We watched in awe as four NASA astronauts crammed inside a small spacecraft traveled around the far side of the Moon before starting their five-day return journey this week, delivering spectacular images of the “blue marble” we call our home and our closest celestial neighbor’s cragged surface.
The images perfectly highlighted the frailty of our existence: a tiny sliver of an atmosphere trapping a perfectly composited mixture of gases that allows life to flourish, making us possibly unique in the universe (at least as far as we know.)
And yet, despite an undeniable and worsening climate crisis, the Trump administration has turned a blind eye to environmental regulations and research, forcing out thousands of scientists and systematically dismantling atmospheric research institutions, as former NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies research scientist Kate Marvel detailed in a scorching new guest essay published by the New York Times.
In her essay, Marvel argued that the astronauts’ “pictures remind us that Earth has changed immensely since the last time astronauts went near the Moon in 1972.”
“So has NASA,” she added. “Budget cuts, chaos, and political interference now threaten the very science that motivates and enables space exploration.”
A 2025 report by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation concluded that the agency had been prematurely and illegally acting on Trump’s highly controversial 2026 budget proposal for the space agency, well before Congress had a chance to sign off — which it never did.
In January, lawmakers decided NASA’s budget would remain largely unchanged. Nonetheless, as budget cuts loomed and climate change denial surged, over 10,000 doctoral-trained experts in science left their jobs last year as part of an interagency, nationwide brain drain.
Little has changed since then. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its proposed 2027 budget for NASA last week, two days after the agency’s Artemis 2 mission launched from the Kennedy Space Center, renewing its efforts to eviscerate its science directorate by proposing a reduction of its budget totaling a whopping 47 percent. The proposal appalled the science community and lawmakers.
Marvel says she has experienced the Trump administration’s “attacks” on science first hand. Two weeks ago she left the agency, writing in a resignation letter that she wanted to “tell the truth” and “speak publicly about everything I learn.”
In her latest essay, Marvel argued that “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,” she wrote. “I knew then that it was time to go.”
Marvel also argued that environmental research has absolutely nothing to do with politics.
“Climate science is not innately politically charged, whatever the administration says,” she wrote. “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.”
Indeed, the Trump administration has — unsuccessfully — ordered the termination of major climate change-focused satellite missions and even omitted any mentions of climate change when releasing its latest annual report on global temperatures.
To Marvel, it’s tantamount to self-sabotage by refusing to foster a deeper understanding of our planet and its climate.
“NASA is still trying to conjure the notion of inspiration,” she wrote in her essay. “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,” she added, “NASA is throttling the scientific pipeline and diminishing our ability to see and understand our planet.”
“Without science, the stunning images of Earth from space are only pretty pictures,” Marvel argued. “We all deserve so much more.”
More on NASA: The White House Is Still Desperately Trying to Slash NASA’s Budget
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