“It’s just very sad, and it’s a little useless,” says Rader. “And I think they will look at him in a couple of years, perhaps less, and they will go, ‘Oh my God, what have we done?'”
None I spoke for this piece thinks that NASA is literally leaving. First, the congress is rejecting the changes, although the administration seems determined to dig them in one way or another. Instead, what they imagine is a kind of rump agency. “The feeling I had was, it was a very real possibility that NASA could be reduced to something just a little in the name,” says Rader. “Almost perhaps a version of the FAA (the federal aviation administration), but for the space.”
What is underestimated is not only NASA’s technical ability to carry out missions, even if it would be quite serious. They are America’s ability – and the world – ability to wonder, believe, know. “It is almost like a decrease in our vision and ambition to say that we are literally, I mean, again, not in a figurative sense, literally, closing our eyes to the cosmos and turning us in the inside,” says Casey Dreier, head of space policy at the non -profit planetary society. “It’s like witnessing a death of an ideal.”
That death is already in progress. About 4,000 NASA staff members are scheduled to leave the agency this year, both through what the Trump administration calls “deferred resignation” – a kind of delayed and voluntary dismissal – or what NASA is marking a “normal acting”, which includes people like Rader who are starting alone. This represents about a quarter of the total staff of the agency and includes over 2,000 senior leaders, according to a relationship in politician.
(In a declaration, Cheryl Warner, head of NASA news, said that security “remains an absolute priority for our agency as we balance the need to become an slender and efficient organization and work to ensure that we remain fully able to pursue an gold era of exploration and innovation, also on the moon and on Mars.”)
In the meantime, the administration has proposed a 2026 NASA budget that would have reduced the overall expenditure of the agencies of 24 % and scientific expenditure specifically for almost half. “This is the largest one year cut as a percentage ever proposed to NASA,” says Dreier. “It would seem the overall resources of NASA, adapted to inflation, up to a level not seen before that the first humans entered space in 1961”.
Trump’s proposal It projects a frozen NASA budget until at least 2030 even if the administration has published a new “golden age of innovation and exploration”. To close, NASA was without a full -time administrator, the maximum official of the agency since January. Sean Duffy, the transport secretary and former champion Lumberjack e Real world Member of the cast, he played the double duty in the role on a temporary basis since July.
Much has been written on what the cuts to the budget proposed and the job losses will do to NASA. To begin with, they would mean the end of 41 planned or current missions, according to planetary society. These include a bold plan and along Loway to collect pristine soil samples on Mars and bring them back to Earth, a probe that explores the Solar System Oltre Pluto and a Lader set to capture and study a giant asteroid that will barely miss the Earth in 2029. It would also force NASA to obtain essentially the business of the monitoring of climate change.
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