In July of 1969, humanity took our first steps on the surface of another world: the Moon. This was the crowning achievement of NASA and the space program in the 1960s, representing a global victory for science and human achievement. Now, in 2025, it's clear that the new direction the country is headed will include a very different set of priorities.
For the past 60+ years, the name NASA has been synonymous with humanity’s vision to dream about horizons far beyond the bounds of our terrestrial worries. NASA was the first agency in history to not only bring humans to the Moon, but to:
- send rovers to Mars,
- reveal the distant galaxies lurking in the depths of deep space,
- send orbiting missions directly to the outer planets,
- to land a probe on a moon of Saturn,
- to fly past Pluto,
- to send spacecraft beyond the limits of our own Solar System and into interstellar space,
- to have a spacecraft touch the Sun,
Perhaps most importantly, NASA gave hope to the entire world. In addition to its endeavors in spaceflight, NASA brought to us the idea of space exploration, and using a presence in space to better understand the Universe around us: the Earth, the Sun, the Solar System, and the greater Universe of which we’re all a part of. Its four main science directives, for decades, have brought to us a superior understanding of Earth science, heliophysics, planetary science, and astrophysics than ever before.
And now, as we enter October of 2025 (and the new fiscal year), thousands of longtime NASA employees have begun leaving the agency, overwhelmingly diminishing the agency’s science and STEM education capabilities. Here’s a look back at all we accomplished, as well as how we got to where we are today.
And now, as we enter October of 2025 (and the new fiscal year), thousands of longtime NASA employees have begun leaving the agency, overwhelmingly diminishing the agency’s science and STEM education capabilities. Here’s a look back at all we accomplished, as well as how we got to where we are today.
A technician working on Sputnik 1, prior to its launch on October 4, 1957. After a mere 3 months in space, Sputnik 1 fell back to Earth due to atmospheric drag, a problem that plagues all low-Earth-orbiting satellites even today.
NASA didn’t begin in a vacuum, but rather as a response to a unique event in human history: the 1957 launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellite in all of Earth’s history, completing an orbit around the Earth at an altitude of hundreds of miles (or kilometers) above the ground every 90 minutes. It was this singular event that led to:
- the start of the space race,
- the formation of NASA,
- and the beginning of science conducted from space,
Early on, the Soviet Union and the United States represented the two primary nations with a presence in space, with both nations not only conducting crewed and uncrewed missions, but also with sending explorer probes to other planets and moons in our Solar System. We glimpsed the far side of the Moon for the first time. We touched down on the surfaces of Venus and Mars. We began studying the Earth from space, with vantage points that enabled us to see an entire global hemisphere at once. We studied the Sun from above the confines of Earth’s atmosphere. And when we sent humans some 380,000+ kilometers away from Earth for the first time, as part of the Apollo program, the most stunning and famous picture they sent back wasn’t of a foreign land, but of our own distant home.
This photograph shows the first view, with human eyes, of the Earth rising over the limb of the Moon, taken mere minutes after the original Earthrise photo (in black-and-white) was snapped. The discovery of the Earth from space, with human eyes, remains one of the most iconic achievements in our species’ history. Apollo 8, which occurred during December of 1968, was one of the essential precursor missions to a successful Moon landing. This photo is arguably the most environmentally impactful one ever taken.
As astronaut Bill Anders, who was part of that famed Apollo 8 mission, would put it:
“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth.”
Over the subsequent decades, NASA spurred the development of many new launch vehicles, including the Space Shuttle, and used them not just to send humans to space, but to explore novel aspects of the Universe. We began sending probes all over the Solar System: fly-by missions, orbiter missions, landers, and even rovers. We mapped out many of the worlds in our Solar System in their entirety, while getting to examine certain areas on the surfaces of those worlds in unprecedented detail.
We started monitoring our own planet, gathering critical information about our planet’s atmosphere and the interplay between weather, climate, and human activities. We learned about the hole in our ozone layer and identified its cause, banding together to halt the damage we had caused and to allow the planet to heal. We learned how to predict and mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events, from hurricanes to wildfires, and gained an understanding of the complex relationship between droughts and floods. And through the NASA-NOAA partnership, we came to understand how human activity is driving global climate change: not just at a qualitative level, but quantitatively (e.g., by what amount) as well.
This graph shows the global average temperature anomalies relative to the 1850-1900 baseline. The red line shows the multi-year moving average of global temperature, while the dotted green line shows a linear fit to the warming from 1974-2022. As recent years show, the warming trend has accelerated, with 2023 and 2024 marking severe (hottest-ever) departures from the late-20th century trend.
But perhaps the most important aspect that NASA brought to humanity was the ability to dream: to dream of worlds, galaxies, and even universes far beyond our own. It was the formation of NASA that inspired the modern genre of science-fiction stories, starting with Space Patrol, Lost In Space, and Star Trek in the 1960s, and continuing on in popular imaginations ever since.
Starting in the late 20th century, NASA began launching space telescopes as well, including the first suite of Great Observatories:
- the Hubble Space Telescope, still in operation today,
- the Compton gamma-ray observatory, which discovered the one form of light where the Moon outshines the Sun,
- the Spitzer infrared space observatory, which paved the way for NASA’s latest flagship mission, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),
- and the Chandra X-ray Telescope, which remains the most powerful, high-resolution X-ray telescope in humanity’s arsenal.
The X-ray (pink) and overall matter (blue) maps of various colliding galaxy clusters show a clear separation between normal matter and gravitational effects, some of the strongest evidence for dark matter. The X-rays come in two varieties, soft (lower-energy) and hard (higher-energy), where galaxy collisions can create temperatures ranging from several hundreds of thousands of degrees up to ~100 million K. Meanwhile, the fact that the gravitational effects (in blue) are displaced from the location of the mass from the normal matter (pink) shows that dark matter must be present. Without dark matter, these observations (along with many others) cannot be sufficiently explained.
By combining Hubble and Chandra, for example, we were able to acquire deep images of colliding galaxy clusters in multiple wavelengths of light: wavelengths that encoded different pieces of information about the state of those collisions. Observations of these clusters revealed:
- the locations of the stars and galaxies (through visible light),
- the locations of the heated gas (in the space between the galaxies, through the X-ray light),
- and the locations of the total mass of the clusters (inferred from gravitational lensing, imprinted in the visible and infrared light data from the background galaxies).
So where, then, would the gravitational lensing signal come from? Would it be aligned with the gas, pointing away from the existence of dark matter and toward evidence for a modified law of gravity? Or would it show a clear separation between the X-ray signal and the effects of gravity, demonstrating the reality (and necessity) of dark matter?
Often hailed as the first empirical proof of the existence of dark matter, observing these colliding galaxy clusters was not why either of these observatories were designed, and yet, they revealed the Universe as never before. Beyond that, “deep field” observations, also not why these observatories were designed, revealed the ultra-distant cosmos that few could have even imagined would be there.
This side-by-side view showcases the original Hubble Deep Field, with a total exposure time of 11.3 days, compared to JWST’s view of the same region of sky, but with only 20 hours of JWST data. Already, not only are details being revealed by JWST that are invisible to Hubble, but entirely new objects never seen before.
This pathway to better understanding so many aspects of the Universe was supposed to continue, driven by new tools, superior developing technology, the next generation of scientists, and a sustained investment in the one endeavor — fundamental science — that benefits all of humankind. But just as a carefully constructed sand castle can be kicked down in seconds by a reckless, unsupervised toddler, an entire country’s long-term, sustained investment in science, in space, in fundamental knowledge about the Universe, and in the people who conduct it, can be destroyed entirely by a short-sighted series of cuts.
That’s exactly what’s taking place here in the USA now, in 2025, and why so many of us who’ve been involved with NASA over the 20th and 21st centuries are now facing what was once unimaginable: the steepest cuts in the storied program’s history. Although we still don’t have a budget for the next Fiscal Year (2026) signed into law, the agency — and all of its interim directors this year, as detailed in this newly released federal whistleblower report — has been following the directives of the President’s budget request as though it were law already. The result has been the coerced resignation or firing of more than 4000 of NASA’s original (at the start of the year) ~17,000 employees, and the steepest cuts to NASA’s science programs and STEM education programs in the agency’s history.
The top graph shows the proposed White House FY 2026 budget (inflation-adjusted) for NASA, where the 2026 budget request is the lowest since 1961: when Alan Shepard became the first American in space. The lower graph shows the year-over-year change in budget requests, with the ~25% decrease from 2025 to 2026 marking the largest requested decrease in NASA’s entire history.
As various whistleblowers at NASA have specifically noted, imposing a President’s desired budget that has not been approved by Congress is against the law, and defies a series of fundamental constitutional principles. Specific quotes from these whistleblowers include:
- “NASA’s legal office should know better. They should know that what this Administration is doing is breaking NASA procedures, NASA regulations, and not following the will of Congress.”
- “It’s all under wraps. They’re not doing town halls anymore. Nothing is written down.”
- “All avenues of communication have been shut down [and employees are] not allowed to ask questions [or] talk to anyone above [their] supervisor.”
- “Compliance with the President’s Budget Resolution seems to be driven by threats to high level leaders.”
- “[NASA employees] have been told to get in line with the President’s Budget Resolution or lose their job or position.”
- “We’re expected not to bring safety concerns forward and to not use good judgment. I see safety issues around us all the time.”
- “[I am] very concerned that we’re going to see an astronaut death within a few years.”
- “It’s a dartboard in a dark room where darts are being thrown at random and hitting people.”
- “There is no longer a path for someone to come work at NASA when they grow up.”
- “The pipeline is now closed.”
- “[NASA is] losing our future workforce, [and it’s] really heartbreaking to see the future of NASA just disappearing.”
Although the Presidential Budget Request for the fiscal year 2026 has not been signed into law, NASA administrators have taken active steps during the latter three-fourths of FY2025 to implement those proposed changes, including by reducing the workforce by an unprecedented 4000+ employees already. The proposed budget cuts, as broken out by several different segments of NASA’s budget, are shown here.
Despite the fact that the proposed fiscal year 2026 budget has not become law, and that it is in no way legally binding, various reduction-in-force efforts have already been actively pursued and implemented by the interim NASA administrators that have served to date. Many scientists have already had their positions terminated, and over 4000 NASA employees, total, stand to lose their jobs over the coming months. By January 9, 2026, every full-time permanent employee of NASA, every excepted service (NEX) employee at NASA, every Pathways student, every term employee, and every part-time or probationary or remote work employee, will have their position at NASA terminated, in most cases, with no replacement coming.
In addition, even if no budget has been passed, various authority figures within the federal government have threatened to impound any such funds even if they are authorized by Congress. Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has directly threatened to do precisely that (as detailed in the whistleblower report), and the President himself, on the eve of the looming government shutdown, was quoted by the Washington Post as saying,
“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them, and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like… Because of the shutdown, we can do things medically and other ways, including benefits. We can cut large numbers of people.”
It’s too bad, because cuts like this specifically put the USA on the opposite path from the well-documented course our country took to become a scientific superpower.
This animation switches between the planned NASA astrophysics fleet, as originally published by NASA in December of 2016, and the current budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year for NASA astrophysics. With only a few notable exceptions, the entire portfolio of NASA astrophysics missions is slated to be eliminated.
One small example is that of the 124 NASA missions currently in development or performing operations, 41 of them are facing outright cancellation. Another is that a large fraction of the thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians, and NASA contractors who will suddenly find themselves out of work will no doubt take their talents and capabilities to other nations: a phenomenon known as a nationwide brain drain. Only, unlike in past years, the USA won’t be the beneficiary of a brain drain, as we were from the exodus of scientists from Nazi Germany or from post-Soviet Russia; this time, the intellectual loss will be ours.
And NASA, although it’s viewed as the crown jewel of American science, is not going to be the only casualty here. Similar, deep cuts are occurring at many of the most venerable of American science institutions, including:
- the National Science Foundation,
- the National Weather Service,
- the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
- the National Institutes of Health,
- the Department of Energy’s Office of Science,
- the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative,
- the Department of Education (which is slated to be eliminated entirely),
This 1958 photograph shows six scientists in the United States with a model of the Explorer-1 rocket. At far right, Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger is standing, next to Dr. Werner Von Braun (seated). Together, these two men were among the many former Nazis that were brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip: to secure their scientific knowledge and talents, and to use their expertise for the benefit of American science.
As history professor W. Patrick McCray specifically articulated:
“[Vannevar Bush, Roosevelt’s science advisor] eventually oversaw the production of this famous report called “Science: the Endless Frontier.” It laid out a blueprint for what would become U.S. science policy in the years and decades following the Second World War. They recognized we needed to have a cadre of trained scientists and engineers and needed to keep them fed and paid until the next conflict eventually breaks out. Scientists were seen as a resource to be stockpiled, like steel or oil, and that we can turn to in time of a national emergency. Federal leaders realized that they were actually not just investing in the products of research. They were investing in the people.”
The metaphor was that “basic research” was the tree that we would grow by investing in these scientists, and that tree would bear fruit that would benefit us down the line: health benefits, economic benefits, and national security benefits, even if the specific nature of those benefits couldn’t yet be known.
But without this scientific infrastructure and a system that supports it — and this is what we’re doomed to as we starve and choke off this tree — people from other countries will no longer come here to get their degrees. People who are already here will no longer remain here to help the American economy. And without these scientific resources, our country will lose out to others who do invest in them: Spain, France, Japan, China, Canada, and even Russia are among those all standing to benefit from the imminent cuts to NASA and beyond. Farewell to the NASA we knew, and to all the employees that made America the great place it was for so many decades. From here on out, things will never be the same.
Article Link
Archive
