Six months ago, in his second inaugural address, Donald Trump declared, “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
At the time, it seemed as if the president were serious about his interplanetary ambitions. Indeed, those watching the Republican’s remarks might’ve assumed that he was prepared to invest heavily in NASA to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.”
But six months later, it’s easy to wonder whether NASA and the U.S. space program will survive Trump’s second term. NBC News reported:
The director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center announced her resignation Monday, marking yet another high-profile departure as questions loom about the agency’s budget and future. Makenzie Lystrup, who has served as director of the center in Maryland since April 2023, will leave the agency on Aug. 1, according to a NASA statement. Goddard oversees a number of key NASA missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the OSIRIS-REx mission that collected samples from an asteroid.
Lystrup’s resignation comes less than two months after Laurie Leshin stepped down as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Her departure marks the latest in a series of setbacks at the agency, which includes the avoidable fiasco surrounding the president’s original nominee to serve as NASA administrator; the decision to put Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in charge of NASA (even as he spends time trying to avoid blame for recent failures in his other full-time job); and the agency’s rapidly shrinking staff.
Politico reported two weeks ago, for example, that “at least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees are set to leave under a push to shed staff,” and that many of those leaving the agency “serve in NASA’s core mission sets.”
This personnel loss dovetails with the new White House budget plan, which would cut NASA’s science budget nearly in half. Politico’s report added that the proposed spending cuts, if approved by the Republican Congress, “would force the agency to operate with the smallest budget and staff since the early 1960s” — before the first moon landing.
It’s against this backdrop that The New York Times reported on a new public letter from NASA employees that urges agency leaders to push back against the Trump administration’s proposed deep cuts. “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement and efficient use of public resources,” the employees wrote. Cuts to NASA programs have been arbitrary and in defiance of priorities set by Congress, they added, leading to “dire” consequences for the agency and the country. A NASA spokesperson told the Times that the concerns from NASA employees are misplaced, but given the circumstances, those waiting to see American astronauts “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars” will have to wait for some other presidential administration to try to rescue the space agency — while hoping it’s not too late. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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