed to work and put together what is now known as H.R. 6938, soon to be public law 119, insert some number, whatever number that ends up being.

And this mini bus included, again, commerce, justice science, energy, water, interior environment, those three subcommittees. And it was negotiated behind closed doors in what they call a pre-conference. So, Congress sometimes does what's called a conference committee. This is their doing those activities of a conference committee, but before that could officially happen. So, it allows members of Congress to negotiate things that they want in the bill and supporting texts called the joint explanatory statement. And basically, you bring it to the floor already knowing that you've negotiated all of the finer details that people care about.

And sometimes, as we saw in the Senate last week or just this week, there are some things that people really care about that didn't make it into the final bill. And so, amendments sometimes get proposed. But ultimately, this is a bill that in the House, 397 of the 431 current members with four vacancies, 397 of those members could support. And then in the Senate, it was 82 members. It's more than a super majority in both chambers supported this bill.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's so relieving. Oh my gosh.

Jack Kiraly: Is Congress actually working, right? I mean, I think people have complained a lot, and I think rightfully so, that Congress has stalled on a lot of major legislation, but this is a welcome relief to the gridlock that we've seen. This is the 119th Congress, the current session of Congress that we're in, is probably one of the least productive in terms of number of public laws passed. I think they're only in the 40s, right? Typically, you go back 10 years, we're in the hundreds by this point, right? And this is everything from changing post office names to authorizations and other major pieces of legislation.

And so, for this to get through, for them to strike this deal, clearly the contents of this package were so important to the members of Congress that this also was the first mini bus of 2026. Congress did pass another mini bus that included some other subcommittees of jurisdiction, things that were maybe a little less controversial when they reopened the government back in November, but that now leaves six subcommittees of jurisdiction not covered before the January 30th deadline. But we can breathe a sigh of relief that should the government shut down or find ourselves in another continuing resolution, NASA's not going to be caught up in that. NASA is fully funded by H.R. 6938.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, you mentioned this a little bit earlier. This final budget includes something called a joint explanatory statement, which has some legal force behind it. Can you talk about why that detail is so important?

Jack Kiraly: Yeah, happy to. For those eagle-eyed listeners, you'll know the word report when we're talking about appropriations. The report, the House or Senate report includes a lot of additional details. The appropriations law itself, if you really have trouble falling asleep, like I can send you the link to congress.gov and you can read the legal text, it really only pertains to those really top line numbers. Here's how much we're spending on NASA and how much we're spending on science, but doesn't go into individual missions, typically, does not go into individual missions. That's where the reports come in.

And typically, well, typically it's a weird word on this because in recent years, because we've dealt with so many continuing resolutions and different funding mechanisms for the federal government, this has not been the case. But prior to, I would say maybe five years ago, Congress typically makes those reports statutory. Meaning, that somewhere in the law it says, "Hey, agency, we're writing this law, but you also need to consider this additional document as having the force of law that this is not just a set of recommendations. This is not just a bunch of members of Congress telling you how to spend your money and you can ignore us." This has the weight of the United States Constitution and the United States Congress behind it. And so, that adds a level of intensity of severity to the intent that Congress has in passing this bill. Now, a joint explanatory statement and a report are very similar, where a report is only coming from one chamber, House or Senate, a joint explanatory statement is coming from both, hence the joint, right? And it in itself, and having that name has even more weight that the agencies have to follow this.

And something very interesting that the joint explanatory statement associated with H.R. 6938 had in it is it said, not only Congress is this report, this language statutory, but so are the reports that the House and Senate produced last summer. And so, we actually have to not just look at the legislative text of the bill that's passing and the text of the joint explanatory statement. We have to look at the reports from the House and Senate. And so, long as those reports from the House or Senate don't contradict something in the JES, the joint explanatory statement, they also have the force of law.

Now, there's only a handful of things that are maybe a little bit different in one or the other, but that means that we have three times the amount of direction going to agencies like NASA with this bill.

Ari Koeppel: And if we remember, one of the things we were really worried about with the budget cuts is that when NASA passed back the budget under the administration's request, what it outlined for was cancellation of not only missions that are under development, not only missions that are in the formulation stage, but ongoing missions that we've already invested millions, if not billions of dollars in. And those reports that came out of the House and Senate over the summer specifically delineate protections for these really exciting missions that are both currently collecting data and going to be collecting data in the next 10 years or so.

That includes things like the missions to Venus, DaVinci, and VERITAS under development. And it also includes missions currently at Mars like Mars Odyssey and Mars Express. Unfortunately, for those who follow the Planetary Science news world, you know that Maven is undergoing some trouble right now as well, but it also includes protections for that if we do ultimately get back in contact with it. And it extends beyond Planetary Science also into the astronomy realm like the Chandra X-ray observatory into earth science with the Landsat Program and the Terra, Aqua, Aura observation system and then heliophysics missions as well.

But one of the biggest things to come out of these reports is specific highlights for missions telling NASA, "Hey, disregard anything else you've been told, you have to keep these missions running and you have to continue developing them to the levels, the funding levels that we've delineated here. And those funding levels are the levels recommended for the most part by the experts working on those programs themselves."

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I love this level of clarity because now we're not lost in limbo thinking, "Well, okay, now we know that there's funding, but who's going to be left out in the cold in this scenario?" I've been having these mini existential crises over the last year, thinking about specific missions. So, having that level of delineation in the funding, I think is really going to soothe my anxiety going into the rest of this. There's also this additional funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. How does that change the picture for NASA overall in fiscal year 2026?

Jack Kiraly: Yeah. So, NASA for fiscal year '26 and for the next few fiscal years, NASA's lucky in that it actually has two budgets. Back over the summer, and actually starting really with the inauguration of Trump, there was this conversation about passing what they call a reconciliation budget. And this is something that looks at multi-year obligations of funding, not from the discretionary budget accounts, right? So, again, going back, we're talking about those 12 subcommittees of jurisdiction, those all pertain to discretionary spending, which is only about a third of what the US spends on an annual basis, right? It's not even the majority of what the US government spends, and that includes everything, right?

I mean, that's why you think about NASA's budget, $24 billion, that seems like a lot of money to an individual in the grand scheme of things of the federal budget, it's less than half a percentage point because the federal government's just so, so big. So, the reconciliation budget is a way for the Congress to allocate funding over multiple years, address things like tax policy and Social Security and Medicare, these really big programs that exist outside of this annual process.

And during the negotiations for this, Senator Ted Cruz, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced an amendment to the bill. This was all part of the process of developing this bill, introduced an amendment that included $10 billion, billion with a B to NASA's budget over the next six fiscal years with all of it having to be obligated as in contracts signed and NASA obligated to spend that money between now and fiscal year 2029. So, it's really laying out this roadmap for primarily human space flight activities. And so, what do you have in Texas?

You have the Johnson Space Center, you have a lot of aerospace companies based in Texas that work very closely with the human space flight program. You have Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Kennedy Space Center in Florida that all play in a Michoud in Louisiana and Stennis and Mississippi that all play very pivotal roles in space broadly, but especially in the human space flight program. Well, so that $10 billion is not just like a slush fund that they sent over to NASA.

There is actually delineations of where NASA is supposed to spend that money and it includes basically a billion dollars every year for the space launch system and Orion Crew Capsule, which are really the core components of the Artemis campaign, the crewed return to the Moon program. It also includes supplemental funding for the International Space Station, also includes $700 million for a Mars telecommunications orbiter to help improve really the infrastructure around Mars. Our most recent telecom orbiter would be Maven. Unfortunately, as Ari mentioned, is in this unfortunate state of the unknown, and that was launched in 2013.

We have aging infrastructure at Mars with a plan to send so many more missions there and eventually crew. We need to be talking about telecommunications. Anyway, so that $10 billion is broken up into requirements on an annual basis for the next four fiscal years, as well as just some general direction for other programs. And so, that's all, I said the word supplemental. That's an important word because it's not discretionary. This is money that is coming out of a different funding account within the US Treasury that is still going to NASA. So, NASA has that money to spend, it has the direction to spend it, and it doesn't put downward pressure on the rest of the NASA program.

And so, actually, I've run the numbers on this. If you look across both the discretionary spending that was just passed and the supplemental funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill or H.R. 1, NASA's actually going to have a larger budget in fiscal year 2026 than it has had in 30 years if you adjust all of those budgets for inflation. That's going into this funding cycle for fiscal year 26, we were facing an existential crisis for science, for the future of human space flight. Remember there was that potential pivot towards not the moon, but a crash Mars program, changes in allocations for space technology development and STEM education.

We were facing this really historic crisis, and we're coming out the other side with the supplemental money from H.R. 1 and a fully funded discretionary account that basically gives us $27.5 billion. It might actually end up being more than that because again, I said there's requirements within HR1 that are delineated by fiscal year and some that aren't. And so, we don't even really know. NASA hasn't put together a spend plan, which is what would tell us where that money is going to go and when they're going to spend it. The telecommunications orders are this one area where it's like, it's $700 million. We don't know when it's going to be spent. Some of that could be in this next fiscal year.

So, we could see NASA's budget by the end of fiscal year '26 pushing maybe $28, $29 billion, which is on par with what we were spending in the 1990s, which was the beginning of the International Space Station, the beginning of the Mars exploration program, really this most recent era of planetary exploration.

Ari Koeppel: And I know we're talking about NASA here, but I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that in response to this budget crisis that we've been going through, we've also seen other countries try to seize the moment and take initiative and boost their funding in ways that in their eyes at the time would have replaced what we would have lost. But now, so for example, just a few months ago, the European Space Agency announced basically a 30% increase to its budget, which if we saw a 30% increase to NASA's budget, it would be unprecedented. And we're seeing that around the world, other countries are stepping up and enhancing their scientific programs.

And the result is that as a result of this budget crisis, we're actually seeing this response from the scientific community and from the public that, "Hey, this type of thing will not be tolerated. Science is important. Exploration is important. Discovery is important." We need to be enhancing these programs, not cutting them. And so, the message is very clear, not just in the US, but across the world.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's almost like whiplash after this last year. Everything seems so dire and now we're in a position where we have more funding going forward than we had before. And I hate to think that it takes this level of crisis for it to instigate additional funding in other nations, but I think you're pointing to something really important, which is that the United States has held this leadership role within the space science community, but there are space agencies all around the world that are ready in our wake to step into this role if the United States seeds it, because this science is just so key for all of humanity. And I think it's something that uplifts all of us.

So, this is just a series of happy outcomes out of what was just one of the most stressful years for the space science community that I've ever seen in my lifetime. And Ari, you joined us at this very key moment right before we went into the second day of action last year and this whole launching of the Save NASA Science Campaign. What did that mobilization actually look like on the ground in Washington DC?

Ari Koeppel: Well, I'll just be a little honest here. I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off in the first month of my fellowship, just trying to keep up to speed and keep my head above water and learn the ins and outs of the organization and also the ins and outs of advocacy on Capitol Hill. This was totally new to me. I come from a background in science. I did my PhD in Mars science and I was not used to having to advocate on this level to maintain funding. My form of trying to secure funding was writing grant proposals. It was not talking with senators.

So, being able to work at this high national level to further the type of exploration and discovery that has driven me personally in my career has been fulfilling in ways that I couldn't have imagined. It's been this opportunity to get real insight into how large scale organization of massive enterprises that no single individual could even dream of planning out on their own is actually carried out. In other words, how the sausage is made. And I think in the academic world, oftentimes it's very individual driven.

It's an individual comes up with an idea, gathers a small group of folks to think through that idea with them, but typically that small group is no larger than a dozen, and then they carry out that research program over the course of three to five years. Space missions don't operate like that. It's much more complex and there is this interplay with the academic world of academics coming in and proposing missions, but ultimately it's a large organization and hundreds, if not thousands of people carrying out that task of making sure that that idea comes to fruition and joining The Planetary Society at this pivotal moment was really the premier opportunity to see, okay, this is how that actually gets done.

This is how we make sure that a mission that is a good idea that someone came up with at some point actually can be carried out with the resources that we have available to us as a society. And this is how we can communicate with Congresspeople and with the public the value that a mission like that actually has for society. It's not just feeding scientists curiosity, but it's showing us as humans the types of things we can achieve when we band together in an organizational structure and pool our resources towards something that is greater than any single individual.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We'll be right back with the rest of my interview with Jack Kiraly and Ari Koeppel after the short break.

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Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's given me a lot of hope. There are so many important issues facing humanity right now, and I've chosen in the last year because I love space science so much, because this is my job, to dedicate all of my efforts into this one thing. And seeing it turn out this way gives me a lot of hope that all these other causes, when enough people come together, they can in fact enact change and turn things around in dire circumstances. So, I don't know. I don't even know how I'm feeling right now. It's been a weird year.

Jack Kiraly: It sure has. And a lot of damage has been done and there's a lot of people in pain and strife right now. And this declaration of victory for the campaign made to some people come across as a little glib, but we do have to celebrate these moments because they certainly do not come often. And we can acknowledge, we can do both things, right? We can acknowledge the damage that's been done to NASA, to the science enterprise, to trust in these institutions while also celebrating these victories. There's never going to be any one budget or bill that solves every problem, right?

And even when you pass that amazing budget that we have this full funding functionally for NASA and NSF, it is also a low point broadly for both of those funding lines just because the federal budget has not maintained pace with inflation. And so, NASA's dollar does not go as far as it used to. And then there's implementation. Even with this budget, we have to make sure we're holding Administrator Isaacman and NASA leadership accountable to what Congress has clearly made their intent. And so, there's a lot of work that's going to happen from here on out, and there's a lot of damage that needs to be repaired.

But in this moment, we also need to be grateful for the tens of thousands of people that made their voice heard. The hundreds of thousands of messages that were sent both by the advocates, by Ari, myself, and Casey, the millions of people that saw, read, shared our information on social media and with friends. There's no one thing that's going to change the tide, but it's the concerted effort of a community that can solve problems.

So, I also want to just say thank you to everyone that did take action to all of our partner organizations, the two dozen organizations that put their name on the dotted line next to ours on statements and letters and actions, as well as the members of Congress and the administration that we worked with behind the scenes in front of cameras, all across DC and the country to get to this moment.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. It feels like that moment when you see people in award shows, they go up to the podium and they've got two seconds to thank everybody who's behind them. It's impossible for us to shout out every single person and every organization that was a part of this. But honestly, it took the efforts of people in over a hundred countries to get this done. If I sit back and really think about that, this is absolutely momentous. So, I think you're right. Even if there's so much left ahead and so much damage that's been done, we really do need to take a moment and just be happy for one second that this is the result after all this effort. But as you said, there are several terrible outcomes out of this last year.

And I think one of the biggest casualties of this budget is unfortunately the Mars Sample Return mission. That's something we all care about very deeply, but even though Mars Sample Return is formally canceled, Congress left the door open with this funding for Mars future missions. What does that signal about the long-term intent for Mars? And is there some hope that we can revive the Mars Sample Return mission?

Ari Koeppel: Mars Sample Return, it's both the name of a program that was happening at NASA and it's the name of a concept and the concept being self-explanatory, let's return samples from Mars. So, what the text of the report says is that the Mars Sample Return program is no longer going to be funded, but the concept that we're going to return samples from Mars, which if you're an active listener of this program, you know that the Perseverance Rover has been on Mars since 2020, collecting and sealing off tubes of high priority samples from the surface of Mars that might contain evidence of life. There's a lot of reasons to bring them back, and NASA is not giving up on that.

And in fact, these bills provide funding under the guise of this line item called Mars future missions to think about how we might redesign the concept of returning samples from Mars and come back with an improved or modified version. So, it's not that NASA doesn't want to collect those samples anymore. I think it's recognized within the scientific community that there's a lot of really exciting and interesting science that is going to come out of the analysis of those samples. It's just that the programmatic challenges were not favorable within Congress this time around, and we might see in future years that that sentiment could change.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We're hoped to be had, thankfully, but it's going to be really difficult to accomplish something like a Mars Sample Return in a circumstance like this because even though we did get this funding restored, we lost over 4,000 civil servants at NASA and thousands of contractors during this period. They were either laid off or they took that retirement program, that bonus to leave NASA. Why is that loss of expertise so difficult or even impossible to rebuild quickly?

Jack Kiraly: So, there's something called institutional memory, right? If you've listened to, maybe it was two or three months ago, Casey had a conversation about this on Space Policy Edition.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh, which I loved. That was such a good episode.

Jack Kiraly: Link it in the show notes, right?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Absolutely.

Jack Kiraly: It's one of those things that you don't think about, right? You think of people and you think of the experience that they bring, but then you think of large groups of people who have been working together for a long time who have accomplished many historic feats that maybe don't catch headlines all the time, because it's maybe just within their niche or within their scientific discipline. But you build up this expertise and this network within organizations like NASA. And when you lose that, it's more than the sum of its parts, right?

It is this when you lose that cohesion, that culture, that connection that people have and the experience that each person brings, we can't just go on Indeed and put out a job app open for 4,000 people with experience landing rovers on Mars and sending spacecraft to the outer solar system, right? That's not easily repaired. And the way in which civil servants and contractors were treated by, in large part, the office of management and budget as not being valued, right? I mean, 4,000 people just at NASA, I think it's 300,000 something people across the federal government were basically told, "You're not valued members of our team." And sure, I'm sure some of the folks in there were not doing the job as they were hired to do. But when you're being told that time and time again, day after day that you're not valued, and then you get offered a bonus to leave. "Hey, we'll pay you for the rest of the calendar year, but you don't have to work here anymore. You can go work somewhere else. You can go make a bunch more money working in the private sector. Just you won't be working on these cutting edge technologies," right? You don't invest in something in the private sector unless you think there's going to be a big payout at the end of the day, or that you can increase value for your shareholders.

NASA's the one who is on the cutting edge of technology where they're developing things that you're like, "All right, well, this might pay off in the long run, but our time horizon isn't next fiscal quarter. It's five, 10, 15 years in the future." When you lose that institutional experience with those 4,000 people, and again, there's thousands more contractors, it's a gut punch to the agency because also the people that you have leaving, talking to a lot of them, they're not your under-performers. A huge portion of that 4,000% are the best and brightest of the agency that left because they were no longer valued, that they were told they were not a valued member of the team and that they were not contributing to the advancement of American values.

That's really sad and it's really devastating to the science community. And sure, some of those people stayed in the space community and are now working at a private enterprise, but again, they're not going to be working on the same things NASA is. And so, the loss of experience is immense. And I think what I've seen is that the average tenure of people that left through the deferred resignation program, the DRP, the average tenure at NASA was around 20 years, right? So, you had a bunch of people who were retirement age, maybe 30, 40 years at the agency, and a bunch of people younger than that, but they averaged about 20 years.

So, that's if you just do the back of the napkin math, that's 80,000 years of collective experience that we lost in the course of one year, in the single largest workforce cut to NASA in history and bringing us to a civil servant workforce that is almost at the same level as we had in July of 1960. Before Alan Shepard went into space, before John Glenn named the first American to orbit the earth, like ah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I know, right?

Jack Kiraly: It's like all you can say.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. Now we're in this really weird situation where it's like we have less people than we did before any human went to space, but we've got the largest inflation adjusted budget in nearly 30 years. That is a really weird situation to be in.

Ari Koeppel: What Jack was saying reflects that for a generation, government work was seen as a bastion of stability. And I know this, my colleagues who ended up as civil servants chose that path because they were inclined to want a job that was stable. And oftentimes soft money research, which is research that is done grant to grant, and you go through these proposal cycles, that's not very stable. If you're not winning grants, if things are dry, you're not going to get paid. But civil servant work was seen as this way to engage in the passion of your life, in research. And I'm not just talking about NASA, someone who is working in health sciences and wants to find a cure for cancer.

It's a way for them to work on those projects for the duration of their career without having to worry about making ends meet, without having to worry about how they're going to make it through the next pay cycle. What this last year has done is it's diminished that view of government work as a stable route. There's now this doubt within the community that it'll ever be the same. And so, one of our next steps is to help rebuild an interest in working in federal programs like NASA for the sake of the entire community, because we really need those people to help drive us.

We need people who are not worried about their next step, who can focus on these long-term plans and long-term strategies without worrying about what's happening next year in order to be able to make progress on programs like this.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. This last year, I think, at least anecdotally from the people I've spoken with has deeply impacted people's feelings of safety going into the field, which is impacting the workforce, it's impacting graduate students, it's impacting young people who even considered going into this field, and especially with the grant funding being demolished. There's so much going on here that's dissuading people from going into this field. And I'm really sad for all the young people who saw this as their future who may have been dissuaded in the last year. But now we're in this moment.

We can take this little moment to breathe and be grateful that we have this funding, but now we've got fiscal year 2027 coming down the pipeline. This budget request is going to be coming up soon. How vulnerable is NASA to another funding fight?

Jack Kiraly: Well, yeah, you say FY 2027, it really is. It's going to be coming up quick.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, we've got like a month.

Jack Kiraly: Yeah. Legally, the administration is supposed to submit their budget request on the first Monday of February, according to the Budget Act of 1978. I don't think there's been an administration that's ever met that timeline. It's typically mid-February to more likely mid-March. And so, maybe we have a little bit more breathing room than initially just reading the requirement for the administration. So, yeah, there is a distinct possibility, right? I mean, the Office of Management and Budget, OMB starts the process of the next fiscal year months and months ago. So, we got word that OMB has started working on FY27 three months ago, formally started work on developing that budget request.

During the government shutdown, this is something that it's a constant process over at OMB. I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already starting to talk about FY28. Anyway, so we have to be mindful that they just passed this budget. President is supposed to sign it maybe sometime in the next few days, maybe by the time this episode airs, right? That's information that's going to be valuable that they'll include in the budget request, but how much is it going to influence the direction they want to take? Clearly, they came in at the beginning of last year, Russ Vought and the folks at OMB came in and said, "All right, we're changing the game, right? We're really going to propose something radical for NASA, and in particular, the science budget." But it was so wholly rejected by Congress and by the public in the largest grassroots mobilization for space science and history, I wouldn't be surprised if they really reign it back. And clearly, what we've seen from the executive order that the administration, that the president signed at the end of December when Administrator Isaacman took office, there has been this shift in the tone that the administration has taken. There's also a huge personnel change. There's folks at OMB that have been a thorn in the side of the space science community for decades that are no longer there.

There are political appointees that began the year at NASA, last year at NASA who were instrumental in creating this budget who were let go, because I think because they maybe didn't read the room very well and they're no longer involved in the process. And we now have Jared Isaacman involved and we have a full slate of people, a different set of personnel at the White House and within NASA that are informing this next budget request. So, I'm not holding my breath. I'm preparing for the need to spend more 80-hour weeks over the next year fighting for NASA's budget again. But the signs are there that maybe, just maybe we'll get an FY27 budget request that isn't totally outlandish, that isn't totally an existential crisis.

Are there going to be things we disagree with? Absolutely, there always are. If you know The Planetary Society, we're idealists. We want the best for the space program. And sometimes, we see things in these budget requests, whether it's a Democratic president or Republican president that we disagree with, right? We call it out and we organize people and mobilize people to action to fight for the things that we care about. But with this personnel change and tone shift of really focusing on what the administration can accomplish in the near term, there may be hope for a more reasonable budget request for NASA, something that we can work together with Congress on that still protects these programs that we really care about.

There's a lot of exciting things happening in the next three years already. You got the Dragonfly Launch, NEO Surveyor, Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the beginning of work on big things like the Habitable World's Observatory, this March Future Missions project line. There's all these really exciting things set to happen in the next few years that we're really looking forward to working with Congress to make sure NASA has the funding and address these workforce challenges and the STEM pipeline challenges so that NASA can regain and maintain that title as the world's preeminent space agency.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, for people who are listening right now who may just be getting into this fight or have been in it for a while and are celebrating with us, what can they do going forward to help protect NASA science? And what's the most effective thing that they can do right now?

Jack Kiraly: Right now, there's a couple things. So, within the United States Congress, we are friends with a couple members who have formed a Planetary Science Caucus and it's looking for members, right? It's any member of Congress is welcome to join. I think it's about 30 members right now off the top of my head, 29 members off the top of my head, and we're trying to build that list. And so, we have an action on planetary.org/action that will allow you to send a message to your member and ask them to join the caucus. If they're already a member, you can send them a thank you note for that, and that happens automatically in the backend of our advocacy action center.

If you are interested in coming to DC on April 19th and 20th, we are holding the 2026 day of action. And so, please, if you can afford to come to DC and participate, we've begun planning, right? We're doing our standup calls every week now to make sure that all the logistics are in place for another very successful event. This is your opportunity. We schedule all the meetings, we give you the training, we give you the materials. You just need to bring yourself and your passion and we can help you translate that into political action. And then the final thing is that if you can come to the day of action, great. If you can't, we're currently, I think, in the middle of an advocacy focused fundraising drive.

Anything you can spare would be beneficial to our program. You have me and Casey and Ari on the ground every day doing this work. We have an office space in DC. We are the only entirely grassroots funded organization in the space community, and we would welcome your support and your partnership going forward into this new year at a time when the space community needs it most.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I just want to say congratulations one more time to you and literally everyone around the world that's helped us in this effort. Go pop something bubbly, whether or not it's Apple Cider or Champagne, something to celebrate the moment. And I can't wait to be there again with you guys in DC in April so we can continue this fight. Honestly, together we save NASA science, you guys. This is crazy.

Jack Kiraly: You, you, the listener, you were part of this. And it was truly one of the greatest things I've ever been a part of. And I've been a part of a lot of excellent political and civic actions. This was something that is really, I think, a watershed moment for personally for me, for the organization, and for the broader space community. So, thank you for being a part of this. Let's celebrate right now.

Ari Koeppel: Well said, Jack. Ditto to everything. And congratulations to you too, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Huge colossal effort. Thank you so much, you guys. Good luck in the coming months.

Jack Kiraly: Thanks, Sarah. Ad Astra.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Before we move on with this episode or life in general, it's worth taking a moment to pause here and to appreciate what just happened. I know it's been a really dark year for space scientists around the world. I know that for so many of you, this has been weighing on your heart like it has been for me, but we came together and through that collective action, we won this fight. This was an enormous effort, but it worked. Tens of thousands of people spoke up. They showed up and they refused to let space science be quietly dismantled. Together, we help protect missions and researchers and discoveries that belong to all of us. That matters.

And no matter what's coming down the pipe next, I think it's okay for us to celebrate it. We at The Planetary Society are just going to keep on fighting alongside with our members, our supporters, and our partners. We'll face whatever challenges lie ahead together. Thank you so much to everyone who's been a part of our Save NASA Science campaign. I cannot tell you what it means to me and all of us at The Planetary Society and all the people that work in space science around the world whose lives have been impacted by this. You can find our press release and a detailed breakdown of this budget victory in the show notes for this episode at planetary.org/radio.

Meanwhile, while we were all distracted by this situation and all of the other things happening here on earth, another situation was unfolding in space. Four members of Crew 11 aboard the International Space Station returned home early following a medical issue on orbit. Their return was the first time in the ISS's 25-year history that a mission was cut short because of a medical issue. For the latest on that story, we turned to Dr. Bruce Betts, Chief Scientist of The Planetary Society for What's Up. Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hello, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, sounds like NASA's budget is passed. We've been all caught up in what's going on with NASA down here on Earth, but in the meantime, space exploration is still going on. So, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge a story that I've had a lot of people ask me about recently, which is that Crew 11 on the International Space Station came home a month early than planned because of a medical issue. So, I wanted to ask you about what happened there just so that we can assuage people's fears.

Bruce Betts: Right. Well, we don't know because NASA is keeping the medical issue private, but we know that the astronaut in question, we don't know which is stable and getting treatment for whatever. And they successfully executed, although not in a crisis emergency that had to come back immediately, but still an emergency that they chose to end the mission a month early. They're back safely and there are still three crew members on the ISS right now. There are another three people in space just on the Chinese space station. And Crew 12 is scheduled to put three more people back in addition on ISS in February, mid-February-ish.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. My first thought after hearing about that story is A, I hope everyone's okay, but B, I would hate for Earth to break its streak of having humans in outer space. So, I was really glad to hear that not only are there people still on the ISS, but also on Tiangong.

Bruce Betts: We've had people in space since, what, November of 2000?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, man.

Bruce Betts: Constantly, just on ISS, it has been crewed since November. I believe it's November, but 2000. So, not everyone's been on earth all that time. Whoa.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. I was also delighted to hear that they splashed down in San Diego because Mat Kaplan and I have been discussing hoping that the Artemis II mission all goes as planned. We've been discussing going to the splashdown area in San Diego to celebrate the astronauts as they come back in. So, hopefully we get to make that happen. I've never gotten to see a splashdown before.

Bruce Betts: Not many people have.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. Well, I mean, I'll be on the shore, so obviously I won't be out there in the ocean.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, I was going to say, I think you'll get in trouble if you're out where they're planning to splash down. They tend to not like other ships in the area.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah.

Bruce Betts: Hey, do you want something, a little something?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: A little something. What you got?

Bruce Betts: I got a [inaudible 00:57:19]. Hey, what if you could drive around Saturn's rings, the main rings at freeway speed? It'd take you about a year to go drive all the way around.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Seriously?

Bruce Betts: Yes, seriously. Hey, I don't get around when it comes to random spaces. Well, I do, but the facts are right, hopefully. Yeah, that's the main rings. The fainter rings are farther out and would take longer, but the ones you easily pick out in pictures and telescopes, about a year to drive around, doing your 100 kilometers per hour, roughly.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I need that level in a video game. I mean, you don't want to drive the entire thing, but I wonder too, now, how long it would take you to drive across other things in space. If you could drive across the bottom of Valles Marineris or something, I'm going to have to do some calculations.

Bruce Betts: Well, I've done ones to take unrealistic paths directly to planets, but it's about 5,000 years to Neptune-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh.

Bruce Betts: ... and 170-ish years from the sun to earth.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Man.

Bruce Betts: But that's assuming you could drive straight there as we usually do when we ponder how far things are.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yep. Got to make sure to bring snacks.

Bruce Betts: Gives you an idea of how big those suckers are.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: They're huge. That's great. I mean, honestly, that is context.

Bruce Betts: And that's not stopping for food or bathroom breaks. I mean, it's going to take you longer if more stops you do at the little... Wait, do they have truck stops?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I was going to say, like six months in, you hallucinate a gas station somewhere.

Bruce Betts: Anyway, all right everybody, go out there and look them tonight sky and think about the slurping sound that dogs make when they drink water. I don't have to imagine it. Thank you. And goodnight.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio and finally, happily the end of the fiscal year '26 NASA budget crisis. If you love this show, you can get Planetary Radio T-shirts at planetary.org/shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise. Help others discover the passion, beauty, and joy, or PB&J of space science and exploration by leaving your review and a rating on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback not only brightens our day, but helps other curious minds find their place and space through Planetary Radio. You can also send us your space thoughts, questions and poetry at our email, [email protected].

Or if you're a Planetary Society member, leave a comment in the Planetary Radio Space and our member community app. Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our members. Thank you to everyone who's been with us during these hard times and donated to help make this victory possible. You can join us and help us continue to stand up for [email protected]/join. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers. Casey Dreier is the host of our Monthly Space Policy Edition and Mat Kaplan hosts our monthly book club edition. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor.

Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Pieter Schlosser. My name is Sarah Al-Ahmed, the host and producer of Planetary Radio. And until next week, congratulations everyone. Ad astra.