By redirecting efforts toward what works, the Trump administration is well-positioned to ensure the first boots on Mars are American.
By redirecting efforts toward what works, the Trump administration is well-positioned to ensure the first boots on Mars are American.
C ould slashing large parts of NASA’s budget actually get humanity to Mars faster?
Trump’s new budget proposal redirects billions of dollars within NASA’s $25 billion budget from some NASA projects to other ones. The majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, which oversees research on global warming, earth science, and more.
The space agency’s total budget will actually increase by half a billion dollars compared with 2024. But that didn’t stop some media outlets from claiming the proposed cuts to NASA’s science budget will “eviscerate” science and “decimate American leadership in space.”
The Washington Post reported the Trump budget will slash $3.4 billion from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, moving the money to other NASA programs.
At least 15 U.S. government agencies conduct research on global warming. Only one plans to travel to Mars. Though Trump’s proposal is not final, merely a starting point for negotiations with Congress, the shift in NASA’s budget is profound.
NASA’s core mission is space exploration, not global warming research better suited to other agencies like the NOAA or the EPA. Refocusing NASA’s budget toward spaceflight technologies would avoid the duplication of climate research efforts across different agencies.
Moreover, increased funding for science is no guarantee of innovation. Inflation-adjusted annual federal research funding exploded from $2 billion in 1953 to $60 billion today, according to the New York Times. The Times notes that America devotes the cost of two inflation-adjusted Manhattan Projects to federal research funding, an increase by a factor of 30.
Yet the rate of scientific advancement during the 1950s, when it sparked a series of revolutionary space technologies, was clearly higher than today. The increased funds have been largely diverted to fat university endowments, thousands of highly-paid administrators, and the propagation of left-wing ideology. This is how the embers of NASA were crushed out entirely during the Obama era, when NASA budgets became far more concerned with spending cash on global warming research than with supporting the agency’s mission of space exploration.
During that period, the top scientific question the space agency claimed it wanted to answer in its budget justification was: “How are Earth’s climate and the environment changing?” More typical space questions, such as, “Are we alone?” and, “How does the universe work?,” were at the very bottom of the list.
Spending on the part of NASA that conducts global warming research increased by 63 percent during Barack Obama’s presidency. (This increase crowded out funding for planetary science and the Mars program.) Such money could be spent more efficiently by a more specialized agency, which creates a remarkably high “opportunity cost” at NASA. Yet in Washington, each agency competes for budgetary priority by embracing whatever program any given Congress and president is currently focused on. Maximizing budget and staff sizes are the real goals of any bureaucracy, not accomplishing its stated objectives.
Obama’s other major policy change, the space agency’s well-funded Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, are also on the chopping block.
“The DEI-related cuts disturb me the most,” Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado at Boulder told New Scientist. “Those grants are about reaching out to underrepresented groups and ensuring that people have access to training and education.” During Obama’s tenure, NASA Director Charles Bolden declared the agency’s top priority was “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science.”
These imbalanced proposals tied American astronauts’ feet to the ground, shuttering the last vestiges of the Bush era Vision For Space Exploration by effectively ending any possibility of that planned Mars mission while making NASA almost entirely dependent on dangerous Russian-made rockets. Even the Obama era U.S. military depended on Vladimir Putin for space access.
By slashing funding for global warming research and DEI, this new budget returns NASA to its roots. It shifts money to currently underfunded programs like the Mars Sample Return mission, which is vital for gathering the data and precursor technologies needed for a human Mars mission.
The single largest proposed cut of anything which will actually enter space is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which was estimated in 2022 to have a total launch cost of $255 million. But by the time of a 2024 Office of the Inspector General report, the telescope price had surged to $4.3 billion.
This wouldn’t be the first time NASA’s telescope program blew past its time and money budgets.
The James Webb Space Telescope, a darling of the science program, was originally supposed to cost just $1 billion and fly in 2007. It ended up costing $10 billion and flew in late 2021, ten times its original budget and 14 years behind schedule.
Even by the standards of government procurement, NASA has an awful record. Yet previous administrations rewarded that kind of failure with yet more money to set on fire, despite our dire structural deficit.
One reason NASA isn’t getting as much money for science as before is that the agency has miserably failed with the cash taxpayers have invested in it. The idea that failures should be rewarded with yet more money is a big part of why every American taxpayer owes $323,000 as a personal share of our national debt. Rewarding that kind of failure by setting yet more money on fire is so insane only a government entity would continue doing it.
Trump’s NASA budget doesn’t cut the proposed Mars mission. But that’s not what the scientific press wants you to believe. “Trump Wants To Go To Mars, That’s Not Happening” wrote Scientific American in March, citing the fast timeline and low budget.
What this misses is that previous NASA plans to send humans to Mars have always had long time horizons and enormous budgets — and have always failed because of them. As I wrote while working on planning of a NASA Mars mission (which would be shuttered by the Obama budget’s focus on global warming) for the space agency, this is because huge budgets encourage de facto bribery and delay in mission design.
Like many bureaucracies, each NASA center must effectively be “bought off” by declaring its own sacred cow as “essential” to mission architecture, mandating extremely complicated mission designs. This ultimately leads to “design by committee” and “gold plating,” which increase the cost of the mission and the chances of dramatic mission failure.
This is exactly the opposite of how to accomplish any goal. Buying each internal faction of NASA off increases the overall budget, which creates sticker shock in Congress. Long mission time horizons look ideal from a bureaucrat’s perspective, as they guarantee stable employment. But a long-term program will always be more vulnerable to cancellation before it can generate tangible results.
A similar process effectively killed two previous attempts by Republican presidents to land astronauts on the Red Planet: George H. W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative and his son’s Vision for Space Exploration. The latter had an estimated budget of around $858 billion in modern money. The same cost scoring found that a more focused mission could be done for only $60 billion.
From 1960 to 1973, during the Apollo program, the U.S. federal government only invested $318 billion in 2023 dollars, or $24.5 billion per year. That is below the president’s $25.4 billion budget request or the $24.9 billion the agency got in 2024. The issue is not a lack of money. It’s a lack of focus and an agency culture that encourages failure and safetyism.
The trimmed-down NASA will return to its roots and look more like its predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which did so much to help kickstart commercial aviation in America. Such a move makes sense, given the remarkable rise of a real American commercial space industry. It would also refocus the agency on its core competencies. While many mock celebrities like Katy Perry paying for brief joy-rides to space, the fact that private companies have made commercial spaceflight a reality with unskilled astronauts is actually an incredible achievement.
Of the record-setting 259 orbital launch attempts in 2024, the private company SpaceX was responsible for 135. Other American entities only generated 20, as NASA now mostly relies on SpaceX to get to orbit. To put those numbers in perspective, the entire nations of China and Russia performed 68 and 17 orbital launches, respectively, last year.
Private sector spaceflight clearly works. By redirecting efforts toward what works, the Trump administration is well positioned to ensure the first boots on Mars are American. Far from destroying American leadership in space as some fear, slashing NASA’s global warming and DEI budgets will get us to Mars faster.