Trump's NASA Budget Guts Earth Science and Totally Eliminates Education
OMB Budget Blueprint Excerpt for NASA
“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is responsible for increasing understanding of the universe and our place in it, advancing America’s world-leading aerospace technology, inspiring the Nation, and opening the space frontier. The Budget increases cooperation with industry through the use of public-private partnerships, focuses the Nation’s efforts on deep space exploration rather than Earth-centric research, and develops technologies that would help achieve U.S. space goals and benefit the economy. The President’s 2018 Budget requests $19.1 billion for NASA, a 0.8 percent decrease from the 2017 annualized CR level, with targeted increases consistent with the President’s priorities.”
NASA budget would cut Earth science and education, Washington Post
“President Trump’s first federal budget seems to make good on his campaign promises to shift NASA’s focus away from Earth and toward space. But it doesn’t reveal where he thinks the agency should be headed — to Mars, the moon or elsewhere. The total cut to the Earth-science budget is $102 million, or 5 percent of the program’s annual budget, and it almost exclusively targets missions aimed at understanding climate change — the ocean monitoring program PACE; the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3; the Deep Space Climate Observatory; and the CLARREO Pathfinder, which measures heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Also on the chopping block: the entire NASA Education office, which runs camps and enrichment programs, provides internships and scholarships for young scientists, and oversees efforts to support women and underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, fields.”
Trump’s NASA budget preserves Mars mission, cuts Earth science, asteroid trip, education, USA Today
“Trump’s vision for NASA calls for some dramatic shifts from the priorities the space agency pursued under President Obama, according to a broad budget outline the White House released Thursday. Line-item details on the administration’s proposed spending plan for NASA and other executive branch agencies are expected in the coming weeks.”
Message From the Acting NASA Administrator: Fiscal Year 2018 Budget Request
“While more detailed budget information will be released in May, we have received a top line budget number for the agency as part of an overall government budget rollout of more than $19 billion. This is in line with our funding in recent years, and will enable us to effectively execute our core mission for the nation, even during these times of fiscal constraint. While the budget and appropriation process still has a long way to go, this budget enables us to continue our work with industry to enhance government capabilities, send humans deeper into space, continue our innovative aeronautics efforts and explore our universe.”
Keith’s note: NASA made out far better than other agencies. But the cuts to Earth science at NASA, NOAA and elsewhere clearly show a climate change denial trend. Equally as troubling are the cuts within agencies to education projects as well as to the education department itself. You do not need to worry about NASA Earth Science stuff being sent to NOAA since their cuts are even more extreme than NASA’s. Lightfoot makes no mention whatsoever of the cuts to Earth science – he just says that “some missions are not going to go forward”.
NASA’s Acting Administrator also seems to think it is OK to demolish NASA’s education office and that somehow NASA will make that function work elsewhere. No. There is a clear message being sent to government agencies and the White House and Congress will be watching to make sure that no education efforts are going on at NASA – just like they already make certain that NASA does not “advertise” its accomplishments to the American people.
But Robert Lightfoot wants you to think that this is all good news. NASA’s leaders no longer lead. They just roll over.
C’mon. Tell me this was a surprise.
All of you people who voted for 45 are getting what you asked for. Hope you’re happy.
Gee, I thought Congress had to pass the budget.
This is “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks”.
Whatever doesn’t stick will go away, and Congress will go along with it.
And just think, we have another 3 years of this.
How often have they done that lately? Oh, you mean a Continuing Resolution. Or several.
A CR may not be so bad. Projects like PACE and CLARREO might be spared.
If the Wfirst WFI instrument is kept in-house at Goddard. It would not only be cheaper, but a good chunk of PACE personnel should be picked up.
Well, they just did last week (as in passed an actual budget, not another CR): https://futurism.com/congre…
Should have qualified that: by the end of the fiscal year preceding the year of the budget.
What, because ARM (spit!) is dead? Or are you saying we need to spend hundreds of millions more on earth science that everyone will ignore and won’t do diddly squat for the environment because China is will cranking out ten new coal plants per year anyway?
China Aims to spend $300B thru 2020 on renewable energy creating 13M jobs.
Climate change will cost trillions. Better science will guide the economics. 100M is chump change to guide an issue since it will take ~100 years for the Earth to absorb all the carbon, 16% by the the US with significantly less population.
Visting an asteroid is a decades old stepping stone, but the excessively huge expendable rocket and capsule at 3.7B, up from 3B, had to have the boulder retrieved for them because ‘the rocket and capsule to Mars’ were unable to reach a simpler destination without ‘upgrades’. No fine print provided and there is always an escape hatch.
https://www.nytimes.com/201…
Ahem:
https://tinyurl.com/h68ys5m
https://tinyurl.com/jytf92c
Yep, I am happy. I don’t see what is really wrong. ARM is gone, that is good. Earth Science just got some cuts but wasn’t gutted. And it wasn’t quite the “sky is falling” as portrayed by
http://nasawatch.com/archiv…
“I don’t see what is really wrong” You are part of the problem
Nope, you are the problem with your extremely biased reporting.
And you just keep coming back again and again – and commenting, don’t you?
Somebody has to counter the bias, otherwise the bell curve will be skewed and some people might come away with the wrong impression.
Like you have no bias.
Nevertheless, he is correct on his point that the actual proposed cuts in the NASA budget are much less severe than much of the speculation has been predicting.
So, with ARM gone, where will the fully-funded SLS take astronauts?
We can orbit the Moon again! There might be some science controlling rovers from orbit, and (more importantly) building up some more health data on radiation effects outside Earth’s magnetosphere.
It’s not much, but you do what you can with your funding and your mandates. Maybe we could talk other countries into contributing to a lunar orbiting space station, say it’s a stopping point on the Journey to Mars.
Not much. Except that we haven’t sent humans around the Moon since 1972, and no other nation has even attempted it…
personally I rather they research radiation shielding.
“We can orbit the Moon again.” Ok, why would we want to do so? Controlling robotic rovers isn’t a good reason. The light time delay from Earth isn’t so bad, and from Earth, near-side locations have constant radio contact. That isn’t true for astronauts on lunar orbits. Studying radiation effects on people outside the Earth’s magnetosphere? Really? You think the best way to do that is using astronauts as guinea pigs? It might sound cruel, but why not actually fly guinea pigs instead of people? Or a combination of unmanned missions to measure the environment and ground-based experiments to determine the effects?
Stations on lunar orbits and international cooperation are interesting ideas, but SLS isn’t design or scheduled to support either. So I don’t understand your point about that.
The internet does a poor job of conveying the sarcasm in my first sentence. I don’t think it’s worth the cost, just what we’ll be doing if we keep SLS but have no other missions for it.
Very happy
I was surprised the cuts to Earth science weren’t worse. I was expecting NASA Earth science and NOAA to get similar cuts.
President Trump often surprises those who listen to his critics and not to him.
I wasn’t expecting worse based on listening to anyone. I was expecting it based on my own logic. NASA Earth science and NOAA do fairly similar work. Therefore I was expecting fairly similar cuts. The Trump administration either has something more complicated on their minds (which, to the best of my knowledge they have not mentioned) or they aren’t being entirely consistent.
Someone at the WH actually examined the roles of those two agencies? Big assumption.
Actually the cuts at NOAA were not to the observations but for the programs responding to climate change. This fits with his statements that he is lifting the government regulations and activities that are restraining the economy.
In terms of the various satellite program, I think it is not so much part of the attack on climate science as setting the stage to replace government weather monitoring systems with private ones. It fits well the pattern of cuts. The only real exception is cutting the camera on “Goresat” which Vice President Gore proposed not as a science instrument but as a way of increasing environmental awareness. Seen from that prospective it makes sense.
What am I supposed to be upset about? 0.8% upset I guess. NASA will be fine and in fact if the buzz is true, we will see sorely needed leadership to get us out of LEO. The climate isn’t going anywhere, NASA is not the last and only word in climate studies. however humanity has been going nowhere in LEO circles far far too long. We are 20 trillion in debt, that is an extremely serious national threat most can’t seem to understand, it has to be dealt with, we can’t play kick the can down the road anymore. Yet Trump barely touched NASA’s budget, when almost everything else is going to have to tighten belts. That speaks volumes that this admin supports NASA, and many were predicting huge cuts. Didn’t happen. I’m VERY happy with Trump right now.
This is only a budget proposal. To get the final appropriations bill passed, the Senate needs 60 votes, and I’m sure a fair amount will be restored.
Or more can be taken away ….
So a 5% reduction counts as “guts”?
Missions are disappearing.
Not many – and this area has grown a lot under Obama and after Congress weighs in, some may come back. Any cut is not good but as an opening gambit of what Trump must view as a negotiation, NASA is in a much better position than other agencies.
No different than the lack of Discovery class missions started during the last administration. If Insight is excluded, there will be a 10 year gap from Grail launch to the next Discovery mission, Lucy.
So its OK if one Administration cuts lots of missions but not another? Goofy logic.
“goofy logic”
I think you just discovered the most accurate and succinct definition of the word “politics” to date. Congrats
I’d say MSL/Curiosity was more to blame for that than Obama. The extra cost from that mission’s two-year launch delay was about the total cost of a Discovery mission.
Success of other missions also contributed. If (when, usually) a spacecraft is healthy at the end of its prime mission, and it’s been at least reasonably successful, it’s likely to get an extended mission. That money comes from somewhere, and it’s money that isn’t going into starting up new missions. That’s still a good investment, but it is a way too much success can be a mixed blessing.
A FIVE percent cut is NOT the end of the world or the Earth science program and Congress will weigh in and hopefully restore climate research; as for Education, the Office is eliminated but the education within the Science mission directorate is continued not zeroed out.
Actually, there is currently no education effort within SMD. SMD is specifically prohibited from engaging in formal education. They can do “outreach” which is quite different from formal education.
I remember when this came up a few years ago, after the NASA Administrator said something like, “NASA is not the Department of Education.” When we were trying to figure out what it meant for a project I was working on, we more-or-less agreed we were allowed to give the public information, as long as they didn’t learn anything from it.
Given the circumstances, and the current lack of a clear decision vis-a-vis NASA’s major direction (e.g., Moon? Mars? post-ISS?, etc.), an overall reduction of only 1% is a significant indication that NASA is still in the “mix” as a potential policy theme for the new Administration. (As was hinted at in the joint Address to Congress.)
A 5% reduction in Earth science is much more painful, but not catastrophic — except that it appears to be targeted on particular missions, rather than leaving how to take the cut to the discretion of the leadership within the Agency. For reference: the NASA Earth Science budget in FY 2009 was around $1.3B-$1.4B; and, the NASA Earth Science budget in FY 2016 was around $1.9B-$2.0B.
That’s an increase of slightly more than 40% over the course of previous Administration. If the program were given the latitude to deal with a 5% reduction with their own decisions, it would still be bad, but by no means a disaster.
Overall, things could be worse.
“Overall, things could be worse” is defeatist, though. If we care about NASA, science, or the future of the country/Earth, then we should be fighting these significant cuts, not rolling over and accepting them because, hey, it could have been worse.
I see this just as a transition budget until a new Space Council is formed under Vice President Pence to move NASA forward. As such it just got rid of the majors programs of the last Administration that don’t fit into NASA’s future.
Lots of debate below the line, but the top line number of 19B is encouraging (Imagine the conversation if it was 16.8 B and the controversial issues). I know there will be lots of debate about the specifics and controversy, but checking the comparable metrics with other agencies it could be so so much worse….. My view has been the agency needs to figure out what it can do with a basically flat budget and addressing efficiency and some tough decisions. Perhaps my last post…
The budget has good points folks are overlooking. It provides money for research on a quiet SST. It funds the Europa Clipper and increases funding for cybersecurity at NASA. The budget also talks about buying data from private satellite constellations and developing more public-private partnerships in space.
The full budget is here. NASA is on page 43.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/…
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Budget cut proposed for NASA Earth Science is not as bad as cuts to NOAA and EPA, but canceling four Earth Science missions right away is quite worrying. Acting NASA Administrator does not say he will fight to save those missions. When will the White House nominate the regular NASA Administrator?
Does anyone know if all these x% ups and downs are relative to the President’s FY17 proposal, what the House passed or what the Senate passed? (I think we’re still under a continuing resolution, but it’s a bad sign that I’m not sure…)
Also, while I’m asking questions, does anyone know if DSCOVR is zeroed out, or if that’s just the camera? It was resurrected as a solar wind monitor which happened to have a camera. Cutting an Earth-observing camera, especially one associated with Gore, is in keeping with the other missions affected. But axing a solar wind monitor isn’t (assuming consistency and attention to details, which may be a poor assumption.)
From what I read this budget is just shutting down Goresat’s camera.
In the press reports, I’ve heard both. DSCOVR is off entirely by some accounts, and that just the camera is off according to others. I was hoping to hear from someone who had actually read the budget document itself. I was being lazy, and I guess I should do that myself.
Yes, that is a good idea. I posted the link below but here it is again.
https://disq.us/url?url=htt…
The exact wording on DSCOVR is on pages 43-44.
“The Budget terminates four Earth science missions (PACE, OCO-3, DSCOVR Earth-viewing instruments, and CLARREO Pathfinder) and reduces funding for Earth science research grants.”
Given that the original purpose of DSCOVR when Vice President Gore proposed it (Triana) was to provide a continuous image of the sunlit side of Earth to build environmental awareness shutting the camera down makes sense from the Administration’s perspective.
But its far more important space weather mission is intact.
Maybe the title should read “Trump’s NASA Budget Cuts Earth Science and Totally Eliminates Education”
My take is that the White House is probably so focused on healthcare, taxes, and national security legislation that it doesn’t have much bandwidth for micromanagement of NASA at this time.
Also, possibly because of the hostility of Mr Bezos’s newspaper and a certain well known Mars advocate, and because votes in the senate will be so close over the next few months, Trump is not about to topple the SLS/Orion cart any time soon, no matter how favorably disposed he might be to lower-cost commercial approaches.
Or they are waiting for the Falcon Heavy to fly to have an excuse.
Maybe that is really what the Falcon Heavy Dragon 2 lunar flyby is really all about: Anything NASA can do…
https://youtu.be/2fW5Z2z6pX…
Elon Musk did get folks attention returning the Falcon 9 boosters so the idea of shaking up NASA and space policy with a human lunar flyby does make sense.
With cuts in education, and then we complain about hiring H1B immigrants to fill tech positions? Everyone wants to make NASA great again but everyone talking about budget cuts or what programs they favor over others as in zero sum game. Even the space buffs and advocates argue among themselves, then wonder why can’t non-space people don’t seem “to get it.”
Cutting the education budget sends a message that we don’t want to encourage young people to choose a career in the space program.
As the IEEE and others have shown, there are more STEM workers than jobs in terms US.
What would happen to the co-op programs where individual students are integrated into a NASA activity and actually assist in it? To my mind this is probably the most critical educational program in terms of recruiting capable personnel for the future. NASA support for school and university robotics competitions also seems reasonably cost effective. Onsite educational programs for undergraduate and high school students can be individually rewarding but don’t seem practical to me. Given the overhead requirements it’s easy to end up with a program that requires as many NASA man-hours and it produces in student-hours. Better to improve funding for in-house and collaborative research so NASA scientists and engineers can work with faculty and students at local universities, where the infrastructure is in place and the educational efforts are integrated with a degree program. Improving the existing NASA reference websites so that existing research is more accessible to students would be more effective than developing new materials and websites specifically for education.
I don’t know. Our undergraduate summer interns are funded by an NSF program (Research Experience for Undergraduates) although they usually end up on space-related projects. Now that I’ve actually downloaded a copy of the document, can’t find any mention of the NSF.
So does this mean NASA’s Centennial Challenges would also be gone?
Here are some of the DISCOVR images. Really amazing.
https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/
“Provides $3.7 billion for continued development of the Orion crew vehicle, Space Launch System, and associated ground system, to send American astronauts on deep-space missions.” Does not sound like any cutbacks are in store for SLS.
If there’s anything NASA needs, it’s more cybersecurity regulations. Wait a minute, aren’t we supposed to eliminate two regulations for every one we write?
As to the SST, as long as it takes two hours to get through security it’s not going to matter if the actual flight is at Warp 9.
From what I’ve seen of it, you could probably improve NASA cybersecurity by eliminating some of the existing regulations. Merging and reconciling some of them wouldn’t be a bad place to start.
For SST and civil aviation, I think I disagree. You’re quite right that total travel time is largely unaffected. A transatlantic flight is an all-day trip, counting getting to and from airports, time at the airport, connections, etc. Shaving four hours off the time on the airplane won’t change that. (Conversely, I’ve found the opposite to be true in Europe: Even though it’s slower, taking the train can get you there as soon as flying. No security checkpoints, getting to the station well in advance means ten minutes before departure, etc.)
But, in the case of long flights, shaving four hours off the trip can make a big difference to how you feel when you arrive. Current transatlantic flights currently involve 8-12 hours in a cramped seat, overnight, with little potential for getting much sleep and usually arriving early in the morning. People don’t tend to be too productive at that point, and the day of arrival can usually be written off as well as the day of travel. If you could cut the flight time in half, that would be no worse than going from the west to the east coast.
I’m don’t even want to think about transpacific flights. I’ll just mention that, on the evening after Cassini got into orbit, some friends and I were at a bar in Pasadena. An intern at JPL had brought a friend, from Singapore and who wasn’t involved in anything space or NASA related. She was just mildly interested a spacecraft orbiting another planet. She did, however, want to know when NASA would do something to shorten the miserably long flights she had to take to visit family back home.
Not all “science” is worthwhile. Improved GPS means we can drop a nuclear bomb into a bathtub somewhere rather than on an area the size of a football field. Hurricane Matthew’s landfall on the Carolina coast couldn’t be predicted just 12 hours before it happened causing unnecessary deaths. Plus Matthew caused millions to evacuate due to an inability to accurately forecast that it would skirt Florida offshore. That cost hundreds of millions of dollars in real costs and lost opportunities, but we are expected to spend even more on earth sciences? Haven’t they already “proven” the science of climate change? Why is it necessary to spend so much more to prove something that is already proven? And what mineral is so rare that it is necessary or more economical to mine on asteroids? NASA’s mandate has spread so much that we cannot even get a man to the ISS. After all, the Space Shuttle was a great idea, wasn’t it? Constellation, anyone? And what justifies a mission to educate? It sounds like many want NASA to be like a university campus with tenured scientists contributing mostly to their own welfare. The key lesson I’ve observed over the past 30 years is that NASA persistently fails to meet deadlines, budgets and goals. What surprises me is that with few exceptions, the discussion here ignores the fact that 40% of NASA’s budget is deficit spending. NASA’s missions are all over the board. It’s time to refocus and learn to live within its means.