Sending astronauts to the moon and on Mars even if it means sacrificing important scientific programs: the White House unveiled its budget on Friday for the famous American space agency, NASA, which it intends to put the diet.
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Like many federal ministries and agencies, NASA should see some of its heated flagship projects and its budget envelope shrink significantly if this plan was approved by the Congress.
Among the major changes is the gradual abandonment of the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule, developed for the Lunar Program Artemis.
These very expensive devices and whose development has been late, should be left out after the Mission Artemis 3 – which must return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972 – to be replaced by rockets and private companies, like those of Elon Musk SpaceX, great ally of Donald Trump, is detailed.
The future Gateway Lunar Space Station, developed by NASA and several other international space agencies and having to be installed in orbit around the Moon, should be purely abandoned.
It would be the same for the long -awaited return to the earth of rock samples collected on Mars, and which possibly contain traces of ancient life.
So many reversals presented by the executive as necessary for the objectives of NASA, which aims under Trump to succeed in sending before China, great rival power, men at the same time on the moon and on the red planet.
In all, it is a reduction of approximately 24% of the NASA budget which is proposed by the executive, with important cuts in its branches dedicated to space and earth sciences, in particular in the funding of certain satellite surveillance programs used to study climate change.
According to the Planetary Society, an American organization promoting spatial exploration, this proposal constitutes the “largest reduction over one year of the NASA budget in history”. Such cuts will “not” make the agency more effective, but will cause chaos (…) and undermine American leadership in space, “she said in a statement.
Donald Trump’s return to power, this time accompanied by Elon Musk, a key player in the space sector, raises major upheavals in the American space program as well as possible conflicts of interest, the probable future boss of NASA being notably deemed close to the multimillionaire.
