The Space Advocate Newsletter, May 2025

This month

🚨 Historic 25% NASA budget cuts proposed
🪐 NASA Science funding faces devastating 47% reduction
✊ Planetary Society building coalition, fighting back

They say, "It's a marathon, not a sprint…” But what if the sprint never stops? That's how it sometimes feels here at The Planetary Society as we continue to resist cuts to NASA and NASA science, which unfortunately became official in early May.

These "reckless" cuts (Newt Gingrich's words, not mine) are now the stated policy position of the White House. That means the next NASA administrator will have the unenviable duty of defending them to Congress and the public, despite apparently having no input on the proposal itself.

It’s worth noting the following about this proposal:

• This would be the largest single-year cut ever proposed in NASA’s history (-25%).
• This would be the largest single-year cut ever proposed for NASA Science (-47%), Space Technology (-44%), and Aeronautics (-32%) activities.
• If enacted, this budget would be the smallest for NASA since 1961.

This is all very bad.

The Planetary Society has been in a sprint ever since we heard rumors about these proposals in March. In that time, we’ve done an extraordinary amount of work — not all of it visible — to build a coalition of industry, scientific, and public interest organizations to push back on this proposal. And pushing back we are.

I encourage you to visit our Save NASA Science Action Hub to see the latest updates, resources, background information, and actions you can take to help.

The pace of congressional action will be slow, and we won’t have a resolution on this for many months, maybe even a year. So we’ll have to keep our focus and our energy.

I frequently think about the Voyager missions, pushing through interstellar space nearly 50 years after their launch, or how it felt to be the Opportunity Mars rover on year 14 of its 90-day mission, arthritic and slow, but still going, still pushing to see over the next hill.

We’re not going to relent, either.

No matter what happens in 2026, I can promise you one thing: The Planetary Society will never give up on our goals for space science and exploration. We’re in this for as long as it takes. I hope you’ll be there with us.

Until next month,

Casey Dreier
Chief of Space Policy
The Planetary Society

Want to do something?

Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) is circulating a congressional letter in support of NASA science funding. If you live in the U.S., you can use this form to contact your Senators and urge them to sign.

If you live outside the U.S., you can add your name to our global petition. Our aim is to reach 5,000 signatories, and we’ll hand-deliver it to members of Congress.

More ideas and suggestions are on our Save NASA Science Action Hub.

What I’m reading this month

Reading? Who has time to read!

OK, I read some things.

No one knows who’s in charge of Trump’s dramatic space policy (POLITICO)

[Paper] Counting stars and costs: An empirical examination of space launch cost trend at NASA (ScienceDirect)

[Essay] E.T. Phone the White House (NYT)

[Op-ed] The White House assaults American space science (SpaceNews)

Ground Truth

Data visualization and analysis

NASA’s relative annual budget changes as proposed by the White House’s budget. The FY 2026 proposal is the largest single-year cut ever proposed. Source: The Planetary Society’s Historical NASA Budget dataset