The White House wants to cut NASA’s budget and workforce and cancel a series of high -profile missions next year, they reveal recently published documents.
On May 2, the Trump Administration published its request for “Flaco Budget” of 2026, a broad summary of its financing plans for the next fiscal year. This document proposed to cut NASA funds by almost 25%, from $ 24.8 billion to $ 18.8 billion, and much of the reduction comes from agency science programs.
On Friday afternoon (May 31), the White House published a more detailed version of the budget application of 2026, which shines more light on the objectives of the administration and the possible effects in NASA, its people and its portfolio of missions.
The upper line of the proposed budget is the same in the recently published documents, which can be found here: NASA is assigned $ 18.8 billion in fiscal year 2026, which extends from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026.
This would be the largest one year for NASA in history, and the financing of 2026 would be the lowest of the agency since 1961 when it has been adjusted by inflation, according to the planetary society, a non -profit exploration defense organization.
The financing of NASA science would be reduced by 47% next year, to $ 3.9 billion, the same number provided by the skinny budget.
This would result in the cancellation of a series of high -profile missions and campaigns, according to the new documents. For example, the return of the Mars sample, a project to transport the material of the Home Red Planet already collected by NASA’s Perseverance Rover, would get the ax. So would the Mission of New Horizons, which is exploring the external solar system after accumulating its pluton steering wheel in July 2015, and Juno, a probe that has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016.
Two orbiters who have been studying Mars for years-Mars Odyssey and Maven would be canceled, as well as NASA’s cooperation in Rosalind Franklin, a lifetime hunting rover that the European Space Agency plans in 2028.
“In total, this budget points to Canel 41 Sciences Sciences, a third of NASA’s scientific portfolio,” said the planetary society in a statement on the recently published budgetary documents. “These are unique projects that would require billions of new expenses to replace.”
The Roman Space Telescope of Nancy Grace, the highly anticipated next generation observatory of the NASA, is not one of the victims, since many had been made. But the budget application assigns only $ 156.6 million to Roman development next year, less than half of what NASA had planned to spend.
The budget application also cuts the NASA workforce of its current 17,391 to 11,853, a reduction of approximately 32%. And would eliminate the agency’s voice commitment office, saying that NASA will inspire future generations sufficiently through its missions.
“The radical and rapid destruction of NASA’s resources will lead to a reduction in productivity, threatens institutional knowledge and creates economic uncertainty in the American industrial base,” said the planetary society.
The organization is not a fan of the White House Plan, which describes it as “an event at the level of extinction for the most productive, successful and widely supported activity of the space agency: science.”
The recently published documents also confirm other exploration plans established in the skinny budget, for example, the canelation of the space station of the Gateway moon and the elimination of rocket and orion capsule.
These hardware pieces have long been part of NASA’s architecture for Artemis, their program or credde Moon Exploration. The 2026 budget application eliminates SLS and Orion after they fly together in Artemis 3, a creed landing mission aimed at its launch in 2027.
They would be replaced by private vehicles developed through the new Program for Infrastructure and Transportation of “Commercial Luna to Mars (M2M)”, which obtains $ 864 million in the 2026 budget proposal.
However, it is not clear how much this will come real, however; The budget application is only a proposal, which will not be and acted unless and until Congress approaches it.
The planetary society, for example, does not think that this will happen; Describe the budget application “as dead upon arrival at Congress.”
