This week, as part of the budget development process for the 2026 financial year, Trump’s White House shared the version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.
This initial version of the administration’s budget demand provides for an overall decrease of approximately 20% of the agency’s budget, which, according to $ 5 billion, compared to an overall summit of around $ 25 billion. However, the majority of cuts are concentrated within the agency’s scientific mission management, which oversees all planetary sciences, earth science, astrophysics research, etc.
According to “Passback” documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency’s scientific programs would receive almost a 50% drop in funding. After the agency received $ 7.5 billion for the fiscal year 2025, the Trump administration proposed a high -level budget of science of only $ 3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.
Costader the cups
Among the proposals were: a two -thirds reduction in astrophysics, to $ 487 million; A reduction of two thirds greater than heliophysics, to $ 455 million; A drop of more than 50% of the Earth Science, to $ 1.033 billion; And a 30% reduction in planetary sciences to $ 1.929 billion.
Although the budget would continue to take care of the current missions such as the Hubble space telescope and the James Webb space telescope, it would kill the highly anticipated Roman grace space telescope, an observatory considered as equal with these two world class instruments which is already fully assembled and on the budget for a launch in two years.
“Passback supports the continuous operation of Hubble and James Webb space telescopes and assumes that no funding is provided for other telescopes,” said the document.