NASA budget would cancel dozens of science missions, lay off thousands

Updated 8 p.m. Eastern with AIA comment.

REYKJAVÍK, Iceland — NASA released more information about its proposed fiscal year 2026 budget May 30, outlining new investments in exploration at the expense of canceling dozens of science missions and cutting thousands of jobs.

The documents provide greater detail about the top-level budget proposal from what the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) disclosed in its “skinny” budget released four weeks earlier. NASA published the budget documents on its website late on a Friday with no fanfare and without the traditional budget briefing by agency leadership.

That top-level budget of $18.8 billion would be a cut of about a quarter from the nearly $24.9 billion it received in fiscal year 2025. That is the sharpest year-over-year cut proposed for NASA and would bring the agency’s budget down to levels last seen in 1961 when corrected for inflation.

With the budget cuts will come jobs cuts at NASA. A table in the budget document notes that NASA has 17,391 direct-funded civil servants in fiscal year 2025, but that would drop to 11,853 under the fiscal year 2026 proposal, a cut of one-third.

The document does not go into detail about the cuts, with only passing references to “workforce impacts” and “workforce reshaping efforts.”

Dozens of canceled missions

The documents confirm steep cuts in NASA’s science programs. NASA is proposing $3.9 billion for all of NASA science in fiscal year 2026, a 47% cut from what the agency received in 2025.

Those reductions come in large part from canceling many science missions still in development or in extended operations after completing their primary missions. Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, said in an interview that more than 40 science projects, including standalone missions and contributions to other missions, were zeroed out in the budget.

“It’s generally pretty much what we expected,” he said, based on the figures previously released.

Those cuts include the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, which the skinny budget highlighted for cancellation, and Landsat Next, a future Earth observation program that was the other science mission mentioned in the skinny budget. NASA will instead work to restructure Landsat Next in unspecified ways through a separate program, Sustainable Land Imaging.

In Earth science, the budget proposes to cancel missions in the Earth System Observatory line of missions recommended by the most recent decadal survey other than GRACE-Continuity, the latest in a series of missions to monitor the planet’s gravity field. Some extended missions would also be affected, such as the CYGNSS satellites used for studying tropical cyclones, and some smaller venture-class missions in developed would be terminated.

In addition to MSR, the budget proposes to end funding for the Mars Odyssey and MAVEN missions orbiting Mars. It would also cancel NASA’s support for the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover mission, where NASA agreed to provide thrusters, radioisotope heating units and a launch vehicle.

Other planetary science missions that the proposal seeks to cancel include DAVINCI and VERITAS, two Discovery-class missions to Venus selected four years ago. NASA would also terminate its participation in ESA’s EnVision mission to Venus. The budget terminates several planetary science missions in extended operations, including Juno, New Horizons and OSIRIS-APEX, the repurposed OSIRIS-REX spacecraft headed to the near Earth asteroid Apophis.

In astrophysics, NASA will continue development of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, contrary to a OMB “passback” budget document in April. However, it proposes $156.6 million for Roman, less than half the $376.5 mission that NASA projected spending on the mission in 2026 in its fiscal year 2025 budget request.

“NASA is actively evaluating cost-saving strategies and identifying schedule optimization opportunities to enable the mission to proceed with this reduced funding level,” the budget document said. The Planetary Society’s Dreier noted it’s not clear whether costs could be saved at this point, since the telescope is far along in its development and currently on track for a launch as soon as the fall of 2026.

The budget would terminate many ongoing astrophysics missions, including the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Fermi. It would cancel the Astrophysics Probe program, which was studying concepts for a billion-dollar space telescope, as well as smaller Explorer-class missions in development such as the Compton Spectrometer and Imager as well as Ultraviolet Explorer.

The heliophysics budget proposal would also end funding for several ongoing missions, like Magnetospheric Multiscale, and reduce funding for others. NASA’s biological and physical sciences division would see its budget cut by more than two-thirds, from $87 million to $25 million, “to support higher priorities within the agency.”

Dreier said he was surprised some missions were included, like MAVEN, Juno and New Horizons, given their scientific performance and, in the case of MAVEN, providing communication services at Mars. He noted that the budget would effectively end production of plutonium-238 needed for missions in the outer solar system as well as heating units on other spacecraft.

New exploration initiatives

The steep cuts to NASA science, as well as in space operations, space technology and several other areas, contrast with new initiatives in exploration. As disclosed in the skinny budget, NASA seeks to cancel the lunar Gateway and end the Space Launch System and Orion after the Artemis 3 mission.

The budget instead includes $864 million for a new “Commercial Moon to Mars (M2M) Infrastructure and Transportation Program.” That would go towards developing a commercial system to replace SLS/Orion as well as early work on “a space suit appropriate for use by astronauts on the Martian surface.” The program will also fund lunar and Martian relay satellites and be the new home of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, currently hosted by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

The budget overall offers more than $1 billion for projects associated with human Mars exploration. That amount includes $200 million mission for “a near-term entry, descent, and landing demonstration for a human-class Mars lander” and another $200 million for commercial payload deliveries to Mars. The budget documents, though, provide few specifics about those new initiatives.

Reaction

Dreier said that The Planetary Society has seen a strong response to the proposed cuts in the skinny budget and expects the detailed budget to amplify those concerns.

“There’s definitely a lot of significant concern about what this does to the workforce,” he said.

That budget will go to Congress, where even Republican members are expected to push back against the cuts. Dreier said he has heard from even Republican offices on Capitol Hill that the budget is “dead on arrival.”

“No one is eager to cut NASA science. No one is out there openly defending and saying that this is a great idea,” he said.

The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) also criticized the cuts in a statement late May 30. “The proposed budget falls short, making heavy-handed cuts to mission-critical programs that could jeopardize our space leadership,” said Eric Fanning, president and CEO of AIA.

The organization recommended that NASA be funded at an overall level of $25.6 billion or more in 2026.

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