NASA is already great. Right now.

Keith’s note: I co-authored an opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle with Lisa Gray: “Make America Great in Space Again? Pfft. Trump is wrecking what we already have.“ — “When it comes to exploring the cosmos, the Trump administration’s quasi-official mantra is “Make America Great in Space Again.” But here’s the thing: NASA is already great. Right now.” More below.

NASA has sent missions to touch the sun, sent humans to another world, visited every planet in our solar system while discovering thousands of planets in other star systems, looked back to the dawn of time, and now has spaceships traversing interstellar space. No other nation even comes close to such an astonishing track record. And many people feel that we have only begun to realize the benefits of this half century of American leadership.

But instead of building on that capability, the White House seeks to gut virtually every aspect of space science and exploration wherein America has a multi-decade lead. This week, the disassembly of NASA was dialed up. On Friday, May 30, the White House released a budget that would cancel many missions and programs and see a reduction of one third — perhaps more — of the NASA/contractor workforce. The next day, the widely popular pick to be the NASA administrator was summarily un-nominated due to an internal White House food fight.

At roughly the same time, NASA also pulled out of the annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference, thus forcing its cancellation, and also announced that it will no longer provide overall funding for the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. Both were major gatherings, prime places for NASA to display its achievements to an international audience — which, besides spreading scientific knowledge, also functions to market U.S. space achievements to potential clients.

All of this happened against an administration policy meme of beating China in space. But instead of beefing up America’s space agency in all the places where China is advancing, the administration is cutting NASA off at the knees — thus handing that leadership to China and others by default.

This budget calls for the eventual retirement of the International Space Station (we all knew that was coming), with the idea being that low-Earth-orbit research will continue on an American commercial space station, or maybe more than one. Meanwhile, China is signing up customers for its space station — which it recently announced will be expanded.

Backing off of the China angle for a moment, let’s look at the layoffs that are about to descend upon NASA. Every NASA center faces across-the-board civil service personnel cuts of 25 to 30%, and the contractor workforce is likely to be hit even harder. You can argue the “too-many-cooks” point about efficiency, but that only goes so far. These cuts will remove capabilities that NASA needs to do its basic job — never mind the whole Let’s-Beat-China thing.

But wait, there’s more: The expertise that will be lost will stay lost for many years. When your plan is to reduce the workforce permanently, it’s hard to hire new, younger people. Soon the best place for young Americans to pursue a career in space may be outside America: Europe has already pounced on the chance to capture the brain drain from America’s space sector.

I am a child of the Apollo era. I grew up knowing that NASA could do anything it was chartered to do. Yes, in the past few decades there have been notable flops. But they are eclipsed by the astonishing things I mentioned above. Yes, NASA can and should do better. But it needs the tools and resources — and the people — to do so. But that is not what the White House is offering.

It’s true, SpaceX is doing amazing stuff in Texas. Blue Origin and many others have rushed in to advance American prowess in space, building upon initial work done by — you guessed it — NASA. But those companies have been built — and still depend — on work from NASA; developing private American companies with space know-how has been, and continues to be, a NASA goal. But cutting back NASA — slashing the space station without a firm plan for what comes next, and canceling dozens of future missions and payloads over the next decade — will cut demand for those private rocket launches, not increase it. And if the U.S. government doesn’t pay them, who will?

The baffling thing is that the Trump administration wants to enhance America’s global leadership in space and beat China, yet their ill-conceived tactics will achieve the exact opposite.

This is not the way for America to lead the way out into the cosmos. Hopefully Congress will wake up and notice. Let’s “Keep America Great In Space” — not abandon our lead.

Keith Cowing is the editor of NASAWatch.com.