Space Policy Edition: NASA’s 2026 budget

Casey Dreier: Hi, and welcome to this month's Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I am Casey Dreier, the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society, and I should say this is actually not this month's standard episode. This is a special episode devoted exclusively to the train wreck masquerading as the fiscal year 2026 budget request for NASA that was dropped, just as I record this, over a month ago, the full details. You may know some of the details, what's in this budget. You may be learning about them for the first time, but I wanted to devote an entire special episode of the Space Policy Edition just to what is in here and how to read and interpret some of what's going on.

The 2026 budget request, the full details, the full, grisly details were released on May 30th. We knew already that NASA was going to be cut by about 25% and that science within NASA was going to be cut by 47%. Both of those already we knew were historic levels of cuts. This is unprecedented. Additionally, what we learned from the full details of this budget is some of the new initiatives directing human spaceflight exploration towards Mars, while at the same time undermining some of the very technologies, infrastructure and capabilities necessary to get them there.

And by being so profoundly divisive and by effectively not even publicly talking about this budget, NASA itself and the administration that has proposing this radical change to NASA is avoiding any level of strategic implementation and strategic focus, creating the opposite in a sense of a foundation to build on when it inevitably must pass forward these plans to the next administration. Instead, this budget is an anti-strategy or an unstrategic budget.

This budget is also profoundly wasteful. Even though it pertains to save money by cutting spending, it does so at the expense of well-performing capabilities, well-performing spacecraft, and by literally throwing away and turning off perfectly well-functioning systems that would require billions of dollars to restore. This is an unstrategic, wasteful, an unprecedented budget proposal for NASA. None of these three words are hyperbole. These are the most dispassionate ways to express just how radical this budget is.

And it's not just me that shares the concerns for this. It's not just the Planetary Society that is pushing back on this. So, to acknowledge this, and I think to bring in a wider range of perspectives, we invited two guests on the show to join me and my colleague Jack Kiraly, who is our Director of Government Relations.

Joining me this episode is Alicia Brown. She's the Executive Director of the Commercial Space Federation, which represents and looks out for the interest of the commercial, new space companies. Currently, really defining this future era of space that we're in. She is a veteran space policy and legislative affairs professional. She worked at NASA's Legislative Affairs in the past. She has worked for members of Congress and in the Senate's Commerce Committee as professional staff.

In addition to Alicia, I'm excited to welcome Brittany Webster, who is the Assistant Director of Science Policy and Government Relations for AGU, the American Geophysical Union, which represents earth scientists and planetary scientists around the country and around the globe. The AGU has been doing a lot of work and is also rallying their professional members, their professional scientists, to visit their members of Congress and push back against these cuts. Both organizations along with a number, many, many other organizations are stepping up and discussing the serious issues with this proposal that we really hope will be addressed by Congress in the coming months.

The 2026 budget is a lot of things, and it's not even entirely bad. Even the better ideas that it has though, it self-sabotages. And this is why it's so important, I think, to talk plainly and honestly about what this budget does. That even if one agrees with the deprioritization of space science, or cutting aeronautics by a third, or cutting space technology by half, or removing all of NASA's outreach and educational funding, reducing NASA's civil servant staff to the lowest levels since 1960 fiscal year before the first human had flown into space, even if you agree with all of those cuts and agree with the proposal to shift the energy of the human spaceflight program away from the moon and to Mars, you should not like this budget.

Because at the end of the day, by making no effort to sell this, to create a coalition, to create consensus about what it's doing, to make no effort to reach out to the other party or to build support from industry or academic institutions or space professional societies, it is not going to sustain itself. So, the worst possible outcome of this budget would be significant destruction of well-performing, unique capabilities, particularly in space science and technology, in order to pursue an ill-fated and short-term Mars direction that will wither in a subsequent administration because there is no one in a sense to pass the baton to.

This is not a good strategy. This is why it's unstrategic. This is why it's wasteful. It will result in something weaker, smaller, less capable, and possibly, and this is my broad worry, far more politically divided than it ever needed to be. If you want to do something about this, there are many opportunities still, particularly if you live in the United States. You can check out Brittany's organization, the American Geophysical Union, particularly if you're our member or a professional scientist. You can go to the Planetary Society at planetary.org and you will find a number of actions you can take right now to speak up, and to push back, and to share your concern about this direction for NASA to your elected officials.

This is possibly one of the most impactful moments that NASA is facing in its existence and a time where, if you have never taken action or if you are on the fence about whether it's time to do something, this is the time to do something. And now, let's welcome our guests and we will go into the details of NASA's fiscal year 2026 budget. You can find it at NASA.gov/budget if you want to follow along and look at all of the details with us or go to planetary.org, Save NASA Science and you can see some of the details, charts, plots, context, everything there. Here we go.

I am here with my all-star cast of space policy experts, Alicia Brown from CSF, Jack, my colleague from the Planetary Society, Brittany Webster from the American Geophysical Union. Thank you all for being with me today on the special edition of the Space Policy Edition.

Alicia Brown: Thanks. Great to see you and great to be here. Thanks for all the roles.

Casey Dreier: Okay. Well, this is all about the fiscal year 2026 budget or the disaster that is masquerading, I think, as a budget for NASA and I'd say broadly also National Science Foundation that Brittany will talk about a little bit. Alicia, I want to start with you. From Commercial Space Federation, what are your big picture reactions to this proposal that cuts NASA by 25% and obviously cuts a lot of sub-areas within it?

Alicia Brown: I think the overall reaction from CSF and our members, we've got 85 members that represent the span of what's going on in commercial space from launch to remote sensing, there are a couple areas in there where there are some opportunities that we see. But overall, the reaction from our members was, with a 25% budget cut, we're going to be doing less overall. There's less opportunity for everyone.

And I think there's a lot of concern at the cuts across each mission directorate that within space technology, they're investing in things that commercial companies would, at some point, like to take over. And in other mission directorates, those are the real opportunities for them to do business and to do more science, to do more exploration next year and within the next couple of years. With this level of cut, it seems like NASA's barely going to be able to keep the lights on some of the programs they have, much less doing new, exciting things.

Casey Dreier: The idea that, I think, the commercial sector even is not excited about this budget. Kind of undermine some of that, I think, broader messaging of this that it's still, NASA is a really core customer for a lot of your, what do you call them, participants, members of the Commercial Space Federation, right?

Alicia Brown: Right.

Casey Dreier: And sets these broad goals too, that the commercial industry then fills in and can participate in.

Alicia Brown: Yeah, the goal of a lot of our companies is to help NASA and other government customers to do really cool things but for less money and maybe faster than commercial and that they're willing to invest their own company's resources into some of these projects. But ultimately, a lot of them are still interested in government customers and you just see a lot less opportunity if you're going to make cuts of this magnitude.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. Just for space technology, which does this basic technology development, it's cut almost in half. It's a huge cut from that, and these are projects that a lot of it's specifically earmarked for small business contracts and support. A lot of it is to demonstrate technologies at Mars and elsewhere, these early seed technologies to be able to enable future exploration.

It's one of those things. I think the biggest one, for me, out of space technology was nuclear propulsion, which is one of those that's clearly we need the public sector to invest in. But that's a big, meaty thing and could enable, be transformative in the future, could enable all these other activities that undermines, I'd say, their broader goals of even sending humans to Mars in the long run.

Alicia Brown: I think that's why that was so confusing, is that there's all this rhetoric about going to Mars and a lot of excitement about human missions to Mars. Even when I was on the committee and at NASA for the last 10, 15 years, we've been talking about this, but the conversation has usually been about, oh, we need to make these investments in nuclear propulsion, both nuclear thermal and nuclear electric. And we'd finally gotten NASA started in some of those efforts, only to now have it pulled back. It's just really confusing, I think, across the budget as to how does these plans and this budget match up with some of the goals we've laid out for ourselves, and there's just not a lot of detail.

I would also say in the exploration account where there are potentially some opportunities for commercial companies to do more if SLS and Orion are eventually retired, but there's just not a lot of details about how that's going to happen. Is it going to be a competition? I think, overall, we're willing to give them a little bit of space to tell us, but it's just really unclear with what's been presented so far to the public.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. Jack, what are the three words that we like to use to describe this budget?

Jack Kiraly: Unprecedented, unstrategic and wasteful. And Alicia, you hit a great note there in that NASA's really been working, yeah, the better part of the last two decades on building a strategy. I mean it's in law since I think the '05 authorization that the ultimate goal of the human program at NASA is to send humans to Mars. And it's not like this is some novel, new idea. This has been on the books in Title 51 for the better part of 20 years. And to be this unstrategic with that approach is just unprecedented and wasteful. See, there we go. I used all three of them.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, you are devastating so much and then undermining even technologies the agency would actually need, like also canceling telecom spacecraft at Mars now, for example. Then to have it to be so divisive, then who do you hand this off to finish to carry you forward? It doesn't even internally cohere in its devastation that it does.

Alicia Brown: Yeah, I think everyone who's involved in space knows that these programs take a long time to come to fruition. It's a long time to develop new spacecraft and new launch systems. And over the past four years when I was at NASA, we spent a lot of time laying out what are the objectives for lunar exploration, for Mars exploration and beyond, and trying to set up what's the blueprint to extend human presence throughout the solar system.

We talked a lot about keeping to the plan, sticking to the plan, no matter what the resources look like. But it feels like now we're maybe throwing out that plan and haven't decided on what the new plan is yet. I'm worried that we're losing a lot of precious time, and that means that just sets us back that much further to actually extend humans into the solar system.

Casey Dreier: Brittany, what was AGU's general response to this budget and also your purview extends also to National Science Foundation. Were you excited about this?

Brittany Webster: No.

Casey Dreier: Yes, fair enough.

Brittany Webster: Yeah, right, that's the easy thing to say. I think originally it's disappointment, right? But I want to pick up on something Alicia said, and I think confusing. I think there is some stated goals the administration's talked a lot about, and then I think you see the budget across the sciences, and largely, it's confusing because it's unsupportive of those stated goals, especially a lot of things talking about America first. And one of the places we've been first for a really long time is in science, not just in space, but also just in science more generally.

And then I think you have a budget that doesn't reflect that at all and there's a lot of scaling back, a lot of pulling back from missions. And really, in many ways, ceding that leadership, I would say, to other countries, which one of my favorite things now is talk about is, at the beginning, it was us and Russia. That was it. Those were the space players and that's not the case anymore. And so, to pull back at this moment just seems really disappointing, especially as we're hearing from members every day that, I think, this budget really pushes a lot of our members.

And I should say AGU, we represent a global community of about half a million in earth and space sciences and also just allies and partners. A lot of them now are looking outside the US for opportunities and especially, I would say, our youngest and brightest, which is really... One of my biggest concerns is the fact that the people who are the future PIs, the future innovators, those people now are looking everywhere outside the US and that includes countries that maybe we don't love so much.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, it's one of those things, again, it doesn't make sense from a policy perspective because it's not the product of a considered policy process, and what we know from... So, the Office of Management and Budget, the White House's Accounting Office ultimately approves and helps prepare this budget proposal to Congress. This process, from everything we understand, was a uniquely centralized process, and NASA and NSF and other science organizations were just not a party to these discussions. They were effectively just given numbers, told to do whatever to advance the president's priorities with those. And this is why it's this incoherent mess. That it doesn't actually do what it's going to say, but it also then devastates so much in the immediate terms.

One couldn't even argue that, "Well, it's just going to be messy until we're set on this right path." There is no real path out of here. That's what's almost shocking because it's a budget first policy process that doesn't ultimately incorporate strategic thinking.

Alicia Brown: Yeah, and the process is very confusing right now too. We're normally in this posture where the president proposes and the Congress proposes, is what everyone around DC likes to say. But it does certainly seem like the decisions have really been consolidated at OMB, and I think we've all been hearing it's very unclear are they going to listen to what Congress appropriates?

There's debate going on right now this afternoon in the Senate about the rescissions package and how that gets handled and how the administration responds to if that package is not passed, I think, is going to be really telling for us. We're here to talk about FY26, but I think we're all also in the back of our mind concerned about, well, what's happening with the FY25 money that's already been appropriated? Is that going to be spent how Congress told the agencies to spend it? And if not, that really limits, all of us as advocates, how we can get anything accomplished.

Casey Dreier: Well, fundamentally, it would change the nature of our democracy if that's the case in a sense that if you don't have this kind of citizen through representation appeal to how money is spent and prioritized, then I guess we're basically making direct appeals to individuals in the royal court, in some kind of courtier system.

Jack, how are you seeing some of this reaction on the Hill to this budget?

Jack Kiraly: Nobody's trying to sell this budget to the Hill, and we've heard that from Republican offices, Democratic offices ranging the entire ideological spectrum. This is not something that I think anybody... Nobody sees this as a positive development for the space program. And even just the fact that NASA itself, the interim leadership who have, in just the past few months, been pretty well-aligned with the administration, still weren't even trying to sell this budget. So, they haven't even really fully convinced the people who are notionally in charge of giving Congress the deeper dive on details because there are none.

And so, what we've heard is a lot of frustration and consternation about this budget. It hurts everybody and not in the... Well, we all have to tighten our fiscal belt and be prepared to make cuts. This is this wanton destruction of the competitive edge that the nation has built up over generations of scientists and engineers and innovators and entrepreneurs and explorers. It's just being tossed out really on the whim of one person, and that's Russ Vought.

Casey Dreier: The director of the OMB, yeah.

Jack Kiraly: The director of the Office of Management and Budget. And so, there is a lot of feeling that this is dead on arrival in Congress, but it does, as Alicia pointed out, the president proposes this and it kicks off that process. And now, we're in that period of time where the politics, the capital-P, politics of this is going to play out. The House and Senate are both controlled by the Republicans, and they are going to make their proposals over these next few weeks, as soon as two weeks from now, as of recording, on July 7th when the House votes on the initial markup of their budget proposal.

And so, we'll see what that frustration inevitably turns into. If that really is an outright rejection or are there parts of this new budget that people are going to take the opportunity to say, "Well, we do need to make changes here, here and here," but a little bit of this is happening in the dark for a lot of us.

Casey Dreier: I think this is why this is unusually, for those listening, it's like this is an unusually dangerous situation for these agencies because I feel like, in a more standard politics that we've all grown up in, the power really does rest with appropriators and Congress itself. And there's all these varied interests that will come and react and restore a lot of these proposals. But I think, more broadly, the overall politics here are so... There's a dysfunction in Congress in passing a budget at all.

And this year, Alicia, that you mentioned fiscal year '25, they didn't extended a full year of what's called continuing resolution. And so, as a consequence of the inability of Congress to respond quickly perhaps, you have a real situation where a lot of these cuts can be imposed by default, and this is why it's a particularly perilous time for this.

Brittany, from AGU side of things, how has, again, your organization been responding to this? And where do you see, in terms of the congressional engagement that you've been doing, are you optimistic that Congress is able to act or do you see this same kind of structural challenges?

Brittany Webster: In many ways, I feel like Congress only has as much power as they decide they have. I'm always hopeful. I don't think you work in policy unless you are in many ways a blind optimist. I think it's true. I don't think anyone's happy right now with what's happening with funding, both with the grants that we know we've seen be canceled because of executive orders. And also, just the lack of information coming out of agencies I think has been really tough for members of Congress. And I think a lot of them were trying to deal with it on a case-by-case basis, but we know these are systemic issues that cannot be dealt like that, especially on the scale that they were happening.

So, thinking about FY25 and the situation we find ourselves in where we're worried both about FY25 and FY26 and whether FY25 cuts, I mean, the fear is that the FY26 president's budget request will be enacted at the FY25 level without any say so from Congress. And I think a lot of agencies from what we're hearing are acting like that. And that is a major concern and something that, I believe, Congress is beginning to also be very concerned about as they hear about the impacts from their constituents on these cuts.

However, can Congress actually do something to make sure that that's not the case by actually passing FY26 appropriations, actually looking at the spend plans and making sure that they're appropriate and to FY25's CR marks? I'm not sure. There's a lot going on with reconciliation. With the first rescissions package we saw, I'm just not sure whether Congress has, I don't want to say the political, maybe it is, the political will to do that.

Casey Dreier: I think you're highlighting a challenge here, is that there's the speed of Congress and then there's the rapid speed of the administration in terms of its actions of how it's moving forward with some of these changes that are, I'd say, questionably legal and most likely will ultimately be challenged in court. This idea called impoundment where the president claims that he doesn't have to spend money appropriated to him by Congress, that's going to be a big challenge.

But what could happen, what we're worried about is they'll start turning off missions this year because they say they're going to cancel them next year or not pay out the contracts that they had already granted this year because they say they're going to cancel next year. That throws off, and it's happening faster than, you said, Congress is able to respond given its very, very narrow majorities in both House and Senate, but also these broader issues that they're tackling with, their own, capital-B, budget reconciliation, taxing and spending bills.

It's this omni-crisis that I've called it that if everything's in a crisis, that it's really hard. How do you get your one thing to get the attention it needs because there's 18 other things? Alicia, you had something you wanted to add to this?

Alicia Brown: Yeah, as we're discussing how Congress responds to the budget request in this political climate, the Reconciliation Bill, I've found actually to be a really interesting potential indicator that at least Chairman Cruz of the Commerce Committee used his portion of the Reconciliation Bill to push back on some of these cuts in the exploration sector and is trying to go ahead and pre-buy SLS and Orion and some of these other big ticket items that were proposed to be canceled in the budget. So, that's one small indicator, and Congress is 535 people who don't all think the same. But I did think that that was interesting in the context of other Republicans maybe not wanting to push back against the President.

Jack Kiraly: And that creates a situation. Speaking a little bit more about that Reconciliation amendment, is it creates a situation where the fiscal strain is not so heavy on the rest of the NASA portfolio. So, I know that's been a big question that we've gotten about this, capital-B, budget, is how does that additional 10 billion, that supplemental $10 billion affect the rest of this conversation?

And it really could, depending on how the Senate acts on that amendment, how the House responds to all of the Senate amendments. That certainly is the vote-a-rama, as we call it, is happening sometime soon. How the House responds to that will also be indicative, because it was not included on their side. But now, that there is a potential question on the floor, how do these chambers respond to supporting NASA in that way?

And then, Brittany, you made also a great point about the fact that this is a period of time normally reserved for input from the agency to the appropriators. They have budget hearings. Traditionally, by this point, NASA and NSF and all the agencies would've had their major budget hearing and the head of that agency would've gone before the committees and the House and Senate and made their pitch.

For NASA and NSF, that hasn't happened because there just is no leadership. It's all interim for both agencies. And so, that also makes it difficult and I think compounds the frustration that appropriators are feeling towards this process in that they don't even have anybody they can ask the questions of what is the plan, and very little information coming out of the administration to even defend this budget. Again, furthermore variables, I think, in this long string that this budget is set up to fail in a number of ways. And legislatively, it's certainly not sitting in a good position on the Hill.

But that goes to the other issue, is the Hill going to have input and how are they going to, in the very likely, almost certain event that we have a short-term continuing resolution for the first part of FY26, how does the administration approach that? Do we maintain that decorum, the unwritten rules of, well, you are keeping funding at the previously enacted levels, so we're going to spend at those previously enacted levels? Or are they going to try something new and try to impound funds or keep, cancel contracts and grants and stuff you can't come back from, basically? Stuff you can't come back from.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Jack Kiraly: Turning off a spacecraft that's a billion miles away, you can't just flip the switch again and get that thing back.

Casey Dreier: So, let's talk a little bit, we're kind of dancing around the human exploration side of NASA's budget, so let's focus on that for a few minutes and then we'll switch to the other big one, science. But for a human exploration, the '26 budget proposes, this is the one area where there's a plus sign, a positive growth sign of about $600 million compared to the prior year. I'd say it does a few very big things. It proposes to end the space launch system rocket. It proposes to end the Orion crew vehicle, and it proposes roughly a billion dollars of money directed towards some sort of human Mars exploration initiative.

Alicia, going back to some of your issues you raised, the lack of details in some of those Mars exploration initiatives are somewhat shocking to me, as someone who reads budgets over the years. There's literally multiple lines of Mars technology budget, 300 million, 350 million. Literally, this says, "We'll figure out what this says and we will brief Congress when appropriate." So, where does that money come from? What's it going to be used for? Is it enough for what they need it for? It's just-

Alicia Brown: And while it looks good that there's an increase to exploration, I want to point out that they're moving CLPS out of science and exploration. They're apparently moving fission surface power, which is for Artemis out of STMD space technology to exploration. And you have to consider too, I don't see the numbers in the budget that they presented, but there should be termination liability costs if they are going to cancel some of these big contracts. Not sure how much that is.

So, while maybe the number looks good, it's not clear to me that there is actually a big increase for exploration. And we keep saying there's not a lot of details yet on the plan for, okay, how are we going to move to some commercial systems? Like I said, I think some of our members are really excited about potentially stepping in to offer solutions for lunar and Mars exploration, but they haven't really laid out the plan of how we're going to get there and procure those systems.

Casey Dreier: Talk a little bit about termination liability, because I think this is, it sounds like probably the most boring topic, but it's really relevant in that you have these big contracts with Boeing and Lockheed and Northrop and others to build these systems. And there's something in the contract saying if NASA wants to end these prematurely, it's not going to be free. Right?

Alicia Brown: Yeah, and I'm not an expert and I don't know how much it is in each contract, but exactly right. The government has essentially guaranteed to these companies under the cost-plus type contracts that we're developing along with industry that we're going to be with you and we're going to buy these systems, but if we decide not to, well, then we actually owe you money. And it's not an insignificant amount of money in many cases, I mean, considering that these are billions and billion-dollar programs. I'm wondering, are we really saving all that much money by canceling these programs in the future? Again, it's just not really clear in this budget what is going to be available to then transition to new commercial systems.

Casey Dreier: And I think the key here too is that a lot of these savings are in the future. So, this budget proposes to end SLS development, but still fly SLS for Artemis II and III, still fly Orion for Artemis II and III. And so, your real savings don't really show up until fiscal year 2028, which is basically the last year of this administration or one of the last few years of the administration in fiscal year '29.

So, you're not actually shifting this big pot of money towards these new commercial programs for moon and Mars till years down the road. And you can only then do so much in the meantime about spinning up these new projects. The things that it does cancel is this Block 1B upgrade for SLS and the mobile launch tower, both of which, I'd say, are probably more along the lines of the more reasonable policy decisions that you could see from any administration coming in new.

Alicia Brown: Well, those are both significant amounts of money, for sure.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, I think around a half a billion dollars-ish a year. That's where most of that money is being put towards Mars in this budget. In addition to this, there's this proposal for a moon to Mars transportation program from commercial providers. And I'd say that's an interesting idea, but also, there's not that many providers that can actually provide those services at the moment. It would basically be SpaceX and Blue Origin, maybe someone else, but also, neither of those can actually do it now. They're both working at systems and development, and we require those to then be available for any kind of Mars budget.

Brittany, is there anything on the exploration side that you or AGU noted, or are you mainly focused on the science side?

Brittany Webster: I think we're mainly focused on the science side and especially the connection, I would say, to heliophysics. Thinking about the cancellation of HelioSwarm, I'm very confused how we're doing space exploration or I'll see. It seems counterintuitive if our focus is human exploration to be canceling a mission like HelioSwarm within heliophysics, which is specifically designed to study the space environment that we hope to have astronauts in, which I think is our most important asset, if we're launching humans to Mars, if we hope to further human exploration. I imagine even beyond that, at some point. We need to know so much more about our space environment. We don't know enough, not yet.

Casey Dreier: And I would also add that to Mars itself. It cancels Mars Odyssey, MAVEN at Mars, and also Mars Sample Return. And Jack and I, always a bit baffled at that as well because, oh, they'll just say, "Astronauts will pick up rocks and bring them back. Why do we need Sample Return to do that?" But then Sample Return is canceled because it's too expensive and too complex, and I have not seen...

Alicia, you've looked at NASA, worked at NASA several years. Has any project been made easier or cheaper when you add humans into that mix of taking them into space? That generally doesn't happen, right?

Alicia Brown: Yeah, this has been part of my frustration about discussing a human mission to Mars as we've been talking about the last six months, is no one is talking about how difficult it is. And Brittany points out some of the key issues that we haven't figured out. The galactic radiation and particles coming out of the sun all pose real threats to human health, and we haven't closed, I think, the case yet of how we would get humans there, how they would survive on the surface, and how we get them back. I don't think that the average layperson realizes that when we speak about a mission to Mars, we're talking about at least, I think, what is it, a six or seven-month journey there.

Casey Dreier: One way, yeah.

Alicia Brown: Yeah, one way. And then depending on how the planets are aligned, that's how long you have to stay on the surface. It's certainly no small undertaking. And why, to go back to where we were at the beginning, we've been talking about investing in nuclear propulsion technologies that could hopefully get us there a bit faster than chemical rockets, and therefore, lessen the impact on human health. But yeah, there's so many long calls in technology that we need to figure out before we can safely send a human to Mars, especially if we want those humans to come back alive.

Casey Dreier: Right. Yeah, that's the key element, right?

Jack Kiraly: I would say that should be a top priority.

Casey Dreier: Should be a top priority.

Jack Kiraly: I don't think that should be controversial to say it's a top priority too.

Casey Dreier: That's why it tends to be more expensive and complex because you do robot spacecraft. You don't want to lose them, but if you do, you can build another one. It doesn't work that way with humans. Something else I noticed from this budget along the same lines is the idea that they're going to... Really, to me, you read this budget, the idea of anything after Artemis III at the moon really becomes a hand-wavy affair, and that was shocking to me because you would see previously in these other budget projections, Artemis IV, Artemis V, and this continuous US presence at the moon.

And they don't say they're not doing that, but clearly, the shift in this budget is to say, "No. Now, we transition to Mars." And Artemis, therefore, becomes the boots and flag thing that it was always designed not to be. So, you can pivot to this Mars thing, which as Alicia points out, is much, much harder and less likely. And I wrote a piece saying politically unstable in this kind of framing.

Along with that, they say that it's going to take all these lessons from really engaging the commercial sector, which I think those highlights opportunities, Alicia, that you mentioned from your members with this kind of Mars initiatives. But something that was interesting to me is we'll take the lessons from the moon and apply it to Mars, but we're just starting to get to the moon. We haven't really had that many lessons yet. We're figuring them out right now.

And that's the whole point of Artemis, is that we commit for this long time. What lessons do we learn? How do we work a project? So, they propose a Mars payload delivery project to model after CLPS, the one at the moon, but propose less money for that than the one at the moon. Does that make sense to your members that you would have less money to go 100 million miles further than the moon to deliver these types of payloads? That doesn't add up to me.

Alicia Brown: Yeah. I will say I think doing a commercial Mars program is a really good precursor for human missions. I think there are a lot of companies who could do Mars orbiters, and we could probably do some cool heliophysics or astrophysics missions on commercial platforms sending them towards Mars. But for the last, since Bridenstine rolled out Artemis, there's a huge coalition of companies working on moon technologies. And I just wonder what happens to this burgeoning space economy if NASA is going to turn away from the moon.

And then, of course, also there's the geopolitical context, which is really one of the reasons why Congress is so bought into lunar exploration, is that China and its partners are also planning a lunar base. And what does that mean if they're there and can establish the norms and carve out territory for themselves and NASA isn't there. And as we've said, Mars, we expect that to take a lot longer. Well, what are we going to be doing if we're deorbiting ISS; we're potentially walking away from the moon to focus on some longer-term Mars program? It just feels like we're going to be losing our competitive edge in many of these domains.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, I mean the whole point, again, of Artemis, I would imagine, again, from the business case, if you're putting in your own money as a private company to match some NASA contribution to do a lunar access capability or provide a service, you make your money back on the back end of that contract, of providing them that service for years, the model of providing cargo to the space station.

And so, I would imagine this budget would actually make it a lot harder for private investors to raise money for lunar activities in cis-lunar economy because is there a commitment anymore? That was the whole reason we made this long-term commitment, to provide this opportunity for these new companies to form and thrive. It's just baffling to me. It's like unlearning the lessons that the first Trump administration had made with setting this up in the first place.

We have to keep moving along, I think. Any other highlights from anyone else on the exploration side? I guess I should admit it cancels the Gateway space station. Thereby, it's screwing over our international partners, which is where all of our international commitments were.

Jack, maybe just real quickly circle back to that Cruz amendment because it does undo basically this entire proposal. And just briefly, again, say why this is separate from this appropriations process.

Jack Kiraly: Right. So, yeah, so the reconciliation budget that is being discussed currently is that, we keep saying capital-B budget, that is looking at the very large picture that's mandatory spending, taxation, tax breaks, really the incoming and outgoing funds of the United States does not get to the granularity of individual agencies.

But what's happening now is a number of senators, and in this case, Chairman Cruz has provided an amendment that sets aside a supplemental $9.995 billion, $10 billion, specifically earmarked for these specific projects, purchasing SLS for Artemis IV and V, supplementing the funding for Orion crew vehicle development, funding the Gateway space station, as well as a number of activities including the Mars telecommunications orbiter.

We talk about infrastructure at Mars. This sets aside $700 million specifically for a dedicated telecommunications orbiter, a commercially sourced telecommunications orbiter, for a Mars Sample Return campaign, as well as future crewed missions to the planet. And so, this amendment really sets aside that $10 billion in a very specific way to maintain minimum funding levels for those key projects.

Casey Dreier: And it's available for 10 years too. They don't have-

Jack Kiraly: It's available through September 30th, 2032, but all of it has to be obligated by the end of fiscal year 2029. And so, that's September 30th, 2029. And so, all of that funding has to be obligated in some way, shape, or form between now and then should this amendment become law. And so, that allows the agency a little bit more flexibility in the rest of the budget to support its other activities and maintains that support for a sustainable lunar program that transitions to a Mars program along the lines of that strategy we talked about.

Casey Dreier: So, it was basically rejected, some of these core tenets, within four days of this budget coming out by the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee. TBD whether that actually happens, but I thought notable and I think goes to the point that this is not being effectively sold.

We'll be right back with the rest of our Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio after this short break.

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Casey Dreier: Let's switch to science. Science is cut in this budget by 47%. It would lower science funding to its lowest point adjusted for inflation since 1984. It would cut some divisions more than others, including, I'd say, maybe an astonishing, is the right word here, 67, 65% cut to astrophysics. So, two-thirds basically of astrophysics evaporates overnight in this budget. 50-ish percent cuts to earth science, 30% cut to planetary science, heliophysics down by roughly 50%. Right, Brittany?

And so, Brittany from AGU, you expressed this a little bit, what would you highlight as some of the worst aspects of this that you saw? Where do we even begin with something this dramatic?

Brittany Webster: Well, I think, as the Planetary Society well knows, I think the cuts to the decadal missions. So, we have Mars Sample Return. We have the GDC mission in heliophysics, and then we have the cancellation of two of the Earth System Observatory missions. I think they have very scientific names on the atmosphere observing system and the surface biology and geology mission.

So, I think, first of all, given how important the decadal mission process is for our communities in terms of just really setting the vision right for our communities and where the innovation happens for our communities and what, I think, to a large degree inspires the community, but also signals that there's a future for the community and a robust future for the community, I think the cancellation of those decadal missions. I can't speak to... I'm sure there's something canceled big in astrophysics, I can't speak to that. But the cancellation of those missions, I think, is the biggest red flag and concern.

But alongside that, I think it's the concern of the existing missions. The cancellation, I believe, it's over 40 missions. But when you look at them, director or division by division, when I look at the cancellation of the heliophysics missions, this is devastating for the community. I think Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are the best examples. So, they've been in existence since the '70s. They're literally still going strong, still producing science, still doing interesting things. And so many of these missions, they have second lives now too. They're doing new science, science that wasn't even thought about when they were conceived because of how long it takes to build a satellite.

We're often talking, this is going to be conservative, but from decadal maybe or conception to actual being built, I imagine we're talking about at least to 10 years. I would say at least. And so, I think to cancel those missions, to me, seems really short-sighted. But also, as you said earlier, it seems wasteful. Why are we canceling good missions that are in operation that we've already spent billions of dollars building?

And the other thing that I think is really concerning about them, there was a good Twitter thread by someone talking about how, almost think of an ecosystem basically, that the way these missions are used, it's not just about the one mission; it's about the constellation of missions. So, maybe I'm doing a little bit of work from this satellite, but then I'm also using this satellite. But also think about when satellites are built, you might build one satellite and then you go on to the next satellite. It's like basic-

Casey Dreier: You're using a shared workforce and a shared set of capabilities that people can train on and move back and forth between the other, and then it benefits all these other industries too at the same time.

Brittany Webster: Yeah, basically, we've created, based on our scale, we have a scale of economy here that we're able to take advantage of, and also our scientists are able to take advantage of. And I will also point out Landsat Next. Basically, Landsat Next was supposed to be this great innovation for Landsat, and I don't know if you know this, but Landsat is the most cited science mission apparently, and it's the most used by other federal science partners.

And so, Landsat Next was supposed to be a series of satellites through satellites as opposed to the one, and it was going to have all these innovations. So, instead of a 16-day interval, they would be on a six-day interval. Basically, the amount of science we were going to get out of it would be at least double. We were going to get a lot more science out of it, and this is a mission that we know based on the scientific output, the use by federal partners. It's used heavily.

Casey Dreier: You have a continuous earth observation with those, using the same types of instruments that are calibrated very carefully to match each other for over 50 years. That's a priceless data set.

Brittany Webster: It's a place of pride for a lot of people and a lot of members of Congress too. And so, Landsat Next was going to give us all these great innovations and basically the budget's like, "No, let's just build the same satellite again when we need one." So, I think that's also really disappointing.

And again, this circles back to the workforce comment in general. I think this is a blow to the NASA and the space science workforce. Just the optics alone are not... I think the message it sends is almost the optics are not great. I don't want to overstate, but let's say the optics are not great. And I think you guys can talk about planetary science, but I think one of the best missions that, to me, demonstrates this is also the canceling of VERITAS. Like the Venus community, where's their North Star now?

Casey Dreier: All of you, like VERITAS, DAVINCI, and even Venus Technology Development, which is 5 million a year, is all excised out of this. It says Venus no longer exists in this budget.

Jack Kiraly: And the contribution to the European Space Agency's EnVision mission, which is we're providing an instrument. This is not the full-up we're building the whole thing. This is we're just providing an instrument for this platform. And even that is deemed unimportant for the only other terrestrial body in the solar system that has a thick atmosphere.

Casey Dreier: Right.

Alicia Brown: Those core view submissions have just been jerked around almost since the get-go too. It's been years of, are we doing them or not doing them?

Casey Dreier: Yeah, I feel so bad for the Venus community right now. The last time the US had a mission at Venus, Jack, what was that, '94 is when Magellan ended?

Jack Kiraly: 1994.

Casey Dreier: So, yeah, I think it's time to look at that planet too. Alicia, from your members, what's their reaction to the science cuts?

Alicia Brown: It's devastating. And considering, too, that because we've been under discretionary spending caps for the past two fiscal years, '24 and '25, science was already hurting a lot. I think they lost, over those two years, about 10 billion or $2 billion that they had planned to spend. They were already really pinching pennies and canceling missions where they could, and it's just, as you guys have said, they can't meet these numbers without turning off current missions. And so, therefore, of course, there's already very few new missions. Now, there's almost nothing.

I think the commercial community is... And I believe wholeheartedly that there are certainly ways that we could do cool, really cool, really great science for less money, but again, there's just not this opportunity if you're making these deep of cuts. And the earth science stuff is really hitting home to me right now as we're going through this crazy heat wave on the East Coast, on the Southeast. NASA and NOAA are the premier science agencies that are really monitoring the earth. NASA and NOAA put out that 2024 was the hottest year on record. If we're turning off these missions, if we aren't doing the new Earth Systems Observatory, how are we really going to know even what's happening with our home planet?

Casey Dreier: And earth science is a huge purchaser of commercial earth imagery and observations too.

Alicia Brown: Yeah, they've really set a good example, I think, for the rest of science of how you can partner and use commercial technologies to do really great science. That program that you mentioned, they buy data directly from a bunch of different companies, folks like Planet and Maxar who have really great revisit rates and can have really great resolution of what's going on in the earth. It's really great for the farming community. They can tell what's happening on their crops. Of course, there's huge impacts to predicting weather, sea level rise, a bunch of different applications that are really important that earth science feeds into.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, earth science, again, cut by, I think, about 53% in this and loses... You bring up this important thing, both of you, which is the spigot of future missions. It takes a long time to design and build these. And then depending on where you're going, it can take a while to get there, commission and start getting your data.

Almost every future project is functionally canceled. There's a handful left. And so, it's not only just wiping out a third of active missions, it's wiping out our future in space science. And even so then if those all end and then we restart, we basically have to start from zero. And so, even to rebuild will take a decade to do that.

It is not a forward-looking dogma, which is ironic when we talk about space exploration. That's the essence, Brittany. We all have to be optimistic and space policy doubly so. It's like everything, you always have to point at an empty point in space and hope. You trust that your calculations are right and there'll be a planet there when your spacecraft gets there. And it's all about this forward-looking aspect, which is just not here expressed at all, and it's in science, and again, in the lack of effort to sell the Mars initiative, that cannot politically last. This is very long-term consequences from this.

Brittany, a lot of your members are professional scientists. What are you hearing from them? What are the consequences that we're seeing already?

Brittany Webster: This is such an overused phrase, but we're in existential threat. I think a lot of people, I've been asking the question, how long until this really hurts? How long until you and your family are having to make different decisions, basically? And for a lot of people, I think it's the end of the year. But also too, I envision that this school year, we know a lot of grad students, postdocs either about their offers and also too, I will say just the early scientists, they got their offers rescinded or grad students, a lot of colleges and universities, they didn't even offer positions to any grad students this year.

So, then I imagine your lab is now... So, you're underfunded. You're understaffed as well, and we're in unprecedented times. I think a lot of them don't know what's going to happen. A lot of them are dependent on NASA grants, and we could talk about ROSES as well and how delayed that has been. But also then, with NSF pulling back, with DOE, Office of Science, pulling back grants, we're in a really difficult position right now where I think a lot of professors are going to have to make really tough decisions soon. And perhaps then we have scientists who are only working part-time because they just don't-

Casey Dreier: Or not at all or just leave the field altogether.

Brittany Webster: Leave the field altogether because I just don't see how some of them will be able to support themselves, to be quite frank. One of the numbers that really stuck out to me in the NSF budget was that they envision their grant acceptance rate going down from 26%, which already that's pretty low, to 7%, 6%.

Casey Dreier: So, one out of every 20 applications will get funded, basically.

Brittany Webster: So, either now I'm a researcher spending all of my time writing grant proposals. Just to get that one, I'm submitting a hundred to hopefully get one. Or I'm really having to scale back, as you say, leaving the field or maybe just becoming a part-time scientist or moving to another country. I think we all saw... I can't remember. I know it was Europe. I can't remember if it was the EU itself or a country in Europe who put out a call. They set aside a certain amount of money.

Casey Dreier: France.

Brittany Webster: It was France, and then asked other scientists from the US, "Are you interested in coming?" And they said they had to shut it down because they got too many requests and proposals.

Jack Kiraly: If I remember correctly, it wasn't just funding for maybe the next year or the next five years. It was 20 years of committed funding for those folks to move. And this is a national asset. These are the best and brightest minds that help innovate, that come up with new ideas that change our concepts of our place and space, of the way our planet operates, the environment in space and these places beyond here that all has benefits here as technology spinoffs and applications here, terrestrially here on earth, and it's a national asset.

We are known the world over. That's why we have so many people that move here to be part of the science community because it's the best in the world. But this turns off that spigot and says this actually is unimportant to us when it just is undoing this foundation of what modern life has become.

Casey Dreier: It turns out that-

Alicia Brown: Yeah, it's wild. This has been US policy since Vannevar Bush and Endless Frontier, and all of us have been in the science policy world for a while and seen the economic studies and all the different spin-offs and technology that come out of NSF. And Google, I think, even started at NSF, CRISPR, a ton of these. It's amazing, I guess, that France has taken note and learned these lessons where current policymakers maybe haven't.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, I mean the whole post-war policy was realizing that science is a key aspect of national security and threat. And that's why it is a role and needs to be funded by the public to some degree because it enables this long-term security through workforce capability and just cutting edge. Again, you want the talent and the minds. So, this turns off a spigot because I'll point out too, there's a lot of fundamental grants for scientists that ROSES is a version or a way that scientists can apply to a grant application area, but a lot of this funding is cut by a third or half or even two-thirds in some cases.

So, there's just no money to support the active science even of the data that has come back from these missions. We lose missions like Juno at Jupiter, New Horizons in the Kuiper belt. We lose missions like Chandra and Orbit, x-ray space telescope. These are irreplaceable assets. To replace them would cost billions. What they do retain even, they cut the operating funding for. And so, James Webb Space Telescope loses a third of its budget for science. That's what it's there for. It just will do days without science.

Mars Perseverance loses almost 20% of its operating budget. That's two days a week, basically. Now, it'll sit on the surface of Mars not able to operate because you're paying engineers and people to run it. So, again, it's complete walking away from not only our commitments, but the future of this. It's hard to express. Hyperbole is actually failing us maybe in some ways. It sounds like hyperbole in some ways, but this is probably the most dispassionate way we can talk about this.

Very quickly, let's talk science in another area, on the International Space Station. It's set to be deorbited around 2030. This was prior presidential policy as well, but this budget takes away a third of operating funds to International Space Station. Severely reduces the number of astronauts that can go on board, severely reduces the number of cargo, the amount of cargo that can go up. And it cuts functionally all scientific research, both on the ISS research time, the time that astronauts spend doing it, but also on the microgravity biological research side of the science community that creates the experiments themselves.

Alicia, did you want to quickly talk about the ISS changes that you're looking at?

Alicia Brown: Yeah, just like in science, the current operating science missions, it just makes no sense to me. The taxpayers have spent billions of dollars to create this fantastic orbital microgravity laboratory. It's obviously not going to last forever. We're preparing for the commercial space stations that will follow on, but number one, we really need the research keep going on stations so that there is a clear pathway to transition activity from ISS to commercial stations.

But also, why did we spend all this money as a country to invest in this laboratory if we aren't going to use it to the fullest extent possible and to its full capacity for as long as it's actually flying? It makes no sense to me. And reducing crew up there, we're going to literally just be in station keeping and not doing any research. What's really the point of that?

Casey Dreier: I keep saying without science, it's a national laboratory. Without science to do stuff up there, you have literally nothing to do except to fix the toilet, basically. Why are we sending astronauts there just to float around in space? This becomes a-

Alicia Brown: Which is not their favorite thing to do on station.

Casey Dreier: Exactly. I mean you need to fix things, but if there's nothing, no larger purpose, they're just being there to be there, becomes like this existential crisis of why are we even doing that? I would even argue probably all of these things start to undermine this public investment of why are we doing this? They're not doing science in space. What are they doing to begin with? What are we going to Mars for when there's no explanation? We're cutting back in the science, which people say that they want NASA to do. It starts to create this separation between what the space program does and what the public expects of it.

Brittany, do you have any thoughts on the ISS and microgravity communities as well?

Brittany Webster: Not a lot, but I just want to pick up on what you said and maybe say that definitely it's maybe a little more explicitly, but I think it gets lost sometimes when we talk about human exploration. That the point of exploring more planets is in many ways, to do more science, to do more interesting science, to do more hands-on science, science that robots can't do. Probably more experience on human health and the impacts on how do we improve human health and just that we're continuing again to see benefits on this.

And if we're going to Mars, again, it also seems like a loss of opportunity to continue doing research, especially on human health in space because I feel the general public does not know enough how many gaps there are still between our knowledge and how we can safely explore deeper and longer in space.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, absolutely. Other quick hits here, STEM education, NASA's outreach and space grant support zeroed out completely. We've also seen third cuts to overhead and operations, which basically translate to roughly losing a third of NASA's remaining civil servant workforce, which reduces NASA's workforce to its smallest levels since fiscal year 1960, which began in 1959. So, even talking about this broad conflicts of incoherency, going to the moon and then going to Mars with the workforce you had when you started Project Mercury. Again, that just doesn't check out at all in terms of how this can work.

In the last few minutes here, Alicia, I'll start with you. From Commercial Space Federation's perspective, where are you moving from this and how can people follow what Commercial Space Federation is doing?

Alicia Brown: Yeah, thanks for that. So, you can follow us on X and on LinkedIn at the Commercial Space Federation. If you are a commercial space company and are interested in joining us and our policy enacts work in DC, please feel free to reach out on our website. NASA is just one area that we're focused on. There are cuts happening at NOAA, the Office of Space Commerce and Department of Defense that we're worried about as well, and we're also doing some work with the FAA to try to reform space launch and reentry regulations.

So, a ton going on in our world right now that we're focused on, but NASA is something that I think is a crown jewel of our country and many, many of the companies that are part of our coalition want to do work with NASA. And so, we're just trying to get, like you guys are, the word about what are the opportunities that we're losing here and what does that impact mean for the US economy and for US global leadership as a whole.

Casey Dreier: Well-said. Brittany, what is AGU doing and how can people follow or even help?

Brittany Webster: So, I would say you can follow us on all the social media things. If you follow us on BlueSky or X, we're at AGUSciPolicy and our email address is [email protected] if you want to email us. We're always happy to take emails, and we're always looking for partners, scientists, researchers, students who are interested in engaging with us.

We are a member society, so we have a very active grassroots program. And right now, our biggest thing is members of Congress are going to be back home in the district in August, so we're organizing congressional meetings, but we're also doing a big op-ed campaign. There is a lot of, I think, public engagement opportunities. Does the public really know why these missions are important? Not just because I think they inspire us all and also just they're awe-inspiring. I want to say awesome, but that sounds-

Casey Dreier: Awesome in the literal sense, right?

Brittany Webster: Yes. Awesome in the literal sense.

Jack Kiraly: The traditional definition, the original definition.

Brittany Webster: It's not just that. It's also thinking about earth science and thinking about, I'm sure with the heat waves, also the air quality today does not feel great to me personally, but also thinking about natural disasters. I always think that I found myself in a couple of natural disasters and the fact that I know we have this whole arsenal of government agencies working together to problem solve and get information literally in your hands, in your cell phone quickly, that's when you need it more than ever. And maybe you don't realize how important it is until you find yourself in that situation.

And so, we're going to be doing an op-ed letter to the editor campaign in August, really highlighting what these cuts mean, not just to science, but to society as well. And we're always looking for people to engage with us.

Jack Kiraly: Great. Thank you, Brittany. And for us at the Planetary Society, we have our Save NASA Science campaign. We have an action hub at planetary.org/save-NASA-science. You can also access it from our homepage. I want to thank you both for being part of this discussion and for your friendship and partnership throughout this entire process. Over the next few months, I very much look forward to working with both of you, and I know Casey does as well.

Alicia Brown: Thanks. Thanks, Jack. Thanks, Casey.

Brittany Webster: Thanks all.

Jack Kiraly: We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, but we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space, science, and exploration.

Help others in the meantime. Learn more about Space Policy and the Planetary Society by leaving a review and rating this show on platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to this show. Your input and interactions really help us be discovered by other curious minds and that will help them find their place and space through Planetary Radio.

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Mark Hilverda and Ray Paoletta are our associate producers of the show. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor, me, Casey Dreier and Merck Boyan, my colleague, composed and performed our Space Policy Edition theme.

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