Transcription
[Music] Since the time of Voyager 1 and 2, and especially since the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, we have seen this type of imagery from NASA like clockwork, to the point where we take all of it for granted. These magnificent visuals of the universe around us and all of the scientific knowledge that goes with it.
And for the first time, at least in my lifetime, and probably in the lifetimes of most of the people viewing this video, we are on the brink of losing the vast majority of all of this because of deep and random cuts to NASA's budget that are currently putting virtually every scientific project that NASA has on its docket at risk.
At this time, NASA has the unenviable task of trying to figure out which invaluable scientific program must be cut, which programs that they've already planned and spent millions of dollars on that need to be wiped out with nothing having been gained, and which gets to remain in an environment with far less support, far fewer talented staff members, and far more scientific projects than NASA had back in 1961, which is the last time NASA's budgetary support was so absurdly meager.
And what is the government hoping to gain from all of this? Well, ostensibly, to control wasteful government spending at a time when the budget is more out of control and in deficit than it ever has been in the past. That's certainly a worthwhile goal. But does cutting NASA's budget this drastically actually help to achieve this goal? Well, the answer to that question is absolutely not. And we're going to go over all the details of how horribly NASA is getting eviscerated by the so-called big beautiful bill and what you can do to try to save NASA.
Good afternoon, spaceflight enthusiasts, and welcome to another angry bulletin. Once again, to let you know I have a cooling tower blowing directly on me at the moment, so that's probably going to interfere with the audio a bit. The heat wave is still here in southern England. And there's no central air in any of these buildings or flats, so you're pretty much dealing with the same temperature inside as outside, sometimes even worse. But let's just go ahead and proceed with the episode and talk politics—something that I really do my best to avoid on this channel.
Not necessarily because I don't have opinions on these matters. You wouldn't believe the number of topics that I avoid talking about on this channel. I have very strong opinions when it comes to immigration, or abortion, or military spending, or our foreign policy. I actually have very strong opinions on all of this stuff, and I do my best to not talk about any of that stuff on this channel because that doesn't have anything to do with space. But one thing that absolutely has something to do with space is the US government's budget decisions when it comes to NASA.
And what's happened, and I'm sure most of you are aware of this right now, is utterly cataclysmic for the future of NASA. This is the biggest budget cut that NASA has ever experienced—well, at least since 1961. In other words, prior to the time that John F. Kennedy started talking about the moon, started talking about a necessity to increase NASA spending in order to get us to the moon. Way, way before I was born and before most of you guys were probably born as well. That's how bad NASA spending is going to be after the passage of the so-called big beautiful bill.
Now, there have been some changes implemented by the Senate, mostly led by Senator Cruz, to try to turn back some of these cuts, but virtually all of the relief that NASA may get is coming in regards to things that are going to directly benefit Senator Cruz's constituency. That is to say, anything that supports space flight or space-related industries in Texas. This of course includes SLS in a very big way and also the lunar gateway, the International Space Station, and the thousands of people who are engaged and employed in keeping these programs going.
But if we want to talk about science—in other words, we want to talk about things like the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, the orbiters that we have around Mars and all of the other interplanetary probes and other projects designed to increase our knowledge of the universe and the solar system—well, they are going to take a massive, massive blow. As a matter of fact, in many respects, they already have because NASA has seen the writing on the wall. They've laid a lot of people off. And everything that NASA used to be known for is about to go the way of the dinosaur.
At this point, NASA is essentially a space force-lite, spaceflight kind of organization because the space force has received a massive budgetary increase in this bill. So really all NASA is doing is space flight, but just not quite as well as the military. Although they are focused a lot more on human space flight than the space force is. And in my view, that is absolutely ridiculous and devastating to the future of not only the United States space program, but also to the world at large because NASA's scientific contributions have done so much for human civilization over the last 60, 70 years. So many scientific breakthroughs. So many discoveries that NASA has made have directly benefited human civilization, and so much of that is about to come to a halt.
So instead of just going on about vagaries here, I want to go ahead and address the specifics. And the specifics were provided by an analysis done by the Planetary Society, an organization that I haven't always agreed with. I don't always like their spokespeople, etc. But they are the biggest space advocates, the biggest space lobbyists in Washington right now. And I have to say that I agree with virtually everything that they put in this analysis. And once we go ahead and cover all of this, I'm going to talk about a new initiative that I have and an exciting new piece of merchandise that will allow you to make a direct contribution, even if you're not an American, a direct contribution to our efforts to save NASA.
[Music] The article in question was written by Casey Drier, the chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, and it's entitled "NASA's 2026 budget in brief: unprecedented, unstrategic, and wasteful." Quote, "The full details of the president's fiscal year 2026 budget request for NASA were released in the late afternoon on Friday, May the 30th, so a little over a month ago. To date, NASA has held no press conferences or public briefings regarding the dramatic changes included in the budget request. There have been a limited number of prefuncter briefings to congressional committees and industry stakeholders, apparently with little detail beyond what has already been released publicly. The Planetary Society has spent the past two weeks closely reading this budget request, analyzing its numbers, and speaking with academics, industry representatives, and congressional staff. We have come to the conclusion that the fiscal year 2026 budget is a deeply flawed document formulated without the input of NASA or the stakeholders in the space community that radically pivots the direction of the AY's human space flight program, while indiscriminately applying draconian cuts to science, aeronautics, STEM outreach, and space technology. It breaks the current consensus around Artemis, leaving the future of the lunar program relatively undefined after Artemis 3, proposing instead to spend billions of dollars on a rapid humans to Mars effort that is ill-defined at best. It proposes to cut infrastructure, science, and technology programs aligned with their stated goals while also proposing large investments in duplicative commercial capabilities that are of questionable feasibility. Ultimately, we believe this budget can be summed up in three words: unprecedented, unstrategic, and wasteful. This budget, if enacted, would not only abandon decades of American leadership in space science and exploration, but would also sabotage its own stated ambitions, setting the nation's space program on a path to political polarization, economic uncertainty, and surrender of the final frontier."
First of all, let's talk about the unprecedented part of the budget. Let's be clear about the scale of this proposal. The request calls for a 25% cut to NASA's entire budget in a single year, the largest single-year cut ever proposed by any White House for the agency. The cut eclipses even the post-Apollo slowdowns. When adjusted for inflation, this budget would shrink NASA's buying power to a level not seen since fiscal year 1961, which of course began in July of 1960, before the United States had even put a single human in space, before anyone that is had gone to space. The proposal similarly decimates NASA's workforce, the institutional knowledge and human capital that makes American leadership in space possible. It proposes severe layoffs at every NASA center, ranging from 20% to nearly 50% at the Goddard Space Flight Center. No center is spared. The resulting civil servant workforce would be at its smallest since fiscal year 1960. This will have real-world impacts as each NASA civil servant enables an average of 16 jobs in the overall space economy, and government spending has buoyed almost all of the growth in the space economy in recent years.
By the way, this includes SpaceX. If it wasn't for NASA, SpaceX would have gone bankrupt years ago. Because it was only after the fourth test flight of Falcon 1, which by the way exhausted virtually all of the money that Elon Musk had left, that NASA decided that SpaceX was worth investing in, and they plugged millions and millions of dollars into this organization in order to cut down their own launch costs, which proved to be spectacularly successful. But now NASA no longer has the budget to invest in the next SpaceX. Instead, you're going to have a new monopoly taking over the spaceflight industry, even worse than it was before, because there's no money to invest in new competition.
But let me continue with the article. Quote, "The irony is that these historic cuts are being proposed not as America winds down a lunar exploration program, but as the nation spins one up and begins the much more demanding task of sending humans to Mars. To ask NASA to undertake some of the most difficult engineering projects in world history while simultaneously slashing its resources and workforce to pre-human spaceflight levels is not just ambitious. It is fantasy divorced from the realities of programmatic execution, economic conditions, or fiscal requirements. It sets up the agency and the nation's space ambitions for failure."
Now, let's talk about unstrategic. A sound space policy is built on a strategy that aligns resources with national priorities and builds an enduring coalition to ensure its continuation into the future. This budget does the opposite. The fiscal year 2026 budget proposal is apparently the product of a "budget first" policy, driven by the Office of Management and Budget with little if any meaningful consultation with NASA. Numbers were chosen arbitrarily, provided to the space agency with the agency staff left to assemble a program within those limits. A notable parallel is the OMB's arbitrary cap on the space shuttle development costs, which forced NASA to adopt a compromised design that fell short of full usability, ultimately costing the nation billions more in operational cost. Did you ever hear that the space shuttle was not what it was supposed to be because of budgetary shortfalls? Well, it was, but that's a topic for another video. This budget is far more capricious, taking little if any input from NASA itself. The numbers bear a suspicious resemblance to an ideological counterproposal made years ago by the current OMB director, Russ Vought, which called for a 50% cut to NASA science. This budget proposes a 47% cut. This is not the outcome of a considered policy process. This budget request is the imposition of a predetermined number, not an expression of the president's priorities, but those of the OMB director's. This lack of program strategy will directly undermine its own stated goals of sending humans to Mars by creating political division and enmity. In its rush to pivot, it divests from the very technologies and infrastructure essential to any future Martian expedition. It cancels the production of plutonium-238, the nuclear power source required for long-duration missions in the outer solar system and used on surface missions for both power and heat. It proposes cancelling active Mars telecommunications orbiters like Maven and Mars Odyssey, which provide vital telecommunications data relay for surface assets in favor of a vague commercial replacement that does not exist and may not materialize for years. In so doing, it puts primary reliance of the remaining Mars rovers on the ESA Trace Gas Orbiter, a surprising choice given that this budget proposes to abandon nearly a dozen joint programs with the Europeans. And by the way, it also places an enormous amount of responsibility on the Goonhilly facility in Cornwall, which provides a lot of the communications between the European Mars orbiters and NASA. But let's just go ahead and continue. This proposal functionally seeds American leadership in space science to our geopolitical rivals. It pulls back from precisely the areas where China has announced that it is moving forward: a Mars sample return mission, next-generation space telescopes, and exploration of Venus and the outer solar system. By summarily cancelling more than 40 active and future US science missions, including our contributions to joint projects with the European Space Agency, such as the Rosalind Franklin rover and the EnVision Venus Orbiter, we are not only abandoning the cause of exploration but also breaking faith with key international allies. The budget is a roadmap for how to abdicate leadership in the 21st century. China will be more than happy to pick up the mantle. Furthermore, by proposing such divisive and destructive cuts, it sabotages its own long-term political goals. Instead of building consensus, the budget destroys it by abandoning allies and commercial partnerships at the moon, the wholesale destruction of key science, aeronautics, technology, and outreach activities.
And finally, the wasteful part of the bill. Ultimately, the most tragic outcome of this budget is the sheer waste it would generate. It is wasteful of taxpayers' investment, of scientific progress, and of political capital. Consider the Artemis program. For the first time in American history, a human return to the moon program survived a presidential transition. This was not by accident. It was the result of a deliberate bipartisan effort by the first Trump administration to build a broad coalition of support. This budget demolishes that consensus by abruptly cancelling Gateway, the SLS, and Orion programs after Artemis 3 and pivoting aggressively to Mars. It breaks that coalition that made Artemis politically durable. In its place, it offers an ill-defined Mars program with no established base of support. We at the Planetary Society have long championed a moon-to-Mars approach, but this is not it. This is a "break the moon for Mars" approach that risks turning Mars exploration into a partisan activity, ensuring its long-term failure. It also creates opposition amongst members of the president's own party by cancelling those major projects along with major cuts to the ISS. Senator Ted Cruz has already proposed a full rejection of the human space flight cuts and the budget reconciliation bill currently moving through Congress. The budget is also profoundly wasteful of scientific investment. It calls for the immediate cancellation of at least 19 active science missions that are performing well and returning valuable data. Missions proposed for cancellation include Juno and Jupiter. You believe that? They want to shut down Juno. In addition to that, Maven and Mars, both rated excellent scientific value to the US taxpayer by an independent senior review. And New Horizons, another spectacular probe. So much for that, it's in the Kuiper belt, finding new discoveries, but no more. And the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Osiris-REx, a repurposed spacecraft to perform reconnaissance of the asteroid Bennu. That is a really important one, but no way. So much for that. And the only American projects currently planned, by the way, for the Europa flyby, also cancelled. A conservative estimate of the value lost to taxpayers of just operating missions cancelled in the request totals more than $12 billion. The budget request also cancels planned missions like Veritas and Da Vinci, our first return to Venus in more than 30 years, before they can even launch. Support for VIPER, the fully built rover destined to hunt for water ice deposits at the lunar south pole, is shelved. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, though not cancelled outright as feared, has its funding ratcheted back to less than half of the planned amount, lowering the project reserves to levels far below the recommended levels, functionally demanding the project will walk an engineering tightrope in its final year of its assembly. If anything goes wrong, the project will miss its launch date and ultimately cost far more than if its reserves had been available at the time they were needed. Planning for the Habitable Worlds Observatory is lowered to nearly zero. And as mentioned, with the halting of nuclear fuel production, the budget request ends a key infrastructure capability painstakingly restored over the course of the past 20 years. The frantic and arbitrary nature of this proposal will inevitably create further waste through pure incoherence. You cannot simply fire a third of your workforce, cancel dozens of projects, and expect to pivot seamlessly to the most complex mission humanity has ever attempted. The loss of key personnel, the disruption to the space economy, and the collapse of institutional knowledge will create massive long-term inefficiencies that will cost the taxpayer far more in the long run. The budget request is a self-defeating document. It is a budget without a clear, coherent plan. It undermines its own goals, abandons American leadership, squanders decades of national investment, and destroys the political consensus needed for any great undertaking.
Clearly, it's time for space enthusiasts everywhere to unite and do something about this. You can call your congressman or your senator, contact the White House, or I have my own initiative going forward, which we're going to find about in just a moment.
So once again, I know many of you disagree with everything that I've said in this episode, that you think that NASA is this organization that needs to go the way of the dinosaur and that the private space industry needs to take over, that NASA is this bloated, inefficient organization that just doesn't work for advancing 21st-century space flight. But the thing of it is, when it comes to space science especially and all of the incredible things that NASA does in that particular field, there's just no incentive whatsoever for the private industry to do anything about that. Every now and then you get some sort of idealistic project, such as, for example, searching for life on Venus that Rocket Lab is undertaken because Peter Beck wants to get his name in the history books as the person responsible for discovering life on another planet—for the first time definitively discovering life on another planet. All that having been said though, very, very few private space organizations are going to have any reason to uncover the amazing things about space science, especially if we're talking about interstellar space science or intergalactic space science. So many incredible things that things like the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble, those sorts of things have uncovered over the last half-century and even longer. All of that is going to be gone or seriously devastated as a result of these budgetary changes.
And as I've said a number of times before, if this was necessary because we had to get the budget deficit under control, then I would understand; sure, then we need a 25% cut in every government project in every government department across the board if we're really trying to get the deficit under control. But instead, we have a massive budgetary increase, actually, in the big beautiful bill for the military and also for the US Space Force and especially for immigration and ICE agents, that sort of thing, and tracking down illegal immigrants and tossing them out of the country. And granted, you may think that that's the most important thing, the most important problem facing the United States, but in my opinion, the deficit is more important than illegal immigration. And yet, that department is receiving a massive budgetary increase. If the objective is to really reduce the deficit, then the cuts have to be universal. Regardless of whether it's a pet project to the administration in charge or not, they still need to cut it. And the fact of the matter is they aren't. They're only cutting the parts of the government that they don't like and providing massive budgetary increases to the departments that they do like, just like every other administration that came before them. And once again, I want to be 100% clear here. If the Democrats had the opportunity, they would do exactly the same thing. Every administration does this. They talk about the deficit as if it's the worst thing in the world when they're not in power. And then once these political parties get into power, they don't seem to care about the deficit anymore. And they start spending on their pet projects while cutting others. It's just a universal behavior across the board. It doesn't seem that any political party is truly interested in reducing the deficit. So if you're not going to cut every department, if you're not really interested in reducing the deficit, then what is the point? What benefit is gutting NASA really going to do for the future of the United States? I say it will provide no benefit and a whole lot of harm.
If you agree with this, well, as I suggested at the beginning of this video, I've got some new merchandise, and it is amazing. Sunline created this design: "NASA budget cuts suck," and the Perseverance rover, the Curiosity Rover, they're both pretty much identical; they're holding up their little donation cup here. I just love this design. It is so cool. These garments are very cool. So you can
Express your opinion about these budget cuts publicly by wearing one of these garments.
And in addition to that, with every purchase, I will make a donation, a tax-deductible donation, tax-deductible for you, to the Planetary Society; as I said, the major organization in the United States that advocates for space and lobbies for space in Washington.
And if you would like your entire purchase price—in other words, all the money I make off of the item—if you want all of that to go to the Planetary Society, just send me an email when you make the purchase, and I will see to it that that happens. Otherwise, I will give at least 20% of my take directly to the Planetary Society, unless you tell me you want to give more.
Thank you very much for watching. Please don't forget to like and subscribe. Please don't forget about supporting the Australia trip. Let me tell you, you guys have been incredible lately. Thank you so much for your generosity there. And until next time, stay angry about space. [Music]