As four astronauts soar deeper into space than humans have traveled in decades, a quarter million miles away, back on Earth, the White House has proposed slashing the budget of the space agency that sent them there.

The proposal, released Friday, includes a request to give a billion-dollar boost to the agency’s moon-focused Artemis program. But President Donald Trump is also requesting deep cuts to NASA’s science budget — nearly 50%.

Overall, the budget proposal would cut the agency’s top line by $5.6 billion, or 23%.

But this latest White House proposal raises questions about how space agency leadership intends to execute on its vision of sending humans to explore the cosmos while also gutting the research efforts that underpin the United States’ leadership in scientific endeavors.

“There’s cuts to outer solar system programs, astrophysics, heliophysics — all things that feed into the human program and enable the human program,” said Jack Kiraly, the director of government relations at nonprofit exploration advocacy group The Planetary Society.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who assumed the top role in December after a yearlong confirmation process, said he supports the president’s proposals.

“NASA’s budget is greater than every other space agency across the world,” Isaacman said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “NASA’s science budget is greater than every other space agency combined across the world.”

It’s not clear how much China — the country with whom the US considers itself to be locked in a high-stakes race to the moon— spends on its scientific endeavors. But Isaacman noted that $10 billion worth of funding, earmarked mostly for human spaceflight and Mars exploration, was also tucked into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill last year.

With that funding, Isaacman said, NASA should be able to pursue a lunar settlement, create a new Mars spacecraft powered by nuclear propulsion, and get various science missions off the ground, such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

“NASA doesn’t have a top-line problem,” Isaacman said.

Kiraly said he understands where Isaacman is coming from, having been a vocal proponent of finding cost savings and efficiencies where possible across the agency. But Kiraly is not convinced the president’s budget proposal would lend enough support — even for the projects that Isaacman has personally bolstered.

“It’s a budget of surrender,” Kiraly said.

‘An existential threat’

Various other NASA initiatives — including maintaining and launching a replacement for the aging International Space Station — are notably left in limbo by the White House budget proposal, which has already elicited fiery criticism from various stakeholders and advocacy groups.

“This proposal needlessly resurrects an existential threat to U.S. leadership in space science and exploration,” reads a statement from The Planetary Society.

The group went so far as to say the proposal “undermines” the milestones NASA has recently celebrated — including the imminent Artemis II lunar flyby and the near-completion of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — “by adding needless uncertainty and disruption to NASA’s workforce.”

NASA officials declined to comment at a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday when asked about the president’s budget proposal and employee morale.

A commercial turn

The Trump administration proposed nearly identical cuts to NASA’s budget last year that elicited similarly negative reactions from various pockets of the space community. And lawmakers soundly rejected the funding rollbacks for the current budget cycle. And lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for maintaining or increasing — not cutting — the agency’s scientific endeavors.

Kiraly pointed out that NASA’s research includes seeking a better fundamental understanding of the sun through the agency’s department of heliophysics. Such initiatives are crucial for understanding how our home star emits radiation, a life-and-death concern for human spaceflight missions — particularly for trips to the moon, as NASA is pursuing with the Artemis program, or Mars.

Isaacman previously said he is a strong advocate for such pursuits. “Anything suggesting that I am anti-science or want to outsource that responsibility is simply untrue,” he said in a November 4 statement amid his confirmation process.

But Isaacman has also positioned himself as a visionary firebrand in the space community who is ready for change.

A document called “Project Athena” outlining his thoughts on NASA policy included calls to increase the agency’s partnerships with the private sector. However, he has also recently made calls to bolster the agency’s in-house capabilities and “core competencies.”

Isaacman has close ties to the commercial space industry. Before being tapped for the administrator role, as a private citizen, Isaacman commissioned two flights to orbit worth tens of millions of dollars aboard SpaceX capsules.

During his confirmation process, some lawmakers voiced concerns that Isaacman’s association with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk created a conflict of interest.

“I led two missions to space at SpaceX because it’s the only organization that can send astronauts to and from space since the Shuttle was retired,” Isaacman said during his December confirmation hearing, one of two held last year to evaluate his nomination. “And in that respect, my relationship is no different than that of NASA.”

A low-Earth orbit question

The latest budget proposal also leaves some commercial partnerships in limbo. For years, NASA has made clear its intention to tap the private sector to build and launch a space station to low-Earth orbit to take over for the 25-year-old International Space Station. It operates as a joint venture between the US, Canada, the European Union, Japan and Russia just a couple hundred miles above Earth, and it serves as a stage for experiments and technology development that help inform deep-space exploration.

At a recent event in Washington, DC, called “Ignition Day,” Isaacman and several fellow NASA executives made clear private companies don’t have much of a financial incentive to pursue the build-out of an orbiting laboratory. That could leave NASA as the sole financial backer for such a station.

“Tourism hasn’t really materialized as a market,” said Dana Weigel, NASA’s International Space Station program manager, at the March 24 Ignition Day event. “We certainly have had a number of tourist-sponsored missions, but those have been limited and we haven’t seen recurring demand for them.”

That sentiment has been quietly acknowledged in the space community for years, but it has not been reflected in formal policy.

The agency’s new plan, it said in a statement, is to “reaffirm” its commitment to standing up a new space station with its international partners in low-Earth orbit, as the move is considered a “national security imperative” to sustain such operations. (China also operates a space station in this area of space.)

Previously, NASA had planned to hand out multibillion-dollar contracts to one or a few of several companies pursuing orbital destination. Now, the agency said it’s reassessing its plan of attack and instead hopes to partner with a company to attach a new module to the existing space station that would spin off on its own when a commercial market is available.

How much funding would be required to pull off the new plan isn’t clear — and the president’s budget request throws even more uncertainty on the issue. The proposal suggests slashing the ISS budget by $1.1 billion, though a budget boost was included in last year’s omnibus bill.

“The Budget prioritizes the rapid development and deployment of commercial space stations, while also keeping the safe de-orbit of the ISS on track for 2030,” the budget proposal states.

But it appears unlikely that NASA can support an ISS replacement, given the proposed funding levels.

Kiraly said that if Isaacman’s Ignition Day announcements cast a pall of uncertainly on NASA’s plans for a low-Earth orbit space station, the presidential budget “is tripling, quadrupling down” on that confusion.

The National Space Society, another space-focused nonprofit, was complimentary of some of the cost-saving initiatives spelled out in the funding proposal. But the group also called the proposed changes to space station funding “unwise and counterproductive.”

“A strong NASA requires both a robust exploration program and a fully funded science portfolio,” the group’s statement reads. “These are not competing priorities — they are mutually reinforcing pillars of U.S. space leadership.” (CNN)

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