Actual, Current, Real-World Cuts to NASA Planetary R&A

Actual, Current, Real-World Cuts to NASA Planetary R&A
Fri 2025-07-11 09:41  
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Planetary research and analysis ("R&A") cuts are far more severe than the overall cuts to NASA science (even though R&A is a very small fraction of the budget).

There has been some public attention to the cuts to NASA, especially its missions and science activities. This is mostly focused on future budget appropriations, which Congress is still working on, but there are real, actual, current cuts to planetary science R&A that have already happened. Research and analysis funding is what enables work to advance our knowledge of the universe. It funds students, professors, research scientists like me, contractors, and also civil servants at NASA.

Research and analysis proposal opportunities for the NASA 2025 year---called ROSES 2025---were just announced yesterday. I did a graphical deep dive into how bad the situation is for soft money researchers working on NASA science. Let's zoom in:

Overall, the current real-world 82% cut to planetary science R&A is much more severe than the 47% cut to NASA science in general. There are a few details making this comparison inexact. My bar chart is based on ROSES 2024 and ROSES 2025, which gives the amounts available in various programs for year 1 of new awards, and many of these awards are 3 years long. The 47% cut to science is calculated by the Planetary Society comparing NASA 2025 and 2026 fiscal year budgets. If I instead compare NASA fiscal years 2024 and 2026 using data from the AIP (because 2025 is so difficult to understand), I see a 50% cut to the Science Mission Directorate (SMD), which is still not as bad as the 82% cut affecting science researchers right now in the real world.

Let's look at the impact on specific planetary R&A programs in NASA proposal year 2025:

A large number of programs (purple) are either permanently canceled or just canceled for 2025, including ones that support the development of new advanced science instruments (PICASSO, MATISSE, and DALI). The programs all have cryptic (or fun) acronyms, which can be decoded with the ROSES 2025 Table 3. For planetary programs, look for the ones that start with "C". Someone was kind enough to preserve the Early Career Award program at the same level. The gold bar is interesting: the Rapid Mission Design Studies for Mars Sample Return. If you look at the selected awards [PDF] from this $12M program, it's all corporations like RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, etc. This 2024 industry support program was larger than the entire $10M budget for Solar System Science in 2025 (the blue bar).

What is this Solar System Science (SSS) program?

The new SSS program is not a Trump/DOGE thing. This was in the works at NASA for years. It combines some 11 previous different programs, with different focuses and different rules, into a single program. I can see pluses and minuses to this approach, but it's worth a shot.

The funding for SSS family programs is cut overall by 69%, and proposers don't know specifically which ideas will be favored more by NASA. With separate programs (2024 model), chances of selection varied from 3% (PDART / archiving) to 27% (MDAP / Mars), with an overall selection rate of 17%. If incoming 2025 proposals stay the same, under the reduced 2025 budget, the overall selection rate will be 5% for solar system science, maybe reaching a higher 9% selection rate for Mars work. For these calculations I used the Grant Stats info provided at science.nasa.gov.

A 5% selection rate will rapidly eliminate the solar system science capability in the US. In the Other Worlds and Life ("OWL") 2023 Planetary Decadal Survey, we recommended a 30% selection rate to maintain the planetary science workforce. Our Planetary selection rate recommendation followed the recent Astro 2020 Decadal Survey, which itself relied on an NSF advisory study advocating 30% selection rates for a healthy astronomy and astrophysics research workforce.

The dismal 82% cut to planetary R&A is specific to competed science programs, and does not directly affect active NASA planetary missions. In fact, planetary R&A has a much smaller budget than mission budgets, as shown in this figure from OWL:

The 2025-year cuts to planetary R&A are devastating, but in a way they are part of a long-term trend that has been affecting NASA and federally-funded research over a period of many years. Although I am thankful that I've been able to hold on to my job for as long as I have, the continually mounting challenges make it very difficult to encourage the next generations of space scientists.

I recognize that the cut to planetary R&A is a big deal to me, but it's a micro-problem in general. The full planetary R&A budget (not just the year 1 new starts shown above) in 2024 was probably $250M, or a small 2.5% of NASA's overall planetary science (with missions etc.). And planetary science itself is only about 13% of NASA's overall budget. NASA took up about 0.5% of the federal budget, so the 2024 planetary R&A budget was something like 0.0016% of the federal budget.

Space Science is for Everyone: An Open Letter.
Fri 2025-02-14 12:15  
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NASA’s core values, shown in the Central Campus lobby at Kennedy Space Center in 2020 following the addition of a fifth core value, inclusion, by then NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. [NASA/KSC]

Lately I have been grasping at things to hold onto, to maintain my spirits and my belief in progressing as individuals, as a community of researchers, as a nation, and as a species. Here are the top three things I'm holding onto at the moment:

• The open letter Space Science is for Everyone. Its growing list of signers would take a long time to read, but I get a nice boost by just picking a random section, invariably recognizing many of the names, and mentally giving thanks and relishing the spirit of community that is so frightening to fascist forces. The support of my colleagues echoes the recognition expressed in our most recent Decadal Survey that diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility are "central to the success of the planetary science enterprise."
• Buddha's simplest advice for how to live: Avoid negativities, build positivities and tame your mind. I heard this from the late Gelek Rimpoche, and fortunately, it's equally relevant (on an individual basis) no matter how distressing the external circumstances are.
• "Evidence and facts will not be what changes anyone's mind, it will come down to human connections." This is something that Dr. OiYan A. Poon said at an event this week for her book Asian American Is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family, hosted by Chinese for Affirmative Action and the hella cute retail venue On Waverly.

Dr. Poon's quote was illustrated by a story she shared from her book, which was so moving it brought a tear to my eye. This is the story of how a Korean cultural organization in Chicagoland was moved to provide resources and host a Black youth activist organization:

What moved the Korean immigrant constituency to welcome BYP100 was a community dialogue and presentation of photos during Min-Ji's organization's annual commemoration event memorializing the May 18 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea. Min-Ji explained to me that in May 1980 the US-backed South Korean military dictatorship sent in tanks and machine guns, slaughtering two thousand civilians who were peacefully protesting for democracy.

At the 2015 Gwangju commemoration event, photos of violent police repression of peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson and Baltimore were displayed next to photos from the Gwangju uprising. Min-Ji remarked, "People couldn't tell the difference between Gwangju and Ferguson and Baltimore. The the Korean first-generation [immigrant elders] said, 'Oh my God. This is happening here, same way.'"

---OiYan A. Poon, Asian American Is Not a Color

New office, new astro-blog.
Wed 2025-01-01 08:00  
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Happy New Year everybody; the Space Sciences Lab at UC Berkeley has just gotten a major upgrade... me!

At some point my older Astronomy webpage will be going offline. I will try to preserve some of the old content, but just let me know if you're searching for any particular dead link and I can try to restore it.