Isaacman’s NASA Plan Cites Possible SpaceX Role in Quest to Get to Mars

President Donald Trump’s NASA pick Jared Isaacman has proposed to launch an uncrewed mission to Mars as early…
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https://www.newsbeep.com/231753/

NASA Artemis II Astronauts Aim to Make Space Great for All

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/science/nasa-astronauts-moon-artemis-ii.html

Trump Targets Tylenol and Vaccines, and ABC Brings Kimmel Back

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/podcasts/the-headlines/trump-tylenol-vaccines-kimmel.html

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https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1G33oEvxUG/

NASA website won’t publish major climate change reports

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Monday took another step to make it harder to find major,…
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https://www.newsbeep.com/3179/

“Things we’ll never know” science fair highlights US’s canceled research – Ars Technica

“Things we’ll never know” science fair highlights US’s canceled research

Congressional Democrats host scientists whose grants have been canceled

By John Timmer – Jul 9, 2025 12:55 PM |

Washington, DC—From a distance, the gathering looked like a standard poster session at an academic conference, with researchers standing next to large displays of the work they were doing. Except in this case, it was taking place in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, and the researchers were describing work that they weren’t doing. Called “The things we’ll never know,” the event was meant to highlight the work of researchers whose grants had been canceled by the Trump administration.

A lot of court cases have been dealing with these cancellations as a group, highlighting the lack of scientific—or seemingly rational—input into the decisions to cut funding for entire categories of research. Here, there was a much tighter focus on the individual pieces of research that had become casualties in that larger fight.

Seeing even a small sampling of the individual grants that have been terminated provides a much better perspective on the sort of damage that is being done to the US public by these cuts and the utter mindlessness of the process that’s causing that damage.

“It’s no way to do science,” one of the researchers told us

Targeting diversity and more

While many of the scientists were perfectly willing to identify themselves at the event, more than one asked us not to name them in any coverage. Another noted that, while she wasn’t concerned about retaliation from the federal government, she was at a state university in a state with a Republican governor and so could still face problems. As a result, we’re not identifying any of the scientists we talked to in this article.

With a few exceptions, most of these scientists could only surmise why their research was cut. A couple of them were funded by programs that were meant to increase minority participation in the sciences and so were targeted as DEI. Another was at Harvard and saw his materials science research into new refrigerants canceled, ostensibly because Harvard hadn’t cracked down hard enough on campus antisemitism (“ostensibly” because the government has also issued a series of demands that have nothing to do with antisemitism).

In their rush to terminate grants, each agency settled on a single form letter that told researchers that their work was being defunded because it no longer reflected agency priorities. A number of said researchers surmised that they lost their support because, at the time the grant was initially funded, many federal agencies required attempts to, as the National Science Foundation termed it, “broaden participation.” This left them at risk of falling afoul of the new administration’s anti-DEI efforts.

Read more: “Things we’ll never know” science fair highlights US’s canceled research – Ars TechnicaSource Links: “Things we’ll never know” science fair highlights US’s canceled research – Ars Technica

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Over 2,000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push – Politico

Over 2,000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push

The losses could endanger the administration’s plans for landing astronauts on the moon and Mars.
A rocket takes off.

By Sam Skove, 07/09/2025 01:14 PM EDT

At least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees are set to leave under a push to shed staff, according to documents obtained by POLITICO — potentially spelling trouble for White House space policy and depriving the agency of decades of experience.

The 2,145 employees are those in GS-13 to GS-15 positions — senior-level government ranks that are typically reserved for those with specialized skills or management responsibilities. The losses are particularly concentrated at higher levels, with 875 GS-15 employees set to leave, according to the documents.

Those 2,145 employees, in turn, make up the bulk of the 2,694 civil staff who have agreed to leave NASA under a slate of offers that fall within broader administration efforts to trim the federal workforce, according to the documents. NASA has offered staff early retirement, buyouts and deferred resignations.

Many of those leaving also serve in NASA’s core mission sets, according to the documents. Those leaving include 1,818 staff serving in mission areas like science or human space flight, with the rest performing mission support roles like IT, facilities management or finance.

“You’re losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society. “What’s the strategy and what do we hope to achieve here?”

The departures follow a proposed White House budget for 2026 that would slash NASA’s funding by 25 percent and cut over 5,000 staff. The cuts, if enacted by Congress, would force the agency to operate with the smallest budget and staff since the early 1960s.

The losses are spread across each of NASA’s 10 regional centers, where much of the agency’s work is done and which focus on everything from planning astronaut missions to the moon to sending out deep space probes.

The Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland is set to lose the most staff at 607; Johnson Space Center in Texas will lose 366 staff; Kennedy Space Center in Florida will lose 311; and NASA headquarters in Washington will lose 307. Langley Research Center in Virginia will lose 281, Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama will lose 279, and Cleveland’s Glenn Research Center will lose 191 staff.

Read more: Over 2,000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push – PoliticoSource Links: Over 2,000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push – POLITICO

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Crisis at NASA

The scientific community has been waiting for several weeks to find out precisely how heavily the Trump/Musk axe would fall on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); this article reveals the shocking scale of the proposed cuts.

Under the proposal, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) would receive almost a 50% reduction in its Budget. Within the individual SMD Divisions:

• Planetary Science would have its budget cut from the current level of $2,717 Million to $1,929 Million;
• Earth Science would see a cut from the current budget level of $2,195 Million to $1,033 Million;
• Astrophysics would decrease from its current level of $1,530 Million to $487 Million;
• Heliophysics budget would decrease from its current level of $805 M to $455 M.

It’s very bad news all round for NASA science, but the worst hit is Astrophysics (which includes cosmology) where the proposed cut is about two-thirds, which would be truly devastating. According to the American Astronomical Society,

The proposed cut to the astrophysics budget is likely to result in the cancellation of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a Great Observatory that would revolutionize our understanding of dark matter and dark energy while also detecting hundreds of thousands of planets in other solar systems. As the Roman Space Telescope is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years, a cancellation of the mission would be a significant waste of taxpayer dollars. 

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly known as WFIRST) is in many ways complementary to Euclid, though it will survey a smaller area of sky it has an telescope twice the diameter of Euclid so will reach fainter magnitudes. It has been threatened before, in Trump’s previous administration, but it survived. It is not clear that it will do so again as the current composition of Congress is not weighted favourably.

Those of us outside the United States can do little, but in case anyone reading this is in America the AAS has an Action Alert for you to contact your representative(s) to vote against the proposal.

#DonalTrump #ElonMusk #NASA #NationalAeronauticsAndSpaceAdministration