Veterans think Congress may swat cuts again, but uncertainty could still do lasting damage
EXCLUSIVE As NASA's Artemis II mission headed for the Moon, the Trump administration unveiled another attempt to cut the agency's science budget. Yet some insiders, perhaps buoyed by déjà vu and a little post-traumatic resilience, are less alarmed than you might expect.
"They feel they have a stable future," a person familiar with the matter told The Register. "However, if you look beyond that – because this is the interesting thing – NASA is a bit worried. It doesn't quite know what's going on."
"The damn stupid thing is this is the way America behaves," our source said. "It does this sort of thing pretty much every year - obviously, more savagely than ever before."
The mood in the corridors is more weary than panicked. "They are ridiculously relaxed, because they think: last time this happened, the Senate threw it out. They'll throw it out again. There's a lot of bipartisan support for space activities, which may be correct, but it's a dangerous way to live."
It is, particularly when future generations of engineers and scientists might now reasonably wonder if a career with the space agency is worth the instability.
"People are going to look very carefully at their careers... People will say, 'Well, look, being in a NASA lab was once great, but how's the funding going to go in the future?'"
One of our sources reckoned that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is "as stable as you can be," with staff able to get on with their work for now - but the longer term picture is murkier. "What is the future? Where's the future going? How's it going to affect people?"
The Planetary Society's Science Editor, Asa Stahl, estimates there could be as many as 82 NASA missions at risk under the latest proposal, despite Congress firmly rejecting last year's attempt to cut the agency's science budget.
Among those potentially on the chopping block is a reversal of NASA's commitment to the European Space Agency's Rosalind Franklin ExoMars Rover, the termination of existing missions such as New Horizons - which famously conducted a flyby of Pluto - and the cancellation of upcoming projects such as the DAVINCI Venus probe.
As before, lawmakers retain the power to restore funding, and many engineers are banking on exactly that. But the cycle itself is the problem. NASA operates on timescales measured in decades (the Voyager spacecraft launched nearly half a century ago).
Yet given the timescales involved in NASA's missions, repeated short-term budget uncertainty, however it resolves, is a corrosive way to run a space programme. ®