These are BRUTAL cuts. BRUTAL.
The only way to achieve them is to slash and burn. There's no orderly way to wind down or delay things if you're being asked to cut your budget by a half, or by three quarters.
Again, imagine this was your salary. What would you do?
Now, back to Planetary.
The only way to achieve them is to slash and burn. There's no orderly way to wind down or delay things if you're being asked to cut your budget by a half, or by three quarters.
Again, imagine this was your salary. What would you do?
Now, back to Planetary.
Comments
The Dragonfly mission gets the equivalent of a Discovery mission for FY26: $494M.
$137M for more Moon stuff, although the CLPS program leaves Science and moves to the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.
It was $390M in FY25. That's a 49% cut.
Half the R&A budget, gone.
And the Mars Sample Return program is cancelled. Gone. Done. No more.
(Never mind that we have samples ready for collection on Mars.)
Now I'm going to start looking for what, specifically, is being cut—first in planetary, and then more generally throughout the Agency.
(As a reminder, I'm mainly focused on planetary right now, but beyond NASA agencies like NSF, NOAA, and others are also being GUTTED.)
- *all* Venus missions in development are CANCELLED
- the healthy Juno mission is CANCELLED
- the OSIRIS-APEX mission is CANCELLED
- support for the Rosalind Franklin Rover is ENDED
RPS program had major, well-documented issues, but surprised it’s zeroed. RPS is enabling for outer planets (Uranus, Neptune) and even some inner planet missions (Mercury, Moon, Mars).