Trump's NASA Wants to Gut Itself, Own Space, Abandon Earth

Powered by defunding efforts and a lack of clear, unified plans, Trump's NASA is a mess of rhetoric and proposals.

In recent days, it has become increasingly clear that NASA leadership intends to ignore restored funding from lawmakers and work based on Trump's budget cut of six billion dollars. As part of that, the agency intends to eliminate positions or fire employees, numbered in the thousands. This comes after 4,000 people left the agency this year already.

Meanwhile, NASA's Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program has recently been rewritten to no longer have the agency continue its human presence in space. Instead, space station providers, renting their orbiting outposts to NASA, will be required to support month-long missions, something that appears to substantially benefit Vast.

Then, last week on August 13th, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at reorganizing regulations for commercial space activity and for a rhetoric win after the cuts and losses. According to an accompanying fact sheet, the order:

• Directs the Secretary of Transportation, in consultation with the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, to eliminate or expedite environmental reviews for launch and reentry licenses and permits.
• Directs the Secretary of Transportation to review regulatory requirements to eliminate outdated, redundant, or overly restrictive rules for launch and reentry vehicles.
• Instructs the Secretary of Commerce, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Transportation, and the Administrator of NASA, to evaluate State compliance with the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) and whether States are hindering spaceport infrastructure development under the CZMA, or otherwise placing limitations on spaceport development that are inconsistent with Federal law.
• Directs the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Transportation, and the Administrator of NASA to align their review processes to eliminate duplicative regulations and expedite spaceport development.

A press release from NASA was also sent out after the signing, repeating many of the same points but highlighting that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation will become a political appointee, while the Office of Space Commerce will be moved to the Office of the Commerce Secretary.

Despite official rhetoric about unleashing American superiority in space, it is highlighted that the order weakens NASA's position, already under budget troubles, and largely benefits private companies like SpaceX, who are accused of damaging ecosystems across the Gulf of Mexico.

Not long after that executive order, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy made vague comments about wanting America to do all of the business in space. That would be an impossibility unless China, Europe, and Russia stopped going to space and no longer wished to be sovereign nations in orbit.

That comment comes after Duffy let slip that he wants the U.S. to claim parts of the Moon via nuclear reactors, a clear violation of the Outer Space Treaty.

Duffy also perceived the order as a green light for NASA to no longer perform critical Earth sciences, telling Fox Business:

"All the climate science and all of the other priorities that the last administration had at NASA, we’re going to move aside, and all of the science that we do is going to be directed towards exploration, which is the mission of NASA ... not to do all these Earth sciences."

If Duffy's perception of the order turns into action, he will be ignoring a key part of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which says that the American space agency must expand human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere alongside in space. Human-caused climate change is one such phenomenon.

Sadly, as The Hill highlighted, moves to abandon climate research is not surprising as the second Trump Administration has moved to deny and downplay climate change and sought to dismantle scientific research into it.