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Comments about SLS miss what’s happening. SLS is inefficient and wasteful, but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive cu

Comments about SLS miss what’s happening. SLS is inefficient and wasteful, but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1]. Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, Swift, and many more in planetary and heliophysics. This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation. The private sector is irrelevant here: SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research. [1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/trump-administration-moves-to-tighten-the-noose-around-nasa-science-missions/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/trump-administration-m...

jacobolus 1y ago
The point seems to be to cut US scientific capacity (and more generally intellectual research capacity) across the board, as a way of hitting back at "the elites" who have the temerity to call GOP politicians and donors out for their lies and bad behavior.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > a way of hitting back at "the elites" who have the temerity to call GOP politicians and donors out for their lies and bad behavior True for academic institutions. No evidence this is the motivation at NASA. Simpler: science costs money and leadership believes that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut than paying for poor folks' healthcare or basic research. Fortunately, it looks like Beijing is ready to pick up the torch [1]. [1] https://www.fdd.org/analysis/policy_briefs/2025/03/19/aiming-for-parity-with-u-s-china-announces-increase-in-science-and-technology-spending/ https://www.fdd.org/analysis/policy_briefs/2025/03/19/aiming...
  - msgodel 1y ago
    >that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut The federal government now accepts donations if you don't want the money.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > federal government now accepts donations if you don't want the money This is silly. I prefer the money be spent on things that have a larger ROI, collectively, than I can attain individually. Destroying the money doesn't achieve that aim.
      - msgodel 1y ago
        Well, the rest of us disagree. You need consensus for public institutions and no one on the left or the right has been willing to build that.
        jacobolus 1y ago
        Actually, the "rest of us" largely agree, as reflected in the laws our elected representatives have established. We have collectively appropriated the money and set up the institutional framework for spending it. Folks smashing down that system are doing a significant part of it illegally, with no credible justification or public support, in several recent cases in contemptuous violation of direct court orders.
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > the rest of us disagree Irrelevant to the silliness of suggesting destroying money as a solution.
    - throwawayq3423 1y ago
      The current government would take any money you give them and give it back to rich people in the form of tax cuts. So no, I don't want to Venmo cash to somebody who doesn't need it.
      - msgodel 1y ago
        That has always effectively been how government programs work, even if they launder it through poor people and immigrants first.
  - acdha 1y ago
    NASA is “the elites” in a key area: they’ve done a ton of research confirming climate change is real and impactful. I think the general antipathy for education intersected strongly with the wing of the Republican Party which sees climate change as the enemy both because many of them are funded by fossil fuel companies and because they see all forms of collective action or addressing externalities as an existential threat.
  - jacobolus 1y ago
    The cuts to NASA as well as NOAA, NIH, USGS, USDA, FWS, DOE, etc. are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value (not to mention all sorts of work whose value can't be easily quantified). Maybe "smashing things and ruining people's lives and work is fun per se" is a better explanation than anything more complicated. Pretty shitty for the rest of us though.
    - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
      NOAA, NASA, NIH, FWS, and DOE all regularly push how bad the situation is around global climate change. That's likely why they're getting targeted. The GOP's position on climate change is sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming LALALALALA and having credible government agencies pointing out the ongoing effects is detrimental to this strategy. Meanwhile the USDA, FWS, and DOE do those pesky regulatory things, like making it so you can't torture animals quite as much in the pursuit of profits, can't build coal power plants in the center of national parks, and can't dump raw chemical waste into your local wetlands. Utter killjoys they are. Like, not meaning to be shitty to you in specific, but it's no secret why these agencies are getting targeted. If you say anything the admin doesn't like, or dare to tell people with money that they can't do literally anything they want at all times irrespective of it's effects on broader society, you've got a target on your back.
      - wat10000 1y ago
        I think it’s even simpler: government is seen as bad. The military and some law enforcement are excepted, but otherwise, dismantling government agencies is a goal in and of itself. I listened to way too much Rush Limbaugh in the 90s and none of this stuff is a surprise. Distressing, but exactly what this particular segment of Republicans have been working towards.
        hansvm 1y ago
        I could buy that argument if it weren't for the disparity in which organizations are being targeted and the degree to which they're being attacked. Getting rid of all government is just the story they use to appease their base.
  - kube-system 1y ago
    > Simpler: science costs money and leadership believes that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut than paying for poor folks' healthcare or basic research. That's a simple explanation but not a good one. All government salaries across all jobs everywhere in the federal government are about 4% of the federal budget. The DRPs going on are 100% about "draining the swamp", not saving money. This is literally what the administrators of these agencies are saying on TV news. They think science is biased against their worldviews and they want to replace them.
- Supermancho 1y ago
  I think NASA cuts are about giving money to billionaires, so they can build or expand their capitalist version. Obviously, this will be more efficient because it funnels money to the wealthy directly.
potato3732842 1y ago
>but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1]. Sounds like ye olde Sowell quote[1] about organizational priorities and budget cuts in action. [1]https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budget_politics.html https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budge...
- overfeed 1y ago
  This isn't cogent, IMO, since Republicans control all 3 arms of government. Who would be the target of intentional public outrage? Also, this is far less incendiary than the cuts to public benefits.
  - largbae 1y ago
    I think GP is suggesting that NASA administrators might have an incentive to apply budget cuts to programs that get more public outrage. However I would imagine human spaceflight to be the more visible type of program for the average voter.
- dehrmann 1y ago
  Bureaucracies like to grow, and they're very resistant to cuts, so they become inefficient entities poorly suited to current needs. Private companies have competition as a force that forces some amount of accountability, but I have yet to hear a strategy for effectively discontinuing work the government shouldn't be doing.
  - psadauskas 1y ago
    > Private companies have competition as a force that forces some amount of accountability [citation needed] Private companies these days just buy all their competitors to minimize accountability and maximize shareholder returns.
godelski 1y ago
> the world leader in space science. I also want to add that science is a critical investment area for anyone interested in engineering. There is this common belief of "I just want to make things work" and that science is really unimportant here and are concerned with things that don't matter. The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground. In a lot of ways, science is just like engineering (I say this having been both, professionally). Any good engineer knows it is important to find problems. Then you fix those problems. Well... that's really what science does too. When doing science you're just working at the next level of abstraction. It is all about "making things work." Everyone is on the same team here and I'm not sure why we draw these divisions. I mean what would science even be about if it wasn't "making things work?" So I hear people say that engineering is where we get the real value (especially monetarily), but I'd disagree. It matters, but I think it is framing things weirdly. I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever. I'd make a slightly less confident wager that the economic value of calculus is more valuable than all inventions post 1700. That's just one thing too... even if it was the only Science/Math "investment" then it seems like a pretty good ROI [0] Yes, math, but I'm throwing under science. Nitpick if you want but you're missing the thesis
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- eru 1y ago
  > The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground. That doesn't mean that government investment in science is necessarily a good idea. > I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever. Where they financed by the government? Btw, I can also look at winning lottery tickets and say that their return-on-investment was awesome, but that doesn't mean buying lottery tickets is a good idea.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
cyphertruck 1y ago
These cuts are absolutely not the ones I would make, but the reality is not as it is being portrayed. The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putting humans there. Finally, literally everything that SpaceX has done or built is a result of science that SpaceX has had to do, including colder than ever propellants, and life support systems, etc. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was not a replication of the 1960s spacewalks, as it was based on new suit science, etc. Somehow, people like to pretend that probes landing on other planets is the only form of science that is done. And the reality is that new entrants from RKLB, SpaceX, Firefly, and a lot of smaller companies are doing exactly this kind of science as well--- but at vastly lower cost. The inescapable reality-- and this will always be the case with political organizations like NASA-- is no matter how well meaning they cannot do science as effectively as private organizations. NASA slows science down in large part because they are hamstrung by congress. Yes, it looks like some way too expensive projects are getting cancelled and that means some waste of money. It's not the choice I would make. But in the next 10 years, nearly %100 of all science will be done outside of NASA.... because the NASA overhead is too much, makes things too expensive, and less reliable. For example, it's better to blow up 1 falcon one, and 2 falcon 9s, to get 500 successful falcon 9 launches at 1/100th the cost per kilogram of mass to orbit than to have a completely successful SLS system that launches only 2-3 times a decade. The former accelerates science, lowers the cost of all science and more science gets done per dollar than the latter. That transition is happening whether government, the senate and congress is aboard.... or not.
- jrflowers 1y ago
  > they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts Exactly. Like if I am an uber driver and I bring a surgeon to a hospital, it counts as me doing surgery since the most important part of surgery is the process of driving to the place where it happens
  - mmmlinux 1y ago
kamaal 1y ago
>>This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation. Many people grossly underestimate restarting a stopped process which took tremendous inertia to get rolling at the first place. For all practical purposes its almost like you permanently lose the ability.

jacobolus 1y ago

The point seems to be to cut US scientific capacity (and more generally intellectual research capacity) across the board, as a way of hitting back at "the elites" who have the temerity to call GOP politicians and donors out for their lies and bad behavior.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> a way of hitting back at "the elites" who have the temerity to call GOP politicians and donors out for their lies and bad behavior True for academic institutions. No evidence this is the motivation at NASA. Simpler: science costs money and leadership believes that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut than paying for poor folks' healthcare or basic research. Fortunately, it looks like Beijing is ready to pick up the torch [1]. [1] https://www.fdd.org/analysis/policy_briefs/2025/03/19/aiming-for-parity-with-u-s-china-announces-increase-in-science-and-technology-spending/ https://www.fdd.org/analysis/policy_briefs/2025/03/19/aiming...
- msgodel 1y ago
  >that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut The federal government now accepts donations if you don't want the money.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > federal government now accepts donations if you don't want the money This is silly. I prefer the money be spent on things that have a larger ROI, collectively, than I can attain individually. Destroying the money doesn't achieve that aim.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      Well, the rest of us disagree. You need consensus for public institutions and no one on the left or the right has been willing to build that.
      - jacobolus 1y ago
        Actually, the "rest of us" largely agree, as reflected in the laws our elected representatives have established. We have collectively appropriated the money and set up the institutional framework for spending it. Folks smashing down that system are doing a significant part of it illegally, with no credible justification or public support, in several recent cases in contemptuous violation of direct court orders.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > the rest of us disagree Irrelevant to the silliness of suggesting destroying money as a solution.
  - throwawayq3423 1y ago
    The current government would take any money you give them and give it back to rich people in the form of tax cuts. So no, I don't want to Venmo cash to somebody who doesn't need it.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      That has always effectively been how government programs work, even if they launder it through poor people and immigrants first.
- acdha 1y ago
  NASA is “the elites” in a key area: they’ve done a ton of research confirming climate change is real and impactful. I think the general antipathy for education intersected strongly with the wing of the Republican Party which sees climate change as the enemy both because many of them are funded by fossil fuel companies and because they see all forms of collective action or addressing externalities as an existential threat.
- jacobolus 1y ago
  The cuts to NASA as well as NOAA, NIH, USGS, USDA, FWS, DOE, etc. are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value (not to mention all sorts of work whose value can't be easily quantified). Maybe "smashing things and ruining people's lives and work is fun per se" is a better explanation than anything more complicated. Pretty shitty for the rest of us though.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    NOAA, NASA, NIH, FWS, and DOE all regularly push how bad the situation is around global climate change. That's likely why they're getting targeted. The GOP's position on climate change is sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming LALALALALA and having credible government agencies pointing out the ongoing effects is detrimental to this strategy. Meanwhile the USDA, FWS, and DOE do those pesky regulatory things, like making it so you can't torture animals quite as much in the pursuit of profits, can't build coal power plants in the center of national parks, and can't dump raw chemical waste into your local wetlands. Utter killjoys they are. Like, not meaning to be shitty to you in specific, but it's no secret why these agencies are getting targeted. If you say anything the admin doesn't like, or dare to tell people with money that they can't do literally anything they want at all times irrespective of it's effects on broader society, you've got a target on your back.
    - wat10000 1y ago
      I think it’s even simpler: government is seen as bad. The military and some law enforcement are excepted, but otherwise, dismantling government agencies is a goal in and of itself. I listened to way too much Rush Limbaugh in the 90s and none of this stuff is a surprise. Distressing, but exactly what this particular segment of Republicans have been working towards.
      - hansvm 1y ago
        I could buy that argument if it weren't for the disparity in which organizations are being targeted and the degree to which they're being attacked. Getting rid of all government is just the story they use to appease their base.
- kube-system 1y ago
  > Simpler: science costs money and leadership believes that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut than paying for poor folks' healthcare or basic research. That's a simple explanation but not a good one. All government salaries across all jobs everywhere in the federal government are about 4% of the federal budget. The DRPs going on are 100% about "draining the swamp", not saving money. This is literally what the administrators of these agencies are saying on TV news. They think science is biased against their worldviews and they want to replace them.
Supermancho 1y ago
I think NASA cuts are about giving money to billionaires, so they can build or expand their capitalist version. Obviously, this will be more efficient because it funnels money to the wealthy directly.

potato3732842 1y ago

>but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1]. Sounds like ye olde Sowell quote[1] about organizational priorities and budget cuts in action. [1]https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budget_politics.html https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budge...

overfeed 1y ago
This isn't cogent, IMO, since Republicans control all 3 arms of government. Who would be the target of intentional public outrage? Also, this is far less incendiary than the cuts to public benefits.
- largbae 1y ago
  I think GP is suggesting that NASA administrators might have an incentive to apply budget cuts to programs that get more public outrage. However I would imagine human spaceflight to be the more visible type of program for the average voter.
dehrmann 1y ago
Bureaucracies like to grow, and they're very resistant to cuts, so they become inefficient entities poorly suited to current needs. Private companies have competition as a force that forces some amount of accountability, but I have yet to hear a strategy for effectively discontinuing work the government shouldn't be doing.
- psadauskas 1y ago
  > Private companies have competition as a force that forces some amount of accountability [citation needed] Private companies these days just buy all their competitors to minimize accountability and maximize shareholder returns.

godelski 1y ago

> the world leader in space science. I also want to add that science is a critical investment area for anyone interested in engineering. There is this common belief of "I just want to make things work" and that science is really unimportant here and are concerned with things that don't matter. The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground. In a lot of ways, science is just like engineering (I say this having been both, professionally). Any good engineer knows it is important to find problems. Then you fix those problems. Well... that's really what science does too. When doing science you're just working at the next level of abstraction. It is all about "making things work." Everyone is on the same team here and I'm not sure why we draw these divisions. I mean what would science even be about if it wasn't "making things work?" So I hear people say that engineering is where we get the real value (especially monetarily), but I'd disagree. It matters, but I think it is framing things weirdly. I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever. I'd make a slightly less confident wager that the economic value of calculus is more valuable than all inventions post 1700. That's just one thing too... even if it was the only Science/Math "investment" then it seems like a pretty good ROI [0] Yes, math, but I'm throwing under science. Nitpick if you want but you're missing the thesis

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
eru 1y ago
> The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground. That doesn't mean that government investment in science is necessarily a good idea. > I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever. Where they financed by the government? Btw, I can also look at winning lottery tickets and say that their return-on-investment was awesome, but that doesn't mean buying lottery tickets is a good idea.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

cyphertruck 1y ago

These cuts are absolutely not the ones I would make, but the reality is not as it is being portrayed. The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putting humans there. Finally, literally everything that SpaceX has done or built is a result of science that SpaceX has had to do, including colder than ever propellants, and life support systems, etc. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was not a replication of the 1960s spacewalks, as it was based on new suit science, etc. Somehow, people like to pretend that probes landing on other planets is the only form of science that is done. And the reality is that new entrants from RKLB, SpaceX, Firefly, and a lot of smaller companies are doing exactly this kind of science as well--- but at vastly lower cost. The inescapable reality-- and this will always be the case with political organizations like NASA-- is no matter how well meaning they cannot do science as effectively as private organizations. NASA slows science down in large part because they are hamstrung by congress. Yes, it looks like some way too expensive projects are getting cancelled and that means some waste of money. It's not the choice I would make. But in the next 10 years, nearly %100 of all science will be done outside of NASA.... because the NASA overhead is too much, makes things too expensive, and less reliable. For example, it's better to blow up 1 falcon one, and 2 falcon 9s, to get 500 successful falcon 9 launches at 1/100th the cost per kilogram of mass to orbit than to have a completely successful SLS system that launches only 2-3 times a decade. The former accelerates science, lowers the cost of all science and more science gets done per dollar than the latter. That transition is happening whether government, the senate and congress is aboard.... or not.

jrflowers 1y ago
> they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts Exactly. Like if I am an uber driver and I bring a surgeon to a hospital, it counts as me doing surgery since the most important part of surgery is the process of driving to the place where it happens
- mmmlinux 1y ago

kamaal 1y ago

>>This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation. Many people grossly underestimate restarting a stopped process which took tremendous inertia to get rolling at the first place. For all practical purposes its almost like you permanently lose the ability.