Another mission the White House wanted to cancel was THEMIS, a pair of spacecraft orbiting the Moon to map the lunar magnetic field. The lead scientist for that mission, Vassilis Angelopoulos from the University of California, Los Angeles, said his team will get “partial funding” for fiscal year 2026.
“This is good, but in the meantime, it means that science personnel is being defunded,” Angelopoulos told Ars. “The effect is the US is not achieving the scientific return it can from its multi-billion dollar investments it has made in technology.”
Artist’s concept of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, which has orbited Mars since 2014 studying the planet’s upper atmosphere.
To put a number on it, the missions already in space that the Trump administration wants to cancel represent a cumulative investment of $12 billion to design and build, according to the Planetary Society, a science advocacy group. An assessment by Ars concluded the operating missions slated for cancellation cost taxpayers less than $300 million per year, or between 1 and 2 percent of NASA’s annual budget.
Advocates for NASA’s science program met at the US Capitol this week to highlight the threat. Angelopoulos said the outcry from scientists and the public seems to be working.
“I take the implementation of the House budget as indication that the constituents’ pressure is having an effect,” he said. “Unfortunately, damage is being done already. Even if funding is reinstated, we have already lost people.”
Some scientists worry that the Trump administration may try to withhold funding for certain programs, even if Congress provides a budget for them. That would likely trigger a fight in the courts.
Bruce Jakosky, former principal investigator of the MAVEN Mars mission, raised this concern. He said it’s a “positive step” that NASA is now making plans under the assumption the agency will receive the budget outlined by the House. But there’s a catch.
“Even if the budget that comes out of Congress gets signed into law, the president has shown no reluctance to not spend money that has been legally obligated,” Jakosky wrote in an email to Ars. “That means that having a budget isn’t the end; and having the money get distributed to the MAVEN science and ops team isn’t the end—only when the money is actually spent can we be assured that it won’t be clawed back.
“That means that the uncertainty lives with us throughout the entire fiscal year,” he said. “That uncertainty is sure to drive morale problems.”
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