Roughly 120 light-years from Earth sits K2-18b, a planet bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, orbiting a cool dwarf star at just the right Goldilocks-like distance where it’s not too cold and not too hot for liquid water to form. Some scientists suspect the planet’s surface has a warm liquid ocean hundreds of miles deep. And just last week researchers, using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, reported a detection of strong signs of compounds known on Earth to only be produced by living organisms. This claim requires further confirmation before we can know for sure, but it is fair to say that K2-18b is now one of the most promising locales for a second genesis of life. Such are the rewards of peering far and wide into the cosmos.
NASA’s science program is why we know about K2-18b at all, and why we have tools to further search for life there and other destinations in our solar system. But these future projects may never happen. Recent reporting (not yet confirmed) suggests that the Trump administration may slash NASA’s science program by 48 percent for the next budgeted year, a cut of $3.6 billion. NASA’s science program manages a fleet of over 70 active missions stretching from the sun to interstellar space. Roughly 50 more are under intensive development. Despite this scale, the efforts account for about one-third of the agency’s annual budget — and a tiny 0.1 percent of total U.S. expenditures.
If these cuts are enacted, the savings to taxpayers would be negligible, and the impact to science would be calamitous. Dozens upon dozens of productive science spacecrafts would have to be terminated for lack of funds, left to tumble aimlessly in space. Many projects currently under construction would be scrapped midstream, wasting billions already spent. NASA science institutions would be closed. Thousands of bright students across the country would be denied careers in science and engineering absent the fellowships and research funds to support them.
Enacting these cuts would be a mistake — not only for the generational damage it would do to America’s scientific pre-eminence, but also for the symbolic curtailment of our ambitions. Space is among the most potent symbols in human society. It is big, unforgiving, alien and extremely hard to reach. Space agencies like NASA, then, are symbols unto themselves, an expression of a national self-identity projected into the heavens. Shattering NASA’s scientific capability would be an abandonment of our ideals: curiosity in the face of the unknown, relentless optimism and a practical determination to engage with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. Instead of looking up and out, we would become a country looking down and in, the national equivalent of a teenager hunched over an iPhone, oblivious to the world beyond.
There is no private option for space science. The distances are too great, the costs are too high and the instrumentation required too specialized for the endeavor to be served exclusively by free markets. There are no viable business plans for exploring a volcanic moon of Jupiter or ancient lake beds on Mars. Commercial space companies can provide exciting new capabilities at lower costs in certain situations. NASA is experimenting with their use for uncrewed lunar landings, but at the moment these efforts are almost completely funded by NASA. And though very wealthy individuals are willing to spend enormous sums to build rockets or send themselves into space, they haven’t shown interest in paying for the types of missions that would search for extraterrestrial life or pursue other ambitious scientific goals.
In addition to revealing insights about the universe, space science provides a unique opportunity to test our most basic scientific theories in the most extreme environments of the cosmos. It was NASA’s Gravity Probe B that further confirmed key claims of Einstein’s theory of general relativity using experiments only possible in space. Multiple NASA space telescopes, perched in orbits high above the Earth in order to see the light otherwise blocked by our atmosphere, have observed signatures of organic molecules. And NASA’s fleet of planetary spacecraft has cataloged the same geologic features that have shaped Earth throughout the solar system: volcanoes, freshwater lakes and even prospective tectonic plates.
The question of whether there is life beyond Earth is among the most compelling motivations for continued scientific space exploration. Thanks primarily to NASA’s science missions, scientists know where to look, and the number of those possible locations has only increased. Future space telescopes could observe hundreds of relatively close Earth-size exoplanets, like K2-18b, for signatures of life. In our own solar system, the most compelling destinations are the ocean worlds in the outer solar system. Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, another. A new NASA mission launched last year, Europa Clipper, is en route there now and is set to arrive in 2030.
Space science has profound utilitarian benefits as well, particularly if you are concerned about the long-term survival of the human species. There are millions of asteroids that orbit around the sun. They have occasionally collided with Earth during its long history, causing modest to catastrophic levels of destruction. Fortunately, NASA is looking for these hazards. The agency recently proved it could alter an asteroid’s orbit, an important capability should one ever be hurtling our way. This extraordinary effort is also funded by NASA’s science program. Like everything else, it could be kneecapped by the cuts reportedly under consideration.
A recent Pew Research poll found that the NASA programs the public views as the agency’s topic priorities — asteroid monitoring, climate observations and fundamental scientific research — are all funded by NASA’s science efforts. To undermine space science, then, is to flirt with making NASA irrelevant to the taxpayers that enable its existence. This would be a tragic outcome for an organization that is among the most popular federal agencies in the United States.
Curtailing the pursuit of space science is more than a question of budgets. It is a question of what kind of country we are and aspire to be. To retreat from the effort to know the cosmos in which we reside should not be the end of this American story.
Casey Dreier is the chief of space policy at The Planetary Society and the host of the podcast Planetary Radio: Space Policy Edition.
Source photographs by Robert Gendler/Science Photo Library and SummerParadive/Getty Images
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