The End Of NASA As We Know It?
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Welcome to this week's Check 6 podcast. I'm Joanne Somo, Aviation Week's Editorial Director and Editor-in-Chief of Aviation Week and Space Technology Magazine.

Is this the end of NASA as we know it? The Trump administration has proposed cutting the US space agency's budget to levels not seen since 1961, when President John F. Kennedy launched the race to the moon. And the White House last weekend withdrew the nomination of entrepreneur Jared Isaacman to run NASA, just days before the Senate was set to approve his nomination as administrator with bipartisan support.

Isaacman's nomination had been championed by SpaceX's Elon Musk, who suddenly seems to be on the outs with the president. Trump's budget proposal would cut NASA planetary, Earth and space science by nearly half, phase out the agency's costly space launch system, scale back operations on the International Space Station, and sharply reduce funding for aeronautics research. It would fund just a single area of new growth, technology development, to reach Mars.

The Planetary Society, a nonprofit space advocacy organization, is calling the White House's plan, quote, "an extinction-level event" for science. But will Congress go along? Trump so far has largely gotten his way with the Republican majority in his second term, but NASA has deftly spread its work across districts all over the country.

Lawmakers overseeing NASA funding historically have not been shy about pushing back on presidential proposals they feel threaten their parochial interests. Joining me to make sense of all of this is Irene Klotz, Aviation Week's Senior Space Editor, who is based at Cape Canaveral. And rounding out the discussion is Aviation Week's Chief Technology Editor, Graham Warwick.

Irene, I started covering NASA as a junior reporter back in 1992. I've seen a lot of proposals to reform the agency, but nothing quite like this. This is an earthquake.

It sure is, Joe. You know, something you said in your opening comments about the parochial interests of Congress is really the reason why NASA's up a creek as far as the SLS and Orion, which traditionally has been one of the two programs that there's been widespread support in Congress for, a

Partially for the reason you mentioned about having business in their districts. It was Congress that decided to make the SLS not new technology, but really robust.

rolling over the shuttle contracts to the point where I didn't even realize this, but I learned this when I was doing the research for the cover story I wrote recently, that the contracts for the SLS actually to Boeing, they actually still mentioned the Ares program from Constellation. They literally just rolled the vehicles, the contracting vehicles from one to the next and

Clearly, it's a program that's been over budget and administration after administration has been seemingly unable to bring the program into a manageable item. So this mess is kind of largely of conflict.

congressional making, and it's really unclear how far Congress will let the Trump administration go in reforming NASA. And, you know, as we've learned, the Trump administration is not a patient one and very expects people to really follow the marching orders.

And which may have been a reason for the falling out or the seemingly falling out with with Elon Musk. And science is a little bit of an outlier in this because rarely is there a Congress, a congressional advocate like John Culbertson was for the Europa Clipper mission.

which wasn't even in his district. And Barbara Mikulski in Maryland, of course, was a huge advocate for Hubble. Those affiliations of congressional representation for particular science missions so far doesn't really seem to have surfaced. So it's kind of an easier target, though certainly groups like Planetary Society and other industry and public education and outreach organizations are majoring

making it well known, the disappointment with the way things are. And you had written, there's something like 19 missions that are already underway that would be canceled under this proposal, science missions? There's several of the science missions, including it,

underway. Fortunately, the Trump administration did not decide to recall the Europa Clipper mission from its trajectory to come back and end it. It said that would be ongoing. Apparently, the Vera Rubin telescope is going to be cleared to go. I think among the

tabling of the Mars sample return effort, which is the culmination of decades of work dating back really to the Mars Pathfinder mission in 97, which was the first mission to resume Mars exploration since Viking 20 years before. And NASA had followed this very careful strategy to follow the water and characterize the environment and then look

for places where life could have evolved and places where that if there were signs of life, it could have been preserved in various strata and rocks, the environmental conditions, sending the rovers to characterize, caching them, sample and getting them prepped. And now they're literally sitting on the surface of Mars and on the Perseverance rover and

who knows if and when they're going to come back. But that's truly disappointing since that is...

science that really has the fundamental ability to change perspectives of our, really our place in the universe as far as whether those samples do contain any evidence of life. Personally, I've always, I would feel really disappointed if I died before learning if that was

If that is possible, and the fact that the technology exists to answer that question in my lifetime, I find amazing. And to have them just be sitting there on the surface of Mars seems cruel.

So, Irene, I want to get to Graham, but I have one more for you. I got to ask you about Isaacman. I mean, President Trump has made a lot of controversial nominations, but this wasn't one of them. He was respected. He wasn't a lawmaker or a government bureaucrat. He was sort of a breath of fresh air, bipartisan support. So why pull his nomination when it's just about to go through?

Well, that probably was the problem. Trump and the administration really seemed to almost have a loyalty oath. And there's been a lot of controversial picks for cabinet members and so forth and questioning their credentials to be in the positions that they're in, all kinds of issues. And

Jared Isaacman did not have those. In fact, the one area that he was kind of pinged on in the hearing, the Senate Commerce hearing, was about his affiliation with Elon Musk. And he, I think, handled that really, really well. And he actually did a podcast with a business and

investment group called All In yesterday was quite interesting and basically said there's this misconception that he and Elon are like, you know, best friends and he characterized it very differently. Elon is a business associate. He, you know, he bought two rides from SpaceX for missions and

It didn't seem from the way Jared characterized it that this was a, I want my guy in at the head of NASA. Although I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the one area of growth, as you mentioned in your comments at the start of the podcast,

is Mars, and one of the things the budget calls for is $200 million initially for a demonstration to land a human-class lander on Mars, uncrewed. And coincidentally, Elon had outlined plans to do just that at an employee webcast the day before to send Starship to Mars in 26, the next time the planets are aligned for optimal flight.

So it's a mess. Okay. Graham Warwick, a lot of people forget that the first A in NASA stands for aeronautics. In fact, NASA's predecessor was NACA, which was founded 110 years ago to help the U.S. stay on the cutting edge of aeronautical technology. What would this budget do to aeronautics research? Well, I think it has the potential to be an existential threat to

Basically, they're cutting the budget, the money, by about 37% to just under 590 million, which still sounds like a lot of money, but that's a big cut, right? I think even more worrying for me is the accompanying personnel cut, right? So they're cutting... The plan is to cut the personnel in aeronautics from just under 1,600 to just under 900, which means that...

that the government's contribution to maintaining leadership in U.S. aeronautics is in the hands of less than 900 people by the time this is over. And the charter that they've given them in the budget is to ensure U.S. leadership in aeronautics, right? So they gut aeronautics and then they give them the job of making sure that the U.S. continues to lead in aeronautics. So...

The cuts kind of fell where we thought they would. You know, basically, the Trump administration has said, get rid of all the programs we don't like, i.e. if they have green, anything to do with green, get rid of them. Whether they're good or bad, just get rid of them, they're green.

And then the other cuts are kind of spread out over, you know, other things. So they've kind of hit the biggest bit that gets hit is the NASA Aeronautics is divided into about five or six program, you know, major program groups. So there's a thing called Advanced Air Vehicles Program, which is doing the next generations of aircraft.

So that took the biggest hit, and it's been cut from six programs down to three. The Sustainable Flight Demonstrator is gone, you know, things like that. And then what they call IOSP, which is integrated something or other, or IASP, can't remember exactly what it's called, but it's the bit that does the flight research. That's been cut.

It takes a big cut as well, and that loses a lot of the flight research that was planned. They keep the X-59 low-boom flight demonstrator, but, you know, one of the things, it's kind of a schizophrenic budget document, and I kind of, you know, I feel for the NASA folks inside NASA, they had to look at the cut and say, how do we come up with a coherent plan?

plan when we've been cut by this much and it isn't really coherent to be frank, it's schizophrenic. So it says that NASA, once all of its existing programs are finished, the ones that they don't cut, right? Once the ones those run their term, then NASA will focus on revolutionary propulsion for civil aeronautics, right?

But at the same time, they cut all the current propulsion programs like the small core engine that's going. And then they give you no idea what this revolutionary propulsion will be. So it's kind of a nonsense budget. I feel strongly for the people that had to try and pull something together. But it is not a strategy. It is a triage. And what's left doesn't really hold together as an integrated strategy.

that would ensure U.S. leadership. Graham, can I play devil's advocate for a minute? So one of the points that Isaacman made is that basically the NASA organization that exists today is what was designed to get to the moon more than 50 years ago and to work on, have a government-funded program, work on projects that

have or should be in the commercial sector is not the best use of a government of taxpayer funding and the standing army of NASA workers. And he particularly, I mean, he's a pilot long before he got interested in space. But one of the points he was making is that the aviation industry is quite mature in the

why would the government agency be working on research that other commercial companies can work on? So that's a perfectly acceptable argument, except that's not how the aerospace industry works, right? The aerospace industry works with the government across the world

helping with the early stage research. So I mean, NASA, the way NASA's aerospace, aeronautics research is structured now is kind of a response to what Europe did with a thing called Clean Aviation, which is a government, a very large, long term government, public private partnership to develop technologies for the next generation of commercial aircraft. So that's what kind of shaped what we have, or what we had at NASA before this, these cuts.

And it was a response to the way that the industry works. One of the things that it says in the budget documents is to make NASA Aeronautics more cost effective. NASA Aeronautics leverages industry's investment like no other part of NASA does. Every single program that they do of any sort of size is cost shared with industry, right? They do not go off and spend money.

money developing things that industry doesn't want or the industry isn't prepared to put some skin in the game for. They've had many programs they've stopped because industry said, okay, no, we don't want to pick that up. So they've just stopped a program when industry said we're not interested. But when industry continues to put money in, they continue to put the program. And, you know, the argument is that early stage research is risky and expensive and that the companies in the U.S.,

the US companies we're talking about are by and large not willing to spend that money. And the returns only come 20 years later, right? So they don't come at any time close by.

So that if you don't invest or help the companies invest or, you know, help bear the burden of investing, you won't get the technologies that you need 20 years later. So almost every technology in any turbine engine flying today started somewhere inside NASA and increasingly as a cost-shared endeavor. So it's...

The problem I think that NASA Aeronautics has had is the downsizing of the consolidation of the U.S. industry so that you end up serving one, you appear to serve one company, i.e. Boeing. The fact is, you know, as we currently stand, there are multiple companies that are

Being helped by NASA to try and get to a point where they may be able to springboard off to become like Jet Zero, a competitor to Boeing, or enter the business aviation market or some other market to try and build the industry up from its kind of its narrow focus that we have at the moment.

But I will agree, you know, you can look at NASA's research and say, yeah, a bit of low-boom flight demonstrators, a classic example. I mean, why are we spending money, $900 million, to do low-boom when we don't even know if we really want to bring supersonic flying back?

When the low boom started, there was a very strong signal from industry that if they could remove the restriction to supersonic flight over land, they would invest. So the Gulfstream has always said, we'll do a supersonic business as soon as you allow me to fly supersonic over land, which means changing the rules. And the only way to change the rules is you have data to base it on. So that's where it came from. So it is an industry driven, but sometimes that sort of connection doesn't look so obvious.

Well, in the space domain, I think what's happened is NASA has not been leading-edge technology in launch. Certainly SpaceX leapfrogged the agency as far as putting money in and basically parlaying the investment it got from NASA. In some ways, NASA did cede the reusability of launch vehicles by backing SpaceX early on, but then it didn't stop SpaceX

where half its budget, you know, was going to as far as like SLSRI and those programs were not managed in a cost-effective way. And, uh,

I think that what Isaacman's goal was, if he had gotten to be a NASA administrator, was to really go through the program by program and see what was cutting edge, what has the potential to breed the next SpaceX's and the new Boeing's and table the rest of it and weatherize

Whether the U.S. government needs a 17,000-plus member civil service agency to accomplish that is

You know, that's a whole nother question. I guess everybody was working on, you know, nuclear electric propulsion or some of the other technologies that are needed in space and aeronautics. You know, maybe it is, but that really hasn't been been the case. So there's an opportunity, obviously, when the apple cart has been upset to build something new. Jared is a builder. And I think that's why he was very even the Democrats who didn't vote for him and and and

more than a handful did, enough to clear the nomination easier than his predecessor, Jim Bridenstine. Well, not his predecessor, but Jim Bridenstine under the first Trump administration, which was a strictly partisan vote, is because he is respected as someone that started building companies when he was quite young and has followed through. I mean, he's got a performance record. So it'll be really interesting to see whom else they choose and whether the status quo at NASA

you know, can continue. It doesn't quite seem possible in this administration.

Irene, we're just about out of time, but I wanted to bring this all full circle. It seems like you're saying NASA does need to change. I mean, the big reduction we've seen in launch costs was driven by private industry, which sort of made SLS obsolete. The massive increases we see in launches at Cape Canaveral, driven by private industry. SpaceX is doing things that would take NASA decades to do, if ever. So we do. NASA needs to reform, right? Change? Well, yes.

NASA is going to be, what, 67 years old this year. And it's always hard as we get older to stop doing what we've been doing and, you know, kind of prepare for the next chapter. And bureaucracies are even...

you know, it's institutionalized to continue to perpetuate. It's hard enough doing that as an individual, you know, to say, well, you know, I want to do this now instead of this and be forward looking. And I think that NASA has, at least in the space domain, has,

has kind of confused what is groundbreaking. Groundbreaking is not to kind of parlay off what SpaceX is doing and say, "Wow, it's so cool. Look at this rocket land," as opposed to what they've done traditionally. And really how I became a space reporter is by learning about the technology and the science.

It doesn't have that, at least in like the public outreach and things, it doesn't have that expertise anymore. And they haven't really figured out how to kind of get their mojo back. And it's a culturally, it's a lovely organization. They really value teamwork. They value politeness and respect.

it's been a mismatch with the kind of the harshness, which the way things have been unveiled. And we'll see. You know, there's a there's a I had an interview with a member of Senator Cruz's staff the other day, and he was just kind of pointing out that it's

In the short term, everything's very dramatic and it seems extreme. And then the point of the slow process of politics and politicking in the United States is it evolves over a much longer period of time. So Jared was very gracious and completely says, you know, this wasn't Trump's fault that he's out.

He did say that it was, you know, as far as Trump had made a comment that, you know, that came under his attention, that a review of, you know,

I forgot what these exact words were, but basically a review of past affiliations, which all you have. I mean, we all have Google and others use AI. It takes about a quarter of a second to see that Jared Isaac donated to Democratic's.

candidates long before all of this. So that's very disingenuous to presume that that is the reason why. And the timing of it, he was dismissed the same day that Elon Musk left his special service. So I don't know. We'll see. I've covered space through beginning with the Reagan administration, and I've never experienced anything this dramatic and potentially jarring. And

But certainly things weren't going to be able to continue the way they were indefinitely. I personally am not buying that donation story. Donald Trump himself has donated to Democratic candidates in the past. I don't buy that. Graham Orrick, let's give you the final word. Going on what Irene is saying about that NASA needs to change, and I completely get that. And I know that also applies to aeronautics.

And if a strategy comes out of this that focuses NASA more closely on doing that breakthrough and enabling U.S. industry to build on that, I'm fine. But you have to do that in an open-minded way. You cannot say anything green we don't want because efficiency matters.

is reducing fuel burn. Reducing fuel burn is reducing emissions. Reducing fuel burn is reducing airline operating costs. You have to stop being...

dictatorial about this and say, do we need to be the leader? It's efficiency. It's safety. And you put your... There's no... They've cut funding for safety research in this thing, right? You need to focus on the things the industry needs and wants.

to be competitive and to lead. And for that, you have to put the political messaging to the side and sit down and say, OK, we've got this amount of money, we've got this number of people, how do we best use it? I don't think the atmosphere at the moment is right for that to happen, but I'm hoping that when Congress gets stuck in on this budget, that aeronautics doesn't get forgotten while they focus on space and that they drive that need for an actual strategy for competitive leadership.

And on that note, we're going to wrap things up, but we will certainly be back to talk about this more, I suspect, Irene and Graham. But for now, that is a wrap for this week's Check 6 podcast. A special thanks to our podcast producer in London, Guy Ferniho. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Check 6 so you never miss an episode.

If you found today's discussion helpful, consider leaving a rating or review. Better yet, share this episode with a friend or colleague. That's all the time we have for now. Thank you for your time and have a great week.

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