Podcaster: Dr. Pamela Gay;
Title: Escape Velocity Space News – EVSN: Federal Budget Cuts: An Extinction-level Event
Organization: Cosmoquest
Link: http://dailyspace.org/
Description: From April 24th, 2025.
This week we look at how the elimination of science programs, projects, datasets, and funding may be shaping into an extinction-level event for US Space-related sciences. Come cry with us.
Bio: Dr. Pamela Gay is a Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and a Director of CosmoQuest.
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Transcript:
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Space belongs to no one. We all share one sky. And while there are geographical restrictions about what we can see, these limitations are driven by the geometry of the Earth and her orbit, and care nothing for the politics of man.
Each night, objects arise in the East, and we can talk to our friends to the East, and get a preview of what to expect as we ask, Hey, are you getting Aurora? Or is that new comet naked-eye visible yet? As the world turns, professional astronomers will sometimes take turns observing objects around the clock as we watch things like supernovae evolve over time.
We all share one sky. And it is as a world that scientists have more or less worked together to study our shared universe, with the most massive observatories being great collaborations of many nations sprawling many continents. Heck, some observatories, like the Event Horizon Telescope, the Square Kilometer Array, and the Very Large Baseline Interferometer, sprawl their equipment across multiple continents.
How each nation contributes to our shared discoveries varies. With their massive economies, the United States and China have recently spearheaded the construction of many massive new facilities, and have large research populations that include the brightest and most educated from nations around the world. Science has been a cornerstone of how we encourage peace.
In 1991, I was part of an exchange of science students between the U.S. and the USSR that was meant to help build a better future. And the ISS is built on the idea that through shared exploration, we will force ourselves to rely on each other and trust each other, at least in one small moat in space. Science is a solid foundation for international cooperation.
It is also just good for the nation. It was recognized in the 50s that preeminence in science and our dominance in space science would strengthen our economy, our national security, give people something amazing to dream about, and give our best and brightest a reason to stay here in the U.S. At the same time, the best and brightest of the world have often made it a point to compete for entrance to American schools and careers at NASA, our universities, and our research centers. This means our nation was poised to answer big questions about our universe in the next two decades as we launch new amazing space probes and orbiting telescopes, while on Earth, telescopes measuring in tens of meters diameter approach first light. That could all be changing.
This episode of EVSN is going to take on a single topic. This week, we are going to look at how the elimination of science programs, projects, data sets, and funding may be shaping into an extinction-level event for U.S. space-related sciences. This is all happening side by side with the even more disturbing cancellation of social services, medical and climate research, and staffing of everything from the national parks to the national institutes of health.
Our nation is fundamentally changed. We are limiting this episode to space-related sciences, and I would encourage each of you to educate yourselves on what is happening to science in general and health and safety-related programs in particular. In this episode, we are going to look at how science has historically been driven by shared governance and direct democracy, and how that is no longer the case.
We are going to look at the job options and the expiry dates on all our research careers, and we are going to look at how research is staffed and funded and what all the ongoing changes mean as we consider a new brain drain of people leaving the United States for more accepting pastures. All this and more is coming to you right here, right now on Escape Velocity Space News. I am your host, Dr. Pamela Gay, and I am here to put science in your brain.
[Speaker 3]
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[Dr. Pamela Gay]
One of the imperfectly realized goals of science is to reward people fairly for their excellence and defining our future through models of shared governance as we prioritize our limited resources together. Research shows that reality favors the ideas of people at the best schools who are white and male. It is not enough to be the best.
You also have to overcome bias and have a certain amount of luck. These are issues, but we are trying to be self-aware. In our idealized world, committees of competitively selected or elected scientists serve on committees that provide the government with insights on what are the most important science questions to be answered, what are the tools we need, and what are the issues being faced by our profession.
These committees take roughly three different forms. There are our professional societies, which can and do directly address politicians and can often be found calling on their membership to sign letters and make phone calls. As long as scientists exist to pay their dues, these organizations like the American Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union will continue to exist.
Congress also recognizes that it sometimes needs very specific advice, and this is where the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine come in. Congressionally created with the mission to, quote, provide independent, trustworthy advice and facilitate solutions to complex challenges by mobilizing expertise, practice, and knowledge in science, engineering, and medicine, unquote. Committee members are nominated, vetted, and competitively selected, and they work often as representatives who collect input from the community to review existing programs and recommend future priorities.
Recently, we’ve seen the NASA at a Crossroads report come out reviewing NASA’s status and ability to maintain workforce infrastructure and technology preeminence in the coming decades. Unfortunately, studies coming out of the National Academies are no longer what many of us would call independent. As early as February, StatPlus reported that National Academy reports were being scrubbed of words no longer deemed appropriate, like health equity.
We are also seeing studies assessing bias being terminated. In addition to our professional organizations and the National Academies, various government agencies have their own committees. At NASA, these took the form of assessment groups that provided NASA with committee feedback on everything from funding needs to research priorities.
All of these committees were temporarily closed down in response to executive orders, and it is being verified that their websites and actions conform to all current orders from the executive branch. Of the nine different assessment groups, only three are back online, and the remainder remain under review. Listed as under review is the Lunar Exploration Assessment Group, or LEAG, which normally would be in close communications with NASA about everything from the status of the Viper rover to the science plans for the Artemis program.
While it is frustrating to feel left out of lunar discussions, more concerning is the president’s budget request, which includes massive funding cuts to NASA science and the elimination of center’s emissions. If Congress does anything like what the president wants and these assessment groups aren’t in place, there will be little to no community input on what, if anything, is allowed to continue. This means the people who really understand the science may not be the people setting the science goals.
And it’s not just NASA. Per their website, quote, on April 15th, 2025, the National Science Foundation announced that it is disestablishing certain non-statutory federal advisory committees effective immediately in alignment with the president’s executive order commencing the reduction of the federal bureaucracy, end quote. As they explain, quote, the U.S. National Science Foundation, NSF, relies on the judgment of external experts to provide advice and recommendations on its programs. NSF’s advisory committees advise the agency on issues such as how to maintain high standards of program support for research, education, and infrastructure, policy deliberations, program development, and management, identifying disciplinary needs and areas of opportunity, promoting openness to the research and education community served by the agency, end quote. Put another way, committees that previously allowed the staff at NASA and NSF to make more informed decisions have been disestablished or put on hiatus, with NSF implying that making informed decisions is just excess bureaucracy. If scientists who are trying our best to be fair and to maximize what science can be accomplished are told their voices are no longer needed or must be edited for unwanted ideas, ideas like trying to fix our known biases, then we are no longer following the path toward truth.
We are instead following dictates along the path of whim, and it appears those dictates are rich in misinformation. After a break, we’ll be back to look at how space science researchers are employed in America and what funding cuts will mean to careers in the future of science. Stay tuned.
After writing that last section, I took a break, I ate some edamame, and I scanned blue sky, and I learned the story I now need to tell is somehow even more depressing than it was 30 minutes ago. There are a lot of articles out there on the missions that may be canceled, on how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is nearly ready for launch and might get shelved or worse, but what I’m not seeing are the stories on what these cuts will mean to the space science workforce, and that’s the story I’m going to tell. As the story went, the president’s proposed but not yet submitted physical year 26 budget for NASA, per reporting in the Washington Post and Ars Technica, would see nearly half of NASA’s science budget being cut.
Casey Dreyer at the But just as there have always been a few things that lived through past mass extinctions, I thought the National Science Foundation would be there as a safe place for science to find a way forward. And then I saw an article in Nature by Dan Garisto reporting, quote, Trump team freezes new NSF awards and could soon axe hundreds of grants, end quote. And I let our producer Ali know I’m going to be recording later than expected.
I may stress eat a second box of frozen edamame later, but before I do that, I want to explain why I and so many other researchers are struggling right now. There are only a handful of career paths and research. If you are among the very best, like Nobel Prize material, getting the top awards in the top 3% of the top 3%, you can get one of the rare named chair positions at a research university or a Max Planck Institute that allows you to earn a 12 month salary while maybe teaching a couple of courses a semester while getting the rest of your time to focus on research.
There are maybe a few dozen of these positions in the United States. There are also normal tenure track positions at research universities where you again teach a couple courses and get to do research, but these only pay you nine months a year and you need to bring in research grants to cover those other three months, except NASA and the National Science Foundation actually cap grants at two months salary, so you get paid 11 months salary and spend a month or more a year of unpaid time writing grants to fund those two months to fund your students and to pay for things like your computer, conference travel, publication charges, and any lab equipment or telescope time you may need.
A failure to bring in money means no students, no equipment, no… well none of the things needed to demonstrate you are a competent scientist worthy of getting grants. It’s a bit of a catch-22.
A lot of us will use our personal money to bridge us as needed, paying out of pocket for work trips or to get that latest research result published in a good journal. It sucks, but you don’t go into science to get rich, you just try really hard not to get into debt. There are also vast numbers of teaching faculty who may or may not get the time to also do some research.
They too have nine months, unless they get lucky enough to teach a summer class, nine months not full-time salaries. There are also lab staff who support teaching faculty at all kinds of institutes and there are adjunct professors who are paid below minimum wage once you factor in the time it takes to grade. And then there are all of us grant-funded people.
Research universities and science institutes have postdoctoral fellows, research professors, and research scientists who may or may not teach classes and generally only have their jobs for as long as they or a colleague or advisor has grants to pay them. I was a research professor for 10 years and now I’m a research scientist. While we may meet the largest population of researchers, we are also the most vulnerable to budget changes.
The years I have shy of six months of salary, that’s three grants. I only work half-time and I don’t have health insurance or retirement contributions and time off is time unpaid. That’s me this year.
I have a husband for health insurance. But I at least have non-research work I can do. When you see scientists who are selling their art, their jewelry, their whatever they are selling, it is because they love what they are doing and they also need to eat.
So when we see that the National Science Foundation is no longer issuing new grants and NASA’s science funding is slashed 50% or more, we know most of us are going to be gone in a year and then we see NSF to offer no new awards. The astronomers in your life are not okay and we all know that if we leave the field to take jobs as computer programmers, tech writers, or whatever else is willing to hire us, we aren’t going back to science. It is almost impossible to stay up to date on research, on the technologies we use, and everything else you have to know to stay in the profession if you leave the profession.
When people leave, they only come back if they have the independent wealth to fund their return like that famous rock star all of you are probably thinking about right now. People will fight to stay in science and as a profession we will eat our young to survive. When funding cuts happen, student positions and post-doctoral fellowships for our most junior researchers are eliminated so faculty and research scientists can keep going.
As I look around, I see a large number of boomers who helped build the Voyager missions who will now, and I’m so grateful for this, they will now retire before we return to the moon even though they were really hoping to get at least one moon landing during their career. Their retirement will help save some of the rest of us. I also see an even larger number of baby millennials and Gen Zers who are just getting started and still need colleagues to help fund them and they just aren’t going to make it.
And in the middle are us crunchy Gen Xers, all 12 of us, and the elder millennials who are going to multitask and side hustle our way through, but again not all of us will make it. And universities aren’t accepting new graduate students like normal so there won’t necessarily be new people coming up to fill in behind us, not here, not in the U.S. And for those who try and keep going, we’re seeing publicly available data, data being taken offline and data collections being discontinued, eliminating the ability to do research. We see future missions potentially being defunded.
We see massive laboratories being shut down as the federal government punishes universities like Harvard. Grant money pays into our economy as a force multiplier. It innovates our technology, sometimes creating entire new fields out of a few specially aligned atoms.
Astronomy has led to improving signal processing, image processing, machine learning, Wi-Fi, and so much more as a side effect of chasing the mysteries of black holes, the origins of worlds, and an understanding of the fate of the universe. We have discovered what powers stars and what quenches quasars. And we are doing honest work that sometimes includes creating memes about Pluto’s planetary status while we wait for our database queries to run on computers that aren’t quite fast enough for our big data.
These budget cuts will end all that. I’m afraid for the future of research, science, and America. We are about to see a brain drain and the loss of a new generation.
That will happen no matter what. Congress has the power of the person and in theory could say no more. We will fund research.
But today we heard Senator Murkowski express her fear of what could happen to her if she doesn’t do as Trump asks. Imagine we might live in a nation where members of Congress are afraid of the consequences to their safety if they fund science against the president’s wishes. The phrase shock and awe has been used to describe massive overwhelming attacks on our nation’s enemies that were designed to demoralize as well as destroy.
The current attack on science is one of shock and awe and we are demoralized as we see so much destroyed. But here’s the thing they forget. We went to grad school which is designed to demoralize and we got through on our own.
We know how to rage clean, eat our feelings, and then buckle down and somehow keep going. It’s just a lot of us are going to keep going in another country or another field and that is just one more knock against our economy that didn’t need to happen. Call your Congress critters.
Tell them what kind of a future you want our nation to have. That’s it. That’s all I have.
The money is going away and with it the science. After the break we’ll be back with Eric and tales from the launch pad. Stay tuned.
[Eric]
Hi Pamela. On April 7th Russia launched the Soyuz MS-27 mission towards the ISS. The crew consisted of two Russian cosmonauts Sergei Ryzhikov and Alexey Zabrisky and NASA astronaut Johnny Kim.
Sergei is making his third flight into space and Alexey and Johnny their first. Johnny holds unique distinction of being a Navy SEAL, a doctor, and now an astronaut. The Soyuz spacecraft conducted its typical three-hour rendezvous after launch with fleet checks taking a few hours after that before the crew was allowed into the ISS to begin their six-month mission.
On April 10th China launched the TJSW-17 satellite from the Xichang spaceport. The TJSW satellites are used to test different communications technologies in orbit. On April 12th SpaceX launched the NRL-192 mission from the Vandenberg spaceport.
NRL-192 was the eighth launch of the NRL’s proliferated architecture system using SpaceX sterling drive satellites for NRO’s intelligence gathering purposes. The launches are thought to carry 20 to 25 satellites. On April 16th Arthur Kerman launched the NRL-174 mission from the Vandenberg spaceport.
This was the first Minotaur launch from Vandy since 2011. As usual the NRO gave very few details about the payloads only mentioning that there were more than one. The Minotaur family of launch vehicles is unusual in that they use retired military motors.
In the case of Minotaur 4 it uses the three-stage peacekeeper missile with a commercial solid motor as the fourth stage. All launches so far have been of military satellites. Russia and China have similar programs to use decommissioned missiles as space launch vehicles.
On April 18th China launched the Xi’an-27-1 mission from the Haiyuan spaceport. Xi’an is the general destination for a large variety of Chinese government satellites. Because of the orbit these satellites were inserted into they are thought to be radar imaging satellites.
You keep track of launches by launch site also called spaceport. According to rocketlaunch.live so far this year the United States has had 49 launches, China has had 21 launches, New Zealand has had five launches, Russia has had three launches, Kazakhstan has had two launches, French Guiana, India, Japan and Norway each have had one launch. This makes the total number of launches so far this year 84.
Finally there are nine toilets in space. Of those 84 launches there have been four failures reminding us the spaces are.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Thanks Eric. We held off recording this last section of the show while I waited to see if Vera Rubin Observatory would put out a first light press release. Unfortunately while I waited I was exposed to COVID like was in a car with someone who said just a cold and was a snotty massive nose blowing and it was not just a cold so I’m isolating until either I get COVID and recover from COVID or 10 days have passed.
Welcome to my home office. These are my fish. Anyways, Rubin Observatory did not put out a first light press release.
They put out a Facebook post saying on sky engineering tests have begun at NSF DOE Rubin Observatory using the world’s largest digital camera. To me this sounds like they had first light. In fact they went on to say after installing and testing the LSST camera we turned the telescope to the sky.
A moment 20 years in the making. Thanks to the years of diligent work from our incredible team combined with successful testing with the engineering camera late last year the system is already working well. So they haven’t announced they had first light but this face this face this face tells me Rubin is going to be everything everything we need it to be.
This is something to celebrate. Good night everyone and remember go out and look up. This show is made possible by our absolutely amazing patrons at patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX. I’m overwhelmed at how many new names I have to read this month and if you want to join, donate $10 or more at patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX. Thank you to BuzzNash, David Troge, Gary William Berklow, Janelle, Jeffrey David Marasini, Joe Holstein, Lenore Horner, Timelord Iroh, Ambious Andrea Segel, Greg Thorvald, Jeff Harris, Les Howard, Mark Sykes, Masa Herleyu, Peter Richards, Semyon Torfason, William Fitchner, Alan Gross, Bernad Schaffer, Bore Andro-Levsvall, Kami Rassian-Kasnow, Doc Knappers, Don Mundes, Dustin Ralph, Gary Engelman, Glenn McDavid, Gordon Dewis, JustMeAndTheCat, Katrina Inkey, Kimberly Reek, Michael Perciata, OnTheDiagonal, Patrick Young, Robert W. Farley, Sebastian Schieper, Sean Grossman, Simon Oliphant, The Real Fake Admin, and William Bridgman.
Thank you all. Thank you so much.
[Speaker 3]
Escape Velocity Space News is executive produced and written by Dr. Pamela Gay. The This Week In Aerospace segment is written and researched by Eric Mattis, Gordon Dewis, and Dave Billard. Audio engineering is provided by Ali Pelfrey.
Escape Velocity Space News is a production of the Planetary Science Institute, a 501c3 non-profit dedicated to exploring our solar system and beyond. We are here thanks to the generous contributions of people like you. The best way you can support us is through patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX. Patreon benefits include exclusive access to ad-free podcasts, full-length guest interviews, weekly video chats with our production team, and other bonus content. Like us? Please share us.
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365 Days of Astronomy
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As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!