The Space Advocate Newsletter, April 2026

This month

🌑 Artemis II and the return of lunar spaceflight
📉 Historic cuts again proposed to NASA
📣 Please consider supporting our advocacy work

For the majority of people alive today, going to the Moon was a historical event, something that had happened, but no longer did. For me, Project Apollo felt almost mythic, a product of a golden age of space travel free from the petty limitations imposed upon us by narrow-minded politics (not actually true, but such nuance was not available to me as a young boy).

I vividly recall my first visit to NASA Kennedy in early 2005. It was still in the post-Columbia hiatus in the Shuttle program. It felt empty. The Vehicle Assembly Building loomed over the quiet expanse, a vacant colossus dwarfing the practical-but-uninspiring handful of medium-lift rockets then available to the space program. The vibe was more Ozymandias than New Olympus.

No more.

This month, for the first time in my life, I watched a lunar mission whose outcome I didn’t know in advance. I watched flight controllers give a “go” for translunar injection. I heard the struggle of four souls searching for the right words to convey their experience of the utter alienness of the far side of the Moon. I heard long pauses in communications due to the limits of the speed of light. I saw astronauts on a space station talk to astronauts flying by the Moon. I waited, white-knuckled, for all parachutes to deploy after the Integrity capsule re-entered the atmosphere. Most of all, I reveled in the humanity embodied by the crew of Artemis II, their natural camaraderie, their mutual fondness for each other, their decency, their excitement, and their quiet bravery.

Artemis isn’t the ideal implementation of a Moon program. It’s a product of aerospace contractors, legacy workforces, parochial politics, and Shuttle-era hardware. But it’s the most successful lunar effort since Apollo. In fact, it’s now the only successful lunar effort since Apollo. We are past the programmatic tipping point: Artemis will continue. That means sending humans to the Moon is no longer history: it is the present and future of spaceflight.

It was amid this momentous achievement that the White House released its 2027 NASA budget proposal. The agency tasked with returning humans to the Moon now faces a $5.6 billion cut, the second-largest single-year cut in history, and aims to slash NASA science by 46%.

Talk about being pulled back down to Earth.

The 2027 proposal aims to cut NASA by 23%, down to $18.8 billion. Adjusted for inflation, this would be NASA’s smallest budget since 1961. It again proposes draconian cuts to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, reducing its budget by $3.4 billion, a cut of 46%. These cuts would wipe out nearly half of all active and in-development science projects, including the one-of-a-kind missions beyond Pluto, at Jupiter, and many more monitoring the Earth and the Sun.

It is also the least transparent NASA budget justification I’ve ever read, and I’ve gone through them all. The budget proposal obfuscates mission cancellations and prior-year spending baselines, and seeks to establish new, multi-billion-dollar program lines with such scant detail that they are, effectively, slush funds.

We’ve already spun up our Save NASA Science campaign in response. We successfully stopped these cuts last year, and we can do it again. But we can’t just hope it will happen; we need to push back, hard. Our action hub has resources, talking points, and running updates on the budget to help you follow along.

It was a wasted opportunity; Artemis II could have been a perfect occasion for a unity budget, a perfect excuse to change the administration’s position on NASA by advancing all of NASA. Instead, we received what amounted to a budgetary insult to the four astronauts putting their lives on the line for lunar exploration and to the agency tasked with keeping them safe. NASA deserves better, and we’ll work to make sure the agency stays whole.

Until next month,

Casey Dreier
Chief of Space Policy
The Planetary Society

Want to do something?

Our Save NASA Science Action Hub is live, with actions you can take right now to help push back against these cuts.

Want to do really help?

All of the crazy news in the last month occurred right at the start of our annual fundraising efforts for The Planetary Society’s Space Policy & Advocacy program. That was entirely unintentional, but perhaps a good reminder about the unique role we play.

We’re a nonprofit with dedicated space policy and advocacy staff based in Washington, D.C. We work all day, every day, on behalf of space science and exploration and the shared goals of The Planetary Society. Basically, no other organization does this with our credibility and sophistication.

Critically, because of our members and donors, we’re independent. That’s very rare in the space world. We answer to you.

In the face of the budgetary crises facing NASA science last year, we significantly increased spending on our program, allowing us to hire a full-time fellow in D.C., to invest in the tools and infrastructure to drive the narrative, and to pull off the largest in-person space advocacy event in D.C. history.

So, if you can, please consider donating to our fundraising efforts this spring. It truly makes a difference. Thank you.

What I’m reading this month

Put science back in the driver’s seat (SpaceNews)
Technically I wrote this one rather than read it. I outline a trend I’ve noticed in the past few years: that of science becoming a passenger on spacecraft rather than guiding force.

NASA science faces 'very serious threat' from new White House budget, experts say (Space.com)
The expert here is me, and I got into depth on the various ways in which this budget request is not just bad, but sloppy, opaque, and breaks decades of precedent.

Key Senate appropriator rejects proposed NASA budget cuts (SpaceNews)
This is the top Republican on the Senate CJS appropriations subcommittee, which is responsible for NASA funding. A strong indication that the FY 2027 request is highly unpopular and out of touch with political reality.

White House releases Space Nuclear Initiative (Space Policy Online)
A new administration policy seeks rapid advances in space nuclear — a potentially transformative technology for both human spaceflight and scientific missions, but not easy and not cheap.

Ground Truth

Data visualization and analysis

The White House has proposed the second-largest cut to NASA in history, second only to the 2026 cut proposal. More charts detailing the cuts of the FY 2027 budget request are available in The Planetary Society’s budget charts section.