Artemis II’s journey around the moon, scheduled to conclude on Friday, has delivered stunning new images of our home world taken from space.
Those pictures remind us that Earth has changed immensely since the last time astronauts went near the moon in 1972. So has NASA. Budget cuts, chaos and political interference now threaten the very science that motivates and enables space exploration. President Trump’s 2027 budget request calls for a nearly 50 percent cut to NASA’s science division. We may still be able to shoot for the moon, but we’re losing the ability to understand our own world.
When I was young, I always wanted to work for NASA, and after years of study, I was finally hired as a research physicist. But last month I quit my job, joining over 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s who have left the federal government since Mr. Trump returned to office. Call it the great American nerd exodus, as scientists studying cancer, agriculture and weather prediction suddenly became the targets, or collateral damage, of political attacks.
I worked for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies as a contractor and then civil servant for 10 years, studying the best planet of all: Earth. My job was to parse satellite data about rainfall and clouds, to model the present and the future state of our planet. Tracking the changes to Earth from space put me and my colleagues in the cross hairs of an administration particularly devoted to protecting the interests of the oil and gas industry. By this March, the chaos was a constant, and the attacks on our work were only intensifying. I knew then that it was time to go.
My team at NASA survived the initial Department of Government Efficiency purges only to be evicted from our office in New York City in May for no apparent reason. Resigned to office couch surfing, I continued writing grant proposals. Some of them were marked “selectable,” meaning they would have been funded if the money had been available. Other proposals disappeared into a black hole. We didn’t know where the money was.
A September report by Democrats on the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation gave credence to what my colleagues and I suspected: The agency was illegally putting into effect the president’s budget request, with its diminished funding for science, rather than waiting for Congress to approve funds. By January, Congress had passed a budget largely restoring NASA’s science funding. But that didn’t mean the money was readily available to many researchers like me.
There were rumors the situation might get better. There were rumors it might get much worse. No one knew what to expect. Which was ironic, given our jobs.
It wasn’t just the funding uncertainty that bothered us. In March 2025, the agency eliminated the role of chief scientist, which most recently had been held by a climate researcher, signaling a bad omen for earth science research. In all-agency town halls, we heard a lot about the moon and Mars, and little about our own planet, as if the only habitable world in the solar system were an afterthought.
Researchers studying the sun, the stars and other planets and moons also faced disruption and cuts. The library at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center was shut down, as were dozens of labs, supposedly a “consolidation.” The career scientific leaders we knew and trusted were struggling to guide us through the turbulence. Their bosses seemed more interested in making sure no one had pronouns in their email signatures than protecting science.
The final straw for me was when the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, disparaged our work in the magazine Science in March. When asked about climate change, he argued that “for NASA to assemble scientists and put out papers on politically charged issues, whether or not this is an impending climate catastrophe, is not helpful to the broader NASA mission.”
Now that no one can mistake my position for the official view of the U.S. government, I can speak freely. Climate science is not innately politically charged, whatever the administration says. No one I worked with had (or wanted) the power to make policy. It was our job to study the laws of physics, which remain true no matter who’s in power.
Reasonable people can disagree on what should be done to limit the effects of climate change. But rather than debate policy, the administration has chosen to attack science itself. It has effectively canceled the National Climate Assessment, fired researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and left NASA scientists in limbo. Now, it plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a crown jewel of weather and climate science.
The truth is that we are already in the early stages of climate catastrophe. Spring temperatures in the Western United States have shattered records. In the Colorado River basin, an already severe drought is worsening thanks to record-low snow levels in the Rocky Mountains. High temperatures, dry vegetation and low rainfall may result in a terrifying fire season.
Without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of climate change will become only more severe. Homes and businesses will be destroyed, neighborhoods will become uninsurable or even uninhabitable, and shocks to food or supply chains will cause unrest. Eventually, even the NASA administrator may have to admit that the situation is catastrophic.
Even as the evidence mounts that the climate is growing increasingly unstable, NASA’s study of Earth still offers plenty of wonder: satellites that see the ocean in glorious color, pieced-together records of past climates, high-resolution models that show smoke and pollution swirling through the atmosphere. I’m awed, dizzy and grateful to exist amid such otherworldly beauty. It’s impossible not to want to know more.
Humans have access to all this knowledge free of charge because of NASA. That was always part of the promise of government-funded science: discovery for all, wonder as a pledge to be something better and greater than we are.
NASA is still trying to conjure the notion of inspiration. Perhaps if and when Artemis II returns safely to Earth, a generation of children will be inspired to see our world from above. But for now, NASA is throttling the scientific pipeline and diminishing our ability to see and understand our planet. Everyone deserves the benefits that climate science can bring — an understanding of the present, the ability to plan for the future and the sheer joy of learning about the world, even as it changes. Without science, the stunning images of Earth from space are only pretty pictures. We all deserve so much more.
Kate Marvel is a senior scientist at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization dedicated to climate solutions, and the author of “Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet.”
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