Astronomy

Normally we try to end the season on a high note. But there’s unfolding news that we just HAVE to cover before we leave you for the summer. NASA’s new budget is here, and it’s 25% smaller. We’ll cover what the changes are and try to understand the implications. It’s a bad decade to be a researcher. We’re going to look at why, and what US cuts will mean for the world. 

Show Notes

• Podcast Update
• Website and Patreon Changes
• NASA New budget
• Missions affected:
  • OSIRIS-REx Apophis mission
  • Mars Sample Return
  • Earth science missions (Terra, Aqua, Aura, DISCOVER)
• Education and outreach funding is cut to zero.
• DEI programs and teacher training (like REACH) are eliminated.
• Impact of Budget Cuts
• International Perspective
• Artemis and Human Exploration
• Call to Action
• Behind the Scenes and Summer Plans
  • Website redesign and content improvements are underway.
  • A fundraiser is tentatively scheduled for the weekend of October 11.
  • The team will focus on new projects and development during the break.
  • Hosts express gratitude to editors, the production team, moderators, Patreon supporters, and all listeners.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: Welcome to AstronomyCast, your weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the Publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay:I am doing well. This is our last episode before summer hiatus. I am planning this summer to upgrade our website to Divi5, so if any of you out there want anything specific added to our website, drop us a message.

Fraser Cain: Right on.

Dr. Pamela Gay: We’ve just swapped over our Patreon so that I no longer do public messages. I do free and paid subscriber messages, so go join our Patreon, get regular updates, even if you join for free.

Fraser Cain: Yes. This is really important. While you’re listening to this, Patreon allows you to just follow a creator for free.

For example, on AstronomyCast, Pamela sends out tons of information, and most of it is just freely available. A lot of the stuff that we do is just free, and you don’t have to subscribe. It’s the same thing over on my Patreon for Universe Today.

Almost all of the content that we release is released for free and public. It has longer versions of our news stories, longer versions of our Q&As, longer versions of the interviews, and it’s all just free. Why do we do this?

We do this because if you’re using social media or if you’re using YouTube or all these kinds of things, these are walled gardens that are trying to keep you in, and they can change the algorithm and cause us no end of grief at a moment’s notice. But if you use Patreon, then we have a direct relationship. When we provide new information or create a new version of the show or want to give you some other cool content, we can connect directly and send it to you.

So, again, there’s no commitment. You just go to Patreon.com slash AstronomyCast and then just follow us for free. I don’t know if we’re doing this with AstronomyCast, but on the Universe Today one, we’ve got a custom podcast feed that has additional content in it, and it’s also free, and yet is way better.

You just have to follow that, and now you’re getting this additional content. Obviously, we’d love it if you became a patron, but even so, the thing that’s most important to us is that we have a direct connection to you, and it’s not intermediated by YouTube or Twitter or anything, that we put out a message and you receive the message because you’ve chosen to listen to us. So that’s why we’ve got that, and please go there and do it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So this summer, we aren’t going to be producing new episodes, but the website is getting a major refresh. I’m going to go through and enhance a lot of our audio because there are tools that exist today that did not exist when we started doing this show, where I can just run it through a machine learning algorithm, not generative AI, machine learning, they are not the same.

And it will find the noise and make it dead without removing the parts of my voice and Fraser’s voice that we want to keep. And I’m also going to be planning for a giant fundraiser that we’re tentatively scheduling for the weekend of October 11th, because we have recognized with CosmoQuest and everything else we do, there is no longer going to be any federal funding for this kind of stuff. It’s gone.

It’s dead. That is the topic of this episode.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Well, this will be part of the conversation. So like, hang tough.

We’re going to bring this up as part of the conversation.

Dr. Pamela Gay: October 11th. Save the date.

Fraser Cain: All right. Now, before we get into this episode, I need to issue about a thousand caveats because it is going to be a very controversial episode. And I know we’re going to get emails from people who are saying that this is overly politicized.

But the reality is that this is news. This is financial information. This is the new budget for NASA.

And this is going to have implications for science. And I think some people are going to say we’re going to be fear mongering. You know, I am going to do my absolute best to rein in the emotions of this episode so that we focus on the facts.

And I think that, you know, our audience, there are sort of two political factions here. There is a there is a one faction that is for the current administration and there’s another faction that is against the current administration. That’s fine.

Right. Like, feel free to disagree. But I think everyone who’s listening to this is pro space exploration and pro science.

And that is our agenda. Right. That is that is our bias.

That’s where we’re going to put our thumbs on this is that we are pro space exploration and pro science. We are not against these things. We’re pro the scientific method.

So that’s the first thing is that this conversation can be held as much as possible in that vein, which is that we’re going to try and just convey the information, going to try to minimize the emotion, even though we are definitely feeling emotion. And we’re going to try to give you something that you can understand what’s going to happen coming forward. The other thing that I think we’re willing to do is sort of explain, you know, provider disclosures.

The first thing is like, I’m Canadian, I’m not American. And while Canada is entrenched in a lot of negotiations with the United States, we have a an astronaut, part of Artemis 2. We build arms and put them on everything that we have all kinds of existing obligations.

One of the instruments on board James Webb. There’s also sort of, you know, a renaissance in hiring scientists happening in Canada right now, an increase in our budgets for space exploration that is coming as a direct result of this, you know, I hate to use the word opportunity for Canadian research firms. So keep that in mind that, you know, when I say things, it might be that I am unintentionally being Canadian when I sort of consider the perspective of this.

Pamela, you have your own caveats that I think we should really definitely get through here, which is that, you know, you are funded in part by government programs that are going to go away.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So, so my funding has always been a wild mix of different sources. Right now, my federal grant funding is about the lowest it’s been other than during the pandemic.

And so I’m not going to be as hard hit as many of my colleagues. So I’m dealing with survivor guilt more than I’m dealing with terror and fear. But I am watching the people I have collaborated with for 20 years, leaving NASA, leaving academia, redefining who they are.

So for me, I’m going to figure out how to be okay. That is what I do. But I am watching the people around me suffer and I’m watching the Institute that I work for really, really suffer.

Fraser Cain: So yeah. Right. So like your caveat here is that, you know, the funding, the agency that you work for, the Planetary Science Institute, is going to lose a ton of funding.

Yeah. And you have tons of colleagues and friends who are going to either be laid off, fired, or are taking early retirement. The forms of funding that you have been able to access in the past to do the kinds of education outreach are pretty much going away.

And fortunately, you know, we have support through our patrons. We have the support of various fundraising and the other projects and funding sources that’s going to make sure the Cosmic Quest exists in some form moving forward. But it’s hard not to see all this stuff and not feel like they’re gut punches.

So we are collectively feeling gut punched. And so there. I think that’s all the caveats out of the way.

Let’s proceed. Here’s my introduction. Normally, we try to end the season on a high note, but there is unfolding news that we just have to cover before we leave you for the summer.

NASA’s new budget is here and it’s 25% smaller. We’ll cover what the changes are and try to understand the implications. All right, well, let’s get into this.

So let’s go back in time and sort of get a sense of what is NASA’s historical budget levels for the last couple of years. What is normal for NASA?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, NASA’s been struggling more often than not. Its highest budget in history was just over $25 billion. It’s unclear when we’re going to get back there.

That was the 2023 budget.

Fraser Cain: Right. So that’s historically, it’s about 20, what’d you say, 23, 24?

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s been in the 20s for a long time.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. And so it had been sort of 20, you know, 24 billion, 23 billion.

And in fact, back during the last Trump administration, there was mild increases to the, to the NASA budget. There was a lot of really interesting planetary science. There was the recommitment to send the human astronauts to the moon.

So and that’s where it’s been. It has been a sort of like a slight increase over time and there’s been a few budget, you know, projects have been canceled and so on. So all right.

So that’s where we’ve been. Then about two months ago, we got a, an announcement from the White House that they had released their skinny budget and this was going to be a sort of shortened version, high level view of what they were going to be resetting the budget at. And then about three weeks ago from when we’re recording this, we got the full budget.

And so now we see in detail what is the amount that the White House administration is hoping that will actually be passed through Congress and the Senate. So what is that sort of baseline? What is the budget that they’re looking for?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 18.8 billion with a significantly more cuts to science and learning opportunities. So things like internships, then cuts to space exploration.

Fraser Cain: All right. So let’s talk about the things that are, yeah, let’s talk about the things that are getting cut.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, 19 different space missions that are currently active.

Fraser Cain: Okay. So let’s list a few so people know some of them.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So the, the one that I think is hardest on my heart is the OSIRIS-REx extended mission to the asteroid Apophis. Right. In a couple of years, that mission is actually, was actually supposed to be flying along with an asteroid that’s going to be potentially daytime visible here on the planet Earth.

Fraser Cain: Right. So this is an existing mission. This is the OSIRIS-REx mission.

This brought back a sample of asteroid Bennu to Earth. Now the mission, the plan was to retask this spacecraft that is already in space, that already has propellant to chase down asteroid Apophis, go into orbit and be there when it goes in, does a flyby of Earth, giving us a really good understanding of what happens to a near-Earth asteroid when it makes a flyby of Earth and make observations directly there. So, so they’re just, and so like, I just want to understand this, they’re just canceling it?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: They’re just not like the no, like, are they going to just shut down OSIRIS-REx?

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and it’s, like I said, 19 active missions, it’s 41 planned missions altogether are getting shut down. And this means that the greatest opportunity to get cheap and easy data of an asteroid is one that NASA is going to be ignoring. There was discussion for about three seconds where NASA posted to their website a call for proposals to use the in-storage, completely built Janus missions that had to stay grounded due to changes in the Psyche mission profile.

There were thoughts of how can we use Janus? How can we take advantage of other existing hardware to go take advantage of this amazing opportunity? And when news fully hit that not only are we not launching anything new, but OSIRIS-REx is going to get pulled, I got a notice I never thought I’d get.

My, my planetarium software on my phone sent me a notice to call NASA and complain about this. Not NASA, call the Senate and complain about this.

Fraser Cain: Right. So, you know, some other big ones that I think we should be aware of, the Mars Sample Return mission is essentially canceled.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Juno, Roman.

Fraser Cain: And, you know, that’s not a big surprise because that was sort of starting to get over budget and we were starting to see people were having a hard time making that fit within any budget, even within the existing budget. But there’s a lot of other stuff that I think people are quite fond of. New Horizons, which is currently sort of in interstellar space, trying to potentially find its next target.

Juno, which is exploring Jupiter, then it’s upcoming missions, Da Vinci, Veritas, which are going to be going to Venus. There’s a lot of planetary science missions. But do we know for sure?

Because the other ones, like SeaNancy, Grace Roman, looks like that’s still go.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So what we’re dealing with is a confusing situation because NASA is an executive branch agency and civil servants legally in this country are not allowed to do anything that could be construed as lobbying, which means they’re not allowed to make a case to keep things funded to Congress or representatives. And so the way it normally works is the president puts forward the name of an administrator. Congress confirms the administrator, usually in the first couple of months, if not sooner, of a presidency.

And then that person, Bridenstine was an amazing example of this, would go to Congress and say, we need to do these changes. We have to do this. And that person, behind the scenes in some of the best cases, would also go to bat fighting the president to keep things funded.

Right now, we don’t have that political appointee, that person who is legally allowed to lobby. Well, it’s not technically lobbying, isn’t technically allowed to advocate. We don’t have that allowed to advocate person.

Janet Petro, who’s the acting administrator, is a civil servant. She is required by law to do what the president says. And this means that right now, we are in a situation where it appears that NASA is obeying in advance, where Congress hasn’t passed a budget.

Congress determines the budget, determines what is funded. A mission isn’t canceled until its budget line is canceled by Congress. This is why Viper is canceled, but not canceled-canceled.

Fraser Cain: Right. Yeah. And I think it’s really important to be clear that there is, you know, everything we’re talking about here is the budget that the White House has been requested.

The possibility is that Congress and the Senate will refuse, will vote a different budget in, that will stand, and then it’ll be business as usual for NASA and these missions will get cut. But I think, you know, it’s been pretty safe to say so far, we’ve seen that Congress and the Senate, because they’re, you know, in the same political group as the president, have done, have sort of fallen in line. And so this, you know, although there could be something different that happens, I, you know, I’m not sure where I would place my odds right now.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, it’s, it is a difficult thing to understand on many different levels. Currently, as we record this on June 30th at 1.30 in the afternoon Central Time, they are doing various votes on the Senate floor over amendments and riders to the overarching budget bill that the president is pushing for. A few Republicans have said no to the bill.

One of them, Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, changed her mind after she got a special dispensation that cuts that other states will face won’t affect Alaska. We have seen a few people stand out, like Josh Hawley in Missouri, because they are in rural states. It turns out rural states are going to be particularly hard hit, and they’re concerned that their state budgets won’t be able to keep things maintained.

So at this point, we have Schrodinger’s budget bill.

Fraser Cain: Right, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: We don’t know what’s going to happen.

Fraser Cain: And when we come out sort of the other side of summer, we might go, you know what, you know, false alarm, everything’s fine. You know, the new budget begins in October. And so, so this all has to be sort of settled before then.

But already, I mean, you’re seeing, for example, NASA has put an early retirement option in the hands of people. I think 8% of NASA’s workforce has already taken this retirement option. And, you know, a lot of times these are very senior people who’ve been working in the agency for a long time.

So a lot of institutional knowledge that even if this doesn’t happen in the same way, you’re going to have a hard time just rebuilding that. Okay, you know, right now, we don’t know exactly how it’s all going to play out. You know, someone is going to have to do the unfortunate job of saying, well, I’ve got a fraction of my original budget.

So now I’m going to cancel out all of these missions. What other things are going to be, have their budgets curtailed?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So we see, like I said, 41 cancelled missions, 19 of which are active. We are also seeing upwards of 6,000 civil servant jobs being cancelled. These are people who are career bureaucrats working to advance NASA’s mission programs, engineers, grant managers, every different layer of the Institute.

Fraser Cain: Right. And then, you know, I mentioned, you know, 8% have already taken a buyout. So, you know, that’s the kind of thing that you’ll see.

Sort of the, you know, the way things were stated was, you know, here’s the first version, and then next comes the actual layoffs. And so I think a lot of people are saying, well, I’m going to take this more orderly exit before I have to take the disorderly exit.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So in the best of possible worlds, we are going to come back in September. The Congress, House of Representatives and Senate will have figured out something that isn’t the, it’s literally called the Big Beautiful Bill.

It’s a ridiculous name. They will have figured out something else, and science as it stands will be maintained. No one really thinks it’s going to be that simple.

We think that there could be particular things that survive. But, and this is a timeless statement I’m about to make. If you are in the United States or you are a U.S. citizen abroad, call your elected officials for your region and tell them you want to see the United States fund science. Historically, the Republicans have done a great job with this. There, there’s no reason, however, not to ask for more money for science because we are 0.3% of the federal budget NASA is. And when you reduce down to how much science is funded and recognize NSF is much smaller.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, we haven’t talked about NSF. Let’s, we’ll get back to that in a second. All right.

So, so I guess, you know, we’re talking about the cut of the workforce. We’ve talked about planetary science. Let’s talk about earth science.

This is where some of the deepest cuts have happened.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So earth science is basically going away. I don’t know how else to frame it. So on the list of missions going away, we have Terra.

We have Aqua. We have Aura. I’m scanning through trying.

We have Discover, which is my favorite science mission.

Fraser Cain: And then there’s like, obviously there’s, there’s missions in the, in the works that are going to get, you know, there’s the new Landsat mission that’s coming up. So there’s a bunch of this stuff, you know, effectively, there’s going to be very little earth science being contributed by NASA. And you can imagine, you know, if NOAA took over that role, whatever, but, but NOAA is getting its cuts as well.

So, you know, just in general, this, this, you know, NASA’s role in helping us understand planet earth is being severely curtailed.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, education, earth science is getting cut just to add numbers to that from a FY 24, 2.1 to FY 26, they are looking at 1.0. Right.

Fraser Cain: So, you know, and again, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but you know, all of those missions, like you, you have to take budget away from the people who are maintaining the existing spacecraft or take budget away from the people who are building the new spacecraft, uh, new missions, earth monitoring, airplanes that fly into hurricanes, uh, all of that kind of stuff is going to have, is going to be curtailed at some, to some degree that we’re going to find out the details.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I want to hit on hurricanes real fast in particular. Um, USAID had been funding NASA observations of the earth over, uh, areas where the USAID was working and when their budget got cut, all of that earth science got cut. Um, the department of defense had been working in concert with NOAA to do, uh, microwave observations of the planet earth that were used for, uh, weather monitoring.

We also had all of these earth observing missions that were looking at space weather, trying to protect our spacecraft and orbit around the planet, and then looking at our atmosphere as well. What we are going to see is a continued market decrease in quality of, uh, storm predictions at the same time that storms are getting more severe and the loss of the microwave data in particular means that at night, when we often see hurricanes massively increasing in power, we’re not going to have the ability to observe them. And so it is going to be entirely possible that people go to bed with a category two hurricane six hours out and wake up to category five.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. I mean, like, again, I mean, these are like, we don’t know specifically which missions are going to get canceled. We don’t know which missions are going to get shut down.

We don’t know. But I mean, if I told you that you now have one third of your house finances, you know, then you would have to make cuts in your house.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And they’re making those cuts right now. So, so for instance, that microwave data is no longer getting sent out. I believe it’s either effective today or effective next Monday.

So that’s an immediate change that’s going into effect.

Fraser Cain: And then I think a thing that’s, that’s quite sort of for both of us is all the education outreach and that’s just zeroed.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, it’s zeroed. And one of the more fascinating places that this is getting reflected is in how they’re changing communications. One of the things that research into Twitter has found is if any one Twitter account posts too much like a crazy person with post, post, post, post, people unfollow it.

And so agencies like NASA have taken advantage of this understanding to say, okay, we’re going to have a general account that only posts the most important things. And then we’re going to have all of these sub accounts that allow different missions to get their message across in really interesting ways. Many of us remember fondly the NASA Phoenix mission that basically live tweeted its own death of cold on the surface of Mars.

And these kinds of opportunities to give missions personality and style are only possible when you have mission by mission social media profiles.

Fraser Cain: That part makes me really sad because essentially before you had just the freedom of one small group to just run their own Twitter feed and just use it however they wanted to communicate their stuff. And so now those are all being shut down and everything is being centralized and reviewed in a central authority that is then going to allow stuff to come out of the main NASA feed and a few smaller fees. But you’re going from what was dozens, if not hundreds of separate Twitter feeds into something.

And I think like absolutely, if you put me in charge of managing NASA’s Twitter feeds, I would go through and go, there’s a lot of dead feeds here. People aren’t updating them. Let’s have a policy for this.

But I think if you have a small group that’s working on a mission and they want to talk to the public, they should just be able to do it, right? Because outreach and so on. So anyway, we’re seeing that.

There’s just a lot of funds that NASA spends in making educational material available, interacting with universities, doing a lot of outreach about the work that they’re doing. And I think that brand that we experience of NASA with really cool websites and really amazing real-time data that you can go and access and you can sort of feel like you’re a part of the mission. A lot of that stuff will, you know, there are people at NASA whose only job it is, is to make that stuff all go and work and make people feel enthusiastic.

And that is all getting, you know, the budget is being turned to zero.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And it’s more than just the budget issue. So one of the things NASA and the National Science Foundation have been very good at is recognizing that increased science education is good for the entire world. The more people we have engaged in learning and doing science, the more we can advance civilization.

And there are a lot of places in the United States, because education funds are tied to property taxes, where the schools just don’t have equal opportunity. And NASA and the National Science Foundation prioritized going into these disadvantaged communities and doing educational experiences. And that is now considered DEI, and it is strictly forbidden.

So you have not only massive budget cuts taking place, but you also have this situation where if the school you are serving is minority, majority school, so mostly not white people. If you have a school system that is majority English as a second language, if you have a school system that is majority free school lunches, you’re not allowed to specifically fund them. And so I got an email from USRA, which is one of the major granting bodies for massive NASA and National Science Foundation projects.

And it was letting us all know that REACH, which was a teacher training program, an educational materials development program, was gone.

Fraser Cain Yeah. And there’s a lot of material that’s done for teachers, so that when a teacher is going to be teaching about science, space exploration, astronomy in their classroom, there are all of these resources that they can rely on from NASA to be able to do that part. And, you know, the hope is that you’re going to be able to reach young people and in the schools and get them inspired and excited about and understand the kinds of options, career options that are there for them.

And so all of these resources are just going away. Um, not to mention a lot, you know, again, we don’t really know that the, the, we don’t really know what the implications are going to be for our job as communicators of this stuff. I’ve felt a sort of a silence in the feeds.

So, you know, every day I go through all of the RSS feeds from all the different agencies. NASA wasn’t at the American Astronomical Society meeting this year, this, you know, a month ago. And so there was a fraction of the news that was coming out of the AAS.

I’m not seeing a lot of press releases coming out of NASA anymore. So I’m having to go back to first principles. I’m going to, you know, uh, archive and journals and things like that and finding this, this research, but you can feel that this communication of, of interesting information is as just this tap has, has turned down to a fraction of, of what it was.

All right. We are way over time budget on this one, but who cares? Like we’re just going to roll until this one ends.

Um, all right. So let’s talk about Artemis because this one is, is, this is not surprising to me.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: And yet, you know, still kind of feels a little weird and sad.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so I, I’m going to open this up a little bit broader last week for escape velocity space news. I, I did a deep dive, uh, into Starship after realizing Starship and Rubin Observatory have both been in the works the same amount of time, both of them were supposed to launch in 2019. And it was just an interesting side by side.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And one of the things I realized was Starship has already spent half as much money on its development as SLS. And so while the future projected per mission costs will be significantly less, the development costs aren’t proving to be anticipated. And comparing it instead to new Glenn, we have new Glenn is estimated to be about 68 million per launch currently.

And Starship is at a hundred million per launch currently. And Starship has been blown up 10 times on nine launch attempts. And when the number of blown up vehicles exceeds the number of launch attempts, I have concerns.

Um, so Artemis is trying to move forward where it has made these contractual agreements that are fixed fees. So the company’s trying to fulfill these, these budgets are not getting all the money they need to do their innovation where Starship is, it was, it was supposed to have orbital in 2019. We still haven’t hit orbital.

It was supposed to have already landed crew in 2024. It’s now estimated that between four, instead of the between four and six refueling missions that were originally planned, it’s instead going to take greater than 20. And I need to give a shout out to Dustin over at smarter every day.

Cause he was the first person I found to point this out. And it has now been confirmed with NASA numbers.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Dustin Sandler did a great job of that amazing video. All right.

But, but let’s, let’s talk about like specifically like with Artemis. So a couple things are going to happen. First, the lunar gateway is going to be canceled, even though a lot of the modules are already complete.

Um, we’ve got Artemis two, which is due for launch very soon now. And then we’re going to have Artemis three, which is going to bring the people back to the surface of the moon. And then, and then the Artemis mission is essentially going to be canceled.

The, or at least the, the SLS and the Orion capsule are going to be canceled. And then whatever the future holds will depend on what’s possible with the current space fleet. And, you know, you’re looking at potentially Starship if it, if it functions, uh, or some combination of Falcon heavy or new Glenn, uh, or, you know, and then current landers, you know, obviously Starship can be a lander.

Uh, blue origin has their lander mark too. Yeah. Plus there are the various smaller landers and various science platforms, you know, Firefly, uh, intuitive machines, so on.

So I think that the SLS is done and, you know, we, in theory, Artemis three will be an SLS launches with an Orion on top. It’s going to dock with a Starship that’s already proven that it can land safely on the surface of the moon. Uh, but even that, I mean, we’re seeing the, the launch delays happening with, with Starship, with the various tests.

So, you know, I think that right now is all up in the air. We don’t know how that’s going to play out, but we do know that the SLS is over and the lunar gateway is, is a goner.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, I, I am honestly not as 100% on SLS being gone for the very simple reason that Alabama can really lobby well, right. And between Alabama, Texas, and Florida really wanting to keep it alive. Um, Texas is trying to steal the space shuttle from the Smithsonian.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so, you know, there’s weird stuff going, right.

Fraser Cain: If there is going to be a battle for the budget, it could very well end up being, you know, starting or continuing with the SLS, since we might see the SLS and the Orion continue on, especially if Starship continues to have challenges in getting into orbit and demonstrating orbital refueling and getting to the moon and a landing on the moon. Like if that, if that pushes out, then people are going to go like, what about the moon? And, and, and so the, who knows, I think you’re exactly right.

That I, that I think what the budget is called for and what will actually happen is one of the places where we could see a lot of action. Now let’s talk about a couple of things that are increasing because there has been an interest in increasing, uh, NASA’s exploration of Mars with people.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. So currently, and, and I actually was talking with the program advisor three weeks ago, uh, one of my program officers and our advisor program officers at NASA, um, about things that are still getting funded and science supports human exploration and, uh, rovers, landing systems on moon Mars, as well as, uh, being optimized for machine learning and AI solutions are things that they are interested in funding.

The current thinking is twofold. Uh, on one side, we have people arguing, you need to go to the moon before you go to Mars. On the other side, you have people arguing, let’s just go straight to Mars.

Um, that’s, that’s an argument for the ages ranks right up there with Linux versus windows versus Mac. It’s a religious debate at this point. We are not getting into that.

Fraser Cain: We settled it here on this channel already. So I feel, you know, that’s, that’s already been decided. Everyone’s just going to have to decide if they’re going to be able to, to get up to speed with, with how we feel about this.

Um, yeah, so we, so I think there was an increase in development in spacesuits that could go to Mars, some interested in some other platforms technology. Um, but at the same time, we’re seeing cancellation of advanced propulsion techniques like, um, like nuclear, uh, fission, your propulsion is going away.

Dr. Pamela Gay: That is no longer an idea that’s getting canceled.

Fraser Cain: So a lot of the interesting propulsion ideas that might take you to the mock to Mars are all getting canceled. So I want to sort of stop this part of the conversation. And you did a little bit more research just to talk about how the world’s space agencies are sort of compared to NASA and what we might see as they respond.

So can you give us a sense of, of just like what other people are, you know, how does the rest of, cause I think, you know, a lot of people feel like, why is this NASA’s job to do all this? They’re just, the United States is just one country. What’s Canada doing about this?

What’s China doing about this? What’s, what’s Europe doing about this? So what, what are the other nations doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so I, I love Canada. I’ve worked with you for, for longer than I’ve known my husband and my husband is also Canadian. And somehow you both went to university together and didn’t know each other.

Fraser Cain: We were in the same engineering, like literally the same engineering program at UBC and didn’t know each other.

Dr. Pamela Gay: The morning they discovered this was absolutely hilarious. One of, one of my favorite breakfast conversations. Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Like, where’d you go to school? I was like, what, what, what year?

1980, you know, what? 1999. Me too.

What program? Engineering. Wait a minute.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. It was, it was a wonderful morning. I, I am entirely a fan of Canada.

But, but one of the things Canada doesn’t have is a giant budget. Your GDP in 2025 was 2.23 trillion compared to America’s 30.51 trillion. So a, a very solid coming in, still in the top 10 and Canada’s space agency, CSA has a budget of 0.612 billion, 612 million. Call it 612 million.

Fraser Cain: That sounds better than 0.6 billion.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It does, but everyone else has numbers in billions. So I turned you into a decimal billion.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And so one of the things that we’ve been hearing is Canada is recruiting American scientists. True statement. And Japan is recruiting American scientists and students of the world.

True fact. France, France is going overboard, attracting American scientists, but they’re looking to collect our best and brightest in the few to few tens of people. And the problem is the United States has the largest GDP in the world.

We’re at 30.51 trillion. The next closest nation is China at 19.23. Impressive can actually compete. The next closest is Germany with 4.74 trillion. And so when you start looking at this level of difference in gross domestic product, the next set of numbers I’m going to give you totally makes sense. So the European space agency had a total budget converted from euros to US dollars today of 9.03 billion. So their total budget and NASA’s budget cuts are the same order of magnitude.

So the European space agency would have to double their budget, more than double their budget to compensate for what we’re cutting here in the United States. JAXA is at 1 billion. ISRO is at 1.5 billion. The budget for all these partners, JAXA, ESA, ISRO, and CSA, the total budget for all those partners is 12.2 billion.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So they’d have to increase their combined budget by 50%, increase it so it would need to be 150% of what it currently is to compensate for cuts. And that’s just not something that can happen. The one place where we can see things compensate is in China, where their civilian budget in 24, which was the most recent I could find, the civilian budget for space was 14.15 billion. And they have a significantly larger amount in defense. And so we’re actually in this situation where when we were starting in this field, we were seeing Chinese scientists coming to America. I went to university with a bunch of Chinese scientists.

And now we’re seeing American scientists born and raised getting recruited to go to Peking University and other institutes to do science there. And I had someone ask me yesterday if we’re going to see American scientists, rocket scientists in particular, get recruited by Germany in a reciprocation of what happened post-World War II. And that’s entirely possible.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, of course.

Dr. Pamela Gay: ESA has major facilities in Garching, Germany, and currently has 300 job openings.

Fraser Cain: Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Look at their website. Apply.

Fraser Cain: All right. I think we need to wrap this up. I think it’ll be interesting.

Probably when we come out the other side of summer, two months from now, a lot of these unknowns will have been solved. And what I would like to do, hopefully, is that we can give a less vibes-based episode and a more now just hit retrospect what happened. At that point, the big beautiful bill should be passed.

And then NASA and the various agencies across the US will have figured out which things are getting cut. And we will be able to follow on. But I think, and this is back to what the intro that I gave at the beginning, which is that we try to maintain a neutral stance here.

But the thing that we all agree on is space and science are important, that education is important, that these are the kinds of things. So if you’re an American and these changes are concerning to you, then our recommendation is to have a chat with all of your local representatives at every level and hash it out with them. And that if you have better recommendations, if you want things to go in a different direction, it’s up to you to have these conversations.

And now is the chance to do it before this is all locked in and it’s just the way as it always was and everything just moves on. So this is your chance to take action for the kind of world, the kind of universe that you want to live in. Pamela, thank you.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Thank you, Fraser.

Fraser Cain: Do you have some patrons?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I do. So this week, I would like to thank Alan Gross, Andrew Allen, Antasaur, AstroSets, Bebop, Apocalypse, Bob Zatzky, Brett Moorman, Bruce Amazine, Smansky, Cooper, David, David Rossetta, Dr. Whoa, Ed, Fairchild, just as it sounds, Frederick Salvo, Galactic President, Scooper Star, McScoopsalot, Glenn McDavid, Greg Vylde, Jay, Alex Anderson, Jarvis Earl, Jeff Hoinworter, Jim Schouler, Joanne Mulvey, John Fayes, J.P. Sullivan, Katie Byrne, Kim Barron, Kinsaya Panfenko, Les Howard, Mark Phillips, Matt Rucker, MHW1961, Super Symmetrical, Michael Wichman, Mike Heisey, Noah Albertson, Paul D.

Disney, Peter, Rajev, Akari, Robbie the dog with a dot, Ron Thorson, Sachi Takaba, Scott Bieber, Sergei Monolov, Stephen Veidt, Taz Talley, The Brain, Tiffany Rogers, Tricor, and Will Field. Thank you all so much. And we will see you on Patreon all summer.

Fraser Cain: Thanks, everybody, for another wonderful season. Now, as I mentioned, we’ve mentioned, you know, we’re doing a lot of work. In fact, we probably get our best work done during the summer hiatus because we have time to think.

And so, you know, we’re both going to be producing a lot of content over the summer, as well as, you know, new stuff coming from all of our various small projects and so on. So stay tuned for all of that. But thank you, everybody, for your ongoing support.

Thanks for everyone who works on this show, all of the editors, both video and audio and production that helps make this happen. We couldn’t do this without you. Thanks to the moderators who show up in the channel every week and help wrangle and keep things under control.

Thanks to everybody who watches us live and everybody who listens to this podcast on a weekly basis and has done so for, you know, the 18 years, the age of a child who could now drink alcohol in Quebec, in Canada. So thank you, everyone. And we will be back in two months for season 19.

See you then.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Bye everyone.

Live Show

The post #762: Science in Crisis – NASA’s New Budget appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

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