NASA Budget Outlook Discussion

This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on May 14, 2025. Watch the full video here.

Clayton Swope: Hi. I’m Clayton Swope, the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project here at CSIS. Today we’re going to be talking about NASA. We’re going to talk about the budget outlook for 2026. We have in our hands since the start of this month a skinny budget from the White House on what the budget proposal will look like.

Here to talk about that topic with me today are two people. Alex MacDonald. He is our newest nonresident expert here at the Aerospace Security Project. Alex has spent a lot of time at NASA, most recently as NASA’s chief economist. He also spent time in other roles at NASA headquarters, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and then also NASA Ames in California. Fun fact, he is from Canada, but I do not think we were charged any tariffs for you to be with us today. (Laughter.) But even if we were, we’d be happy to pay them. Glad you’re here with us today, Alex.

Alexander MacDonald: Very kind. Thank you.

Mr. Swope: We also have Mike French. He is the founder of the Space Policy Group. Also spent time at NASA with the leadership team as chief of staff. He has also spent time at the Aerospace Industries Association, and then also worked at FEMA for a bit. So I’m really hoping that we could work in something about your time at FEMA into this discussion today. But it probably won’t happen.

So I think, you know, kind of kicking off the discussion, I thought maybe we could just talk a bit about what we know about the NASA budget that’s being proposed. There’s very little detail we have when it comes down to specific lines and accounts that might be affected by either increases or decreases. But we probably know enough to pontificate a bit today. I should warn the audience that we really don’t know anything, and we’re just going to give our opinions. I think probably like the – what is – the haruspex of ancient Rome, maybe were just about as reliable as their divinings.

So, you know, in this case we know the ’26 budget. The president is proposing to have about $19 billion go to NASA. That is down from about 25 billion (dollars), which NASA got in 2025. And, you know, please correct me if I’m wrong on any of these numbers. I think, you know, one thing to think about now for folks watching today is that they might not know how NASA is structured. So I thought, you know, just kind of giving a very high-level look at how NASA is structured. If you look at it, it’s really five directorates. And you both are the experts. So please correct me if I’m wrong here. But it’s kind of broken out into different categories of missions.

You have aeronautics research. You have exploration systems. You have science, space operations, space technology, and then mission and support directorate. And then a lot of that work happens at the centers around the country. So where a lot of the actual metal gets bent, that’s at NASA centers around the country.

So kind of looking at how the budget is – the skinny budget kind of lays out the priorities, it’s hard to know exactly how these directorates are all specifically affected. There might be some crossover. But just, you know, at a very high level, you know, I think we could say what we see with the budget right now. This is really two things. And I’m kind of curious how this – we can talk about this with the conversation. This is really representative of an exercise to extract cost efficiencies across the government, across the federal bureaucracy. That is not unique to NASA. That is reflected in the entire skinny budget from this administration.

The second piece really is this is an opportunity for the administration to really telegraph what it wants to do in space, what it wants to do in NASA. So, to me, that is somewhat agnostic of that overall effort to drive cost efficiencies, but we can kind of see trends between those. So just looking at those very high-level trends, there’s a significant amount of money for lunar exploration, but maybe in a different way than we’ve seen in the past. About 7 billion (dollars), they’re saying. There’s a billion that’s going to Mars in some way. But at the same time, we know that some science – where there was a big Mars mission, Mars Sample Return, that’s probably going to be cut. So it’s kind of unclear how that will kind of map out over those directorates and affect the centers.

Overall for science, we’re looking at kind of a 50 percent cut from what we’ve seen in the past. We’re looking at serious – or, significant reductions in how NASA supports the International Space Station, and maybe some changes there. I think there’s other missions that we could talk about too, that we’re going to talk about, outside of the Moon, outside of Mars, that are affected, particularly in that science budget. And, again, a lot of these things, it’s kind of unclear how they fit into the different directorates, but we could still probably draw some patterns from that.

So I think, you know, the first question of kind of laying out that big picture of where we are right now, this is for both of you. Like, maybe, Alex, we start with you. What’s the most dramatic change that you see in the budget now? And maybe, how is that different from what you expected to see in the budget? Or is it what you expected?

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah. Great question. I mean, Mike and I have both seen a lot of presidents budget requests over the years. You know, I started serving in the office of the administrator under Obama. Served every day of the first Trump administration in the office of the administrator, and all but the last 30 days for Biden. And this is a pretty significant and different budget request that I think we’ve seen really in a very long time. From an economic scale perspective, 25 percent budget cut. The most significant NASA has seen, ever.

If you think about the level of total budget request that NASA is at in this budget, it is equivalent to the budget request from 1961 or 1962, adjusted for inflation. Which was a time where we were still just barely trying to get to orbit and, of course, trying to get onto the Moon. Now, of course, we have much larger sets of ambitions, and we’re still kind of now returning in this budget to that level of funding. So that’s pretty significant. Under the first Trump administration, for example, every year the administration was actually trying to increase NASA’s budget. So that’s a shift.

I think the other two big shifts, one that we see a lot of discussion about, of course, is the way in which science has been targeted for significant amount of these cuts, right? Forty-seven percent of cut to NASA’s science activities. That’s significant. Science has actually been the largest portfolio within NASA for quite some time. That would change going forward. The one that I don’t see as much discussion of, which I think is a shift – it’s a shift we’ve seen coming, but this is really kind of the moment where it is now clear – under this budget proposal, NASA would not have any operational vehicles in space within about five years, for humans. And it proposes to cancel the ISS, proposes to cancel SLS and Orion after Artemis III, and proposes to cancel the Gateway. Those are the three human space flight vehicles that NASA operates.

Now, to your point, there’s a bunch of other stuff that could come around. You could, for example, see a NASA owned and operated Moon base come through all this. And that would still mean that NASA has an operational role in human space flight. But from what we’ve seen so far, that is not a guarantee. And I think that’s a big shift. In fact, it’s such a huge shift I’m not quite sure we’re really – even in the place of really talking about the potential implications of that, both for sustainability and for, you know, what NASA does.

Mr. Swope: Well, what’s your thought, Alex, just in general, kind of pulling out a thread there about whether or not the vehicle is owned by NASA and operated by NASA. Arguably, there’s been a trend to try to have commercial services do a lot for NASA, both for transporting people but also for payloads. That trend felt like, you know, regardless of what the budget number was for this year, that probably was going to continue in some way. So do you feel like – is that shift – you know, how would you characterize it in the shift that you’re seeing now? Is it kind of that trend, or is it just more sudden? Is that –

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah. Well, the trend was there, but now it’s gone – yeah.

Mike French: It’s a different thing, right? And so I think, you know, this is sort of maybe jumping deeply into the human exploration side, but this is a very different thing. And so this gets into, right, real spicy procurement talk, you know, if you will. (Laughter.) But the difference that we talk about a lot in the space community is how we buy things, meaning do we buy at firm fixed price or do buy at cost plus? Another part of that question is, are you buying it as a service, from the government’s perspective, or is the government buying something it operates?

When you look at the human spaceflight portfolio, Gateway here is sort of very interesting. Because Gateway was very purposely structured – it was originally firm fixed price, but it was also, purposely, NASA operated. And I give credit to Administrator Bridenstine for thinking through this quite a bit. The reason for that was to use it like the ISS, as a way for international relations and international cooperation. Now, it doesn’t mean we can’t still do that in another model, but that’s new, right? So to the extent we’ve done a lot of changes in procurement through NASA on the pure contracting side, this is a new aspect we quite haven’t tested.

Mr. Swope: And so just kind of structuring Gateway, Artemis, some of these programs that we’re talking about, where there would have been human vehicles, that falls into this exploration development directorate. And when we look at the skinny budget, that falls into this category of human space exploration and then legacy human space exploration. So kind of those systems, the budget is, for human exploration, about a $650 million plus-up. But then from what is categorized as legacy, that’s about an $880 million reduction. So it’s kind of hard to see exactly how it overlays with some of these programs. But I’m thinking about too the International Space Station. That’s space operation. So that’s a different category. And in the budget right now, we’re looking at for about a $500 million reduction there.

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah. Right. And so when I was still at NASA, one of the things we were already talking about was potential reductions in crew. And with that level of reduction, you’re probably going to see significant reductions in cargo, in crew, and utilization. One of the things that’s not talked about in the budget thus far is what the expectations are for CLDs, commercial LEO destinations. You know, that’s one of the big unknowns, because if you’re having a reduction there, you know, people have been looking at that market as needing more support in general. So unclear.

Mr. Swope: Yeah. And, yeah, to your point, too, Mike, on how you procure something within NASA, within the government writ large, my gut would be that this administration wants to try to procure more things as a service commercially. Might look at something like COTS as a model. So, like, the notion that we wouldn’t have a NASA-owned spacecraft, to me that alone – I don’t know if I would say that’s a bad thing. You know, thoughts. You know, what are either of your thoughts?

Mr. French: You know, it gets to – it gets to what Alex and I were talking about. It’s a different thing about how you buy it. It’s a question of the partnership component of it, right? So if you want to turn it into – again, I’m not – I think it can be done. It’s just new, right? So think about it this way. When you do – when you buy things as a service, it’s contractual laying out who says go and who says stop, right? So, for example – and often those go-stop moments are also driven – have milestone payments behind them.

So imagine a scenario where, you know, do you go forward with launch, or do you go forward with landing, right? These various points in the mission will often have a prearranged set of who says it’s OK, right? In a NASA-operated vehicle, that’s sort of more clear, right, that chain of command. In a service-based vehicle, that much more has to be worked out, and often at a contractual level. So, again, it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It’s adding just a new chapter to the complexity of going from how I buy to how I operate.

Mr. Swope: Right.

Dr. MacDonald: And we’ve seen great success with operating human space flight vehicles as a service, right? Don’t get me wrong. But what’s new is the idea that NASA would not have any operational role in human space flight, other than astronaut activities. We have not run that experiment. And I think we need to think about the larger context, which is a historic NASA budget cut, essentially a proposed removal of $5 billion – sorry, $6 billion. Within NASA, we’ve talked about the fact, internally, that you could see an even smaller budget. And it’s possible that if you don’t have any publicly owned vehicles that NASA’s operating, NASA is still very popular, you might see a reduction in overall support.

So I think that’s what the really big shift is that we haven’t really talked about as a community. I think we’re all getting into the will this program get supported, will that program get supported, but that’s something that’s something that’s really, at a macro level, something that the agency has never really undertaken.

Mr. Swope: OK, yeah. So kind of that shift, a really dramatic shift to as a service. Where effectively it –

Dr. MacDonald: Yes. Everything.

Mr. Swope: You know, it’s you’re buying a ticket on an airline, you’re buying a ticket on a train, or an Uber, or a FedEx, but that the government isn’t operating any of that infrastructure.

Mike, what is your thought? Is that the biggest shift? Or maybe not a surprise, but –

Mr. French: Well, I think it’s one of them. I think, you know, sort of going back to a macro level, right, where we started to, sort of if we look at the budget as a whole. And this is certainly as you walk down implication, this is one that you hit in the human exploration side that’s incredibly interesting. And I think we could spent the whole time just on this one.

Mr. Swope: But maybe not just human exploration.

Mr. French: But if we go back up – yeah, but if we go back up, right, you know, when I think about what does this budget represent, there’s sort of at least three things that stick out for me. One is just the scale of the reduction, right? So, $6 billion reduction, you know, about 25 percent. But that’s based off this year’s number that already was a depressed number. So NASA had about 10 years of budget growth that ended in the last couple years. And this was a continued resolution here, so it was already a lower number than they’re planning for. So if you go back to what NASA was planning for, for this coming year, it’s really an $8 billion reduction, right? So NASA’s plans, what they’re operating under, is this budget’s an $8 billion sort of less than that. So that’s sort of one very big thing we haven’t seen before.

The second big thing, and this is driven obviously by the number, is the breadth of cuts, right? So the breadth of programmatic change, it’s across all areas of the budget, right? The ones that are talked about quite a bit are obviously human exploration. They’re called out. Science are called out. But across all the rest of those five areas you said, those numbers have to be supported by significant program cuts, right, not yet spelled out.

The third big thing that’s different is the account that’s known as safety, security, and mission assurance, SSMS, that account, it pays for people, mostly. And it actually pays for people that work across the other directorates. It’s sort of – if you think of it – it’s sort of a general fund paying for activities across programs. The way that takes a significant cut, that’s not just about programs ending. That can only be accomplished by a completely different organizational model for NASA itself, right? So you have a breadth. You have a depth. But then you also have – it only can be executed really at an organizational change level. So sort of three really big things.

And if we sort of look historically sort of in the recent past, when did we see something kind of this dramatic, right? You know, I don’t know – I mean, it’s really dramatic, right? Because it’s got the scale, I think, may be the most dramatic. But if you go back to sort of recent past, a budget that got a lot of activity, a lot of attention, was Obama’s FY ’11 budget. And so that budget proposed cancelation of Constellation and put, you know, money towards an enhanced cargo and commercial crew programs. If we go to that budget, that budget, while it proposed this cancelation, it also proposed an extra $6 billion over five years to fund sort of new activities, right?

And if you go kind of – you know, inflation-wise, it’s almost about $9 billion, right? So it was – that budget that was dramatic had a dramatic shift in programmatics, but then presented this sort of other alternative way forward with funding, right? And so that’s certainly sort of a big difference, again, when we talk about the skinny budget this time.

Mr. Swope: Yeah. And just kind of thinking beyond just the scale or the size of the cuts, I mean, the other thing I was really curious to talk about with you both was what is the high-level message for the priorities? You know, what is the administration trying to telegraph here, regardless of what that number is, so the size of the pie? What are they trying to do? And how is that different? Thoughts?

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah. I mean, I would say that the communication is getting back to the Moon is a priority, albeit in a different way. And building for a different, more sustainable, in theory, right, I think that’d be the messaging, at least, architecture that is going to be relying on different types of vehicles after Artemis III. Going on to Mars, right? The ambition for Mars is there. You know, we used to work the old Journey for Mars back in the Obama days, but this kind of, you know, billion dollars for Mars vehicles – whether those are EDL demonstrations or what, TBD – but that’s clearly part of the communication.

So I would say the priorities are really doubling down on human space flight as the approach. And then, frankly, reform. I mean, I think at the end of the day, you know, as Mike laid out, the infrastructure and the people and the organization of NASA cannot encounter and deal with this budget without very serious reform. And that, of course, is, you know, very threatening. And at the same time, it is also an opportunity for the agency to try to address things that I think folks have known have been issues for a long time.

Mr. French: And, you know, Clayton, you laid out at the beginning, I thought, you know, sort of very well, that the budget can signify things about an individual agency. It can also signify things – sort of a broader point about where budgets are headed, right? If I sort of think about what does this budget say, I think it’s probably, like, 70 percent saying stuff about the broader budget and sort of broader cuts to non-defense discretionary spending, where NASA lives, and then maybe 30 percent about direction, right? And so – and I think the direction places where we saw something were sort of not really a surprise. And the real surprise was maybe the scope or the scale of the overall budget message.

And so when I look forward this is really interesting, right? Because now we’re at a point where sort of the broader budget message of a large cut now has to meet the sort of policy discussion of, well, how do you do it, right? If you kind of think about it, it’s sort of a bit of a microcosm of what’s going on with the reconciliation bill, right? Sort of that same idea, right? Sort of you have sort of broad goalposts that now have become very specific plays, right? And so that’s where – if you look at that level, there’s sort of a few signals, but quite a bit of it is not defined.

Mr. Swope: Yeah. So this, you know, may be somewhat an exercise in futility, but I’m curious, let’s try to talk about individual programs, maybe help people see how they fit in, both into kind of that overall structure of how NASA headquarters works but also the centers around the country. I think that’s important to know too. It ties into the economic impact of any changes and jobs impact. Also the congressional interest, I think, is tied very closely to that. So that’d be something to maybe talk about as much as we can, or maybe, again, discern that the tea leaves of kind of what we think this budget is saying. Even though it is – there’s not much yet. And, you know, from everything that we hear, we’re probably not going to see a more detailed budget for several weeks, probably sometime in early June.

So, you know, it’ll be a number of days until we really have any kind of – weeks until we have certainty in, you know, where this lays out. So at the end of June we may look back on this video and say, wow, we got that wrong. But, you know, if you’re willing to humor me, I’d say, let’s try. Let’s talk about some of the –

Mr. French: Yeah, no, no, so, I think, right, to the extent I think that we can say that it’s – let’s say – you know, I’m saying 70 percent is an indication of a larger budget push from the from the administration, and 30 percent says policy. There’s a lot in that 30 percent, right? So there’s a lot there, right? So there’s the human side, which, you know, I think we – and, again, I don’t think it’s a surprise.

Mr. Swope: Yeah, break that – break that down for us. Where is all the human buckets?

Mr. French: So, of course – yeah, so if you look at the human side, some – you know, a few things happening there that are fairly significant, right? We expected to see something about a focus on Mars. But I – sort of, if you – if we looked – when we looked at this – when we thought about this maybe two months ago, I think, sort of, many of us actually thought we’d see more Mars and less Moon. And to me, the reason we see more stability in the lunar program – to me, it’s actually quite a credit to the Congress, both on the – both on the House and Senate side. Leadership on both sides, and the committees that work in this area, were quite aggressive and very straightforward on what they wanted to see happen.

I think that also the timing was very – worked quite well with Jared Isaacman’s hearing and his own votes in the committee. So I think we saw – I think we actually saw quite a bit of policy development around the framework of human exploration happen in sort of a very accelerated timeframe, between the very sort of affirmative work done by Senator Cruz, by Congressman Babin, and then the work around the confirmation. And so, to me, I see – we see an outline, right? We see a sketch of what our next, sort of – you know, what the next sort of three, four years look like, around a continuation of most of the components of Artemis with what I think will be, you know, maybe 500 mil (dollars) in the first year, or so to start paying for a Mars program, right? And so – OK, go ahead.

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah, what’s interesting – and I agree, there was actually a lot of information that was kind of revealed in that hearing in terms of what it seems like the negotiation has been between Congress and the White House. What’s interesting is that it does seem that there may, in fact, be an agreement that after Artemis III the additional components that you would need to be building – which is specifically EUS, the enhanced upper stage for SLS, as well as the associated ground systems, which you’d need a second mobile launcher for – that those may be the real – the real casualties.

And in fact, you know, the commitments that, you know, crews kept asking for were related to, you know, Artemis II and Artemis III. So I think we are starting to see that outline there. So you’re going to have that continuation. To be clear, those flights could take you out for, you know, as Mike said, a few years. You’d have to then be starting, however, some other new program, which may be associated with the Mars program, this kind of new billion dollars for Mars related to new heavy-lift launch vehicles, potentially as a full-up service, potentially having SLS be, you know, competed as a commercial capability. That has been discussed before.

So I think there’s been some of that agreement. But some of things like that, like EUS and the second mobile launcher, which are actually big-ticket items, those are not ones that were kind of highlighted yet, but are implied in these discussions.

Mr. Swope: And just to EUS – just maybe explain that a bit.

Dr. MacDonald: Enhanced upper stage? So it’s an additional upper stage that has been proposed to increase the throw weight for SLS. And it’s a whole separate development. And it would then require a different mobile launcher, basically, because it’s a higher rocket.

Mr. French: And so when I say the policy debate got accelerated, is this gets right to it, right? So I think many of us thought what we’d see was potentially a very aggressive skinny budget on the human exploration front, that essentially ended Artemis even more – at a more accelerated pace, right? And that, because the Artemis I, II, III rocket is sort of the same rocket, in a way – there’s obviously changes throughout, and as well as the capsule – but beyond that it’s got a very different rocket. What Alex was talking about, this enhanced upper stage, a mobile launcher, right?

So there was sort of one path that, you know, I think many thought would happen is you’d see this very aggressive cuts to Artemis, the Congress reacting, and there being sort of a compromise around this, Artemis III, IV being a very important time, right? I think that accelerated, right? That sort of happened at a much faster pace because of the things we talked about. And such that the skinny budget, in fact, is putting forward sort of what is looking like a policy debate had happened already.

Mr. Swope: Yeah, not to diminish the role of Congress or that policy debate, but I think a lot of it, too, centers around competition with China. I think there was recognition, if you shift too much away from the architecture that NASA has been working towards there was a real chance that China could get to the Moon for the first time before we could get back. I think that was something that was probably just viewed as not particularly acceptable for a variety of reasons, particularly from national prestige. It just was viewed as something that I don’t know if anyone really wanted to put their name on it. And I think that’s right. I think that makes a lot of sense.

That reminds me that I should mention to the audience, we are taking questions. The question that we already had is from someone that had a question about geo-competition –geopolitical competition with China. So that reminded me. So if you’d like to hear us opine about your interest in NASA’s budget, please put a question in and I will see it on my iPad.

So just my thought was China had a really big role in that decision, really, to keep a lot of that architecture similar – we think similar, for the next few years.

Mr. French: Absolutely. And also, a lot of the policymakers on the Hill have lived through gaps, right? So they very much remember the gap in U.S. human space flight transportation. And so that’s animating – they’re very aware. They’ve now sort of watched what happens when you sort of stop something at a significant level and turn to something else, no matter how promising, right? There’s going to be – there’s always – you know, there can be technical woes, there can be budget woes, right? So I think that is very animating.

The China press – you know, sort of coupled with the experience folks have had in seeing what a transition takes is important. And I think, to an earlier point we can maybe jump into here, because it’s related when we think about human exploration, I think that gap and the concept of a gap is animating – mixed with budget woes – is very much animating what we call the space operations account, where ISS, the International Space Station lives.

Me. Swope: Yeah, let’s talk about it. So, like, when we talk about human spaceflight, just for folks, if they’re not fully tracking everything NASA’s doing, we’re talking Artemis, which is getting astronauts – U.S. astronauts and partners – to the Moon, and to a space station around the Moon, Gateway. We’re talking about possibly Mars now – possibly, into the future, for humans. Not that we weren’t talking about it before, but we’re talking about it now. And then we’re talking about the International Space Station, and possibly a commercial successor to that, which we refer to as the commercial lunar – or commercial LEO destinations, CLD.

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah. And so, just to pick up one of the last pieces we didn’t really discuss for lunar, you know, Gateway being proposed to be canceled is also pretty significant. Been a lot of discussion, you know, around its role in the architecture. One of the parts that is pretty important to it is that it’s one of the critical elements of international partnership. There’s always a lot of discussion of the Artemis Accords. The Artemis Accords don’t actually include you in the program in a material way. But the agreements from Gateway did. Those were actually negotiated between multiple governments. And so if Gateway goes away, one of the immediate questions then is, OK, well then how are the international partners going to be part of Artemis? Will they still be? How does that proceed?

So if Gateway does go away, you then have some elements that might potentially get recycled. And so where that comes then in LEO, you’ve got essentially a $4 billion budget for operations. That covers ISS ops. It covers crew and cargo. At a half-billion dollar hit to that, you’re going to be buying less cargo, you’re going to be buying less crew time in terms of crew up to the ISS. They have not proposed to change the date proposed for ISS retirement. That was always 2030, or had been 2030 recently. So there isn’t a shift there. But the impact on a reduction in budget would be very significant to the utilization of the space station.

It would potentially, really – you might lose, literally, a couple of cargo missions. You might be down to three crew. That would then reduce the amount of time that the astronauts can do research. So you might really be seeing a much more significant impact to research side of it, because you have a certain amount of built-in cost that you just need to bear in order to operate the space station or to get crew there. So what’s going to give? It’s going to be the research. It’s going to be the cargo. And so that really could potentially significantly impact the commercial utilization ecosystem because people don’t often recognize but the International Space Station National Lab, 50 percent of all of the resources on the space station are given over to commercial U.S. companies, universities.

Mr. Swope: You worked there, right? Well, not there, but supported it.

Dr. MacDonald: Used to have responsibility for overseeing it.

Mr. Swope: You worked in space, right? (Laughter.)

Dr. MacDonald: (Laughs.) I did not. No. Economists don’t yet go to space, although I’m looking –

Mr. Swope: One day.

Dr. MacDonald: I’m looking forward to the all-economist Blue Origin flight. That’ll be a real one that’ll get a lot of attention, I’m sure. You basically give away, through the ISS National Lab, but $400 million of resources – crew time, up mass, down mass, cold storage – to companies and research, you know, projects at universities, to figure out how to utilize the space station. That’s the kind of stuff that becomes at risk when you see this level of budget cut. And where that becomes then a really big, interesting question is, OK, if you are then moving to a commercial space station, post-ISS, and you’re seeing less and less of this research, what is that commercial space station doing? How is it – how is that ecosystem developing momentum that allows investors to see progress, to see research? So I think, for me, if you said, well, what’s one of the big ones that is left undiscussed in the skinny budget, that I would like to see a little bit more of how they’re thinking about it, it’s in CLD and operations.

Mr. French: Yeah. So this account, to me, sort of – I sort of share Alex’s – you know, his thoughts on this account. So this account – this account was desperate in the previous – before – in the normal budget, right? So, if those who follow the space policy dialog closely, you’ll remember last year the space policy community had a lot of – we all had to decide how to define the word “continuous.” We spent the right time deciding whether “continuous” meant “continuous,” or something else. (Laughter.) And then we decided it did. It meant “continuous.” Which was great. (Laughter.)

All of that was driven by dollars, right? So what this was about was will these future stations, these commercial stations, will they always have an astronaut on a board, or will they have the capability to bring an astronaut on board? That is a dollar question, right? Because already this account was constrained. And this account pays for three things that are really important. It pays for ISS to keep happening, right? So that’s cargo flights going to it, crew flights going to it, stuff on there. And in all regards, if you – I think you speak to anybody in our industry, the station is humming. And it’s finally humming, right, after sort of a lot of stop and starts of are we optimizing its utilization?

The second big thing it pays for is these future programs, right? So one of those things is a vehicle to deorbit the ISS safely, right, to bring it down. Which is another, you know, almost a billion dollars-plus. So you’ve got the future. It’s paying for this future. The third thing it pays for, which I’m very partial to but really doesn’t get a lot of attention, it pays for NASA’s space communications. So the only way we talk – you know, how we support talking to our spacecraft, our people, all the way into deep space, is in this same account. There’s incredible stuff happening there.

NASA is undergoing a multiyear effort there to shift to commercial systems. It’s doing incredibly neat things there to support what, you know, would be a lunar architecture, possible Mars architecture, right? That’s all in the same account that has to be traded with, you know, how many flights you take to ISS, what you fund for these future missions. So some really, really hard choices.

Mr. Swope: Yeah. So kind of some of these areas where we’ve just discussed where – especially where astronauts are involved, people are involved, yeah, I wanted to – not to put anyone on the spot – but some of these things, I’m like, why – what is the raison d’être that we’re doing something? So why are we doing that? If I – if I had to go and tell my dad why are we doing this, certain things always stood out as, like, a head scratcher a little. Like to me, Gateway always felt like that. Why are we – why are we doing Gateway? Why are we doing a lunar space station? How is that critical to what NASA is trying to do? I’ll toss that one out there. Anyone have any thoughts? I mean, I certainly can opine on that, but I think you guys know more about this than me.

Dr. MacDonald: You know, there were a lot of different elements of logic to it. You know, I don’t want to spend too long on it, because I think there’s other issues that may be more relevant to discuss, but one was if you’re developing long-duration human space flight systems, and NASA is going to be responsible for them, we needed to start developing them. And getting to Mars is really hard. And there’s a whole other discussion to be had about truly how hard it is – two-to-three-year missions, a two-year mission is with nuclear propulsion. Something to talk about there too, because that seems to be implied in some of the commentary on STMD. But any way you look at it, that is a long, hard development process.

And so part of the objective with Gateway was to start developing some of these deep space, long duration, human space flight habitation systems that you would need to go onto Mars, while also serving some lunar, you know, return elements as well. So, you know, as people pointed out for a long time, if you were going straight to the Moon, you did not need a Gateway. But if you were trying to get a NASA capability for long-duration human spaceflight, you needed to be fielding a vehicle. And so that was part of the logic, as well as it being some of the easiest ways – in fact, it came together very quickly. In fact, it’s the only vehicle that has multiple international partners as part of it, because it was an easy port over from the ISS partnership.

Mr. Swope: And just kind of poking around, could you do that in low Earth orbit? Or do you feel like that lunar orbit –

Mr. French: Well, we’ve done it, right? So that’s the ISS, right? So, I think – so I think there’s sort of – when you think about Gateway, you sort of got to think about sort of two different aspects of it. One, there’s a – behind it is a decadal-long history of this concept of how do we move a human presence further and further away from Earth, right? So you can go back to studies showing, you know, you have this low Earth orbit model, but, you know, the ISS is, you know, less – is about the distance from – maybe even less – of D.C. to Cleveland, right? It’s just – it’s very much in our neighborhood, right? You know, going to the Moon, you know, we’re talking a significant different step of getting there in time, communications, living truly apart from Earth.

And so this idea of having a place to work, and pushing humanity out further, this has been a thread of expanding human exploration for a long time. Gateway then itself, and the model now, right, how, you know, it became sort of part of the Artemis program, and became an excellent way for international partnerships, because it’s able to latch on to the same ISS functions. And you can’t really understate how real those partnerships are. I think the commitments are something like $5 billion.

Also, they’re not theoretical. Several of these pieces are built. So the Europeans have at least delivered to a fairly high level most of the first unit that becomes Halo. The propulsion element is well down the road to being built. So I think there’s very sort of longstanding, you know, how does this push humanity further out reasons for further outposts. And then I think you have in the more near term how you saw the energy kind of mobilize around what is today’s Gateway.

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah. And one of the things I would like to point out is that one of the reasons that it was very valuable was that if you’re building an economy, you need some sort of source for the demand to have commercial capabilities continually be extended to that location. The reason we were able to get commercial crew and cargo was because we had the ISS. We had a national need to continue to resupply that vehicle. So that same model is actually going to work pretty much everywhere in the solar system. If you have a national facility, an international facility around the Moon, and you had reasons – and we in fact that did contracts for it – commercial cargo out to the Gateway.

So the question for me is then, OK, if that does go away, are we in fact going to then see a commitment to a national and international lunar research facility that is owned and operated by NASA and international governments? Because if so, then you have an equivalent type of demand generation source. But if not, then you actually might lose the real core of demand generation, which is having a facility that you continually need to send your astronauts and your cargo to.

Mr. Swope: And it’s probably, at least, to me, worth thinking about, well, why would we even, though, want that facility? So saying it’s for international partnerships, to me, is, you know, something like a self-licking ice cream cone, to a certain degree. It’s not the reason. If you say science and research, OK, that’s a reason. If you say economic development, that’s an interesting reason, not necessarily within NASA’s charter. Within the charter of a lot of space agencies – U.K., Canada. But NASA’s not really an economic development agency. Like, to me it still is interesting to think about, like, what is the reason? Is it science? Is it we’re trying to build the Transcontinental Railroad of the future to the Moon that supports economic development? I’m cool with that. I think that’s a great idea. But just figuring out what that reason is, I really think is important, to then think of how we’re going to spend the money.

Mr. French: Yeah, I mean, I guess we’re – you know, I think we probably may be leaving the realm of the FY ’26 skinny budget here, right? (Laughter.) So I think, sort of, to me, these questions are not about any one program. These, to me, are the NASA budget, right? These are questions of the NASA budget. I think if you go, you know, the national academies did a really interesting study in the last decade or so sort of looking at what are the drivers of human exploration, right? And I think, you know, you named some. I think Administrator Bridenstine would like to – would love to – would often use the DIME sort of theory, sort of, you know, to kind of think about why we do NASA.

So, you know, I think it’s actually quite – I think it’s hard to – or, I think you can look at any one program and sort of say, why is this, you know, justified sort of within the NASA framework. But I think if you’re looking at the kind of questions you’re raising, to me, that’s – you need to talk about the NASA budget itself. And, frankly, you know, sort of me, personally, Clayton, I actually think that driver of national security and soft power and diplomacy are, in fact, a massive driver. Which, to me, is also very tied to economic security. So I guess, you know, to me, that’s a sort of a macro purpose of the entire budget. And then you have kind of different ways you allocate those resources as well.

Dr. MacDonald: And I’ll say it even simpler, which is that NASA’s mandate is to continue to extend human presence out into the solar system, which does include economic development. This whole issue of whether NASA is an economic development agency or not is a particularly fun one that I think budget people like to get into. But we do it because in order to achieve human expansion of the solar system, you have to. So I think that’s a bit of a red herring.

Mr. Swope: Maybe, before we go to a couple audience questions, let’s talk about science real quick, and, like, the impacts of science. Because also hearing why are we doing that, how does it affect jobs, I think is a fair question, even if – agreed, Alex – but even if it’s not an economic development agency, jobs are affected. People’s livelihoods are affected. Members of Congress care about that. Federal government cares about that. So tell us about what’s going on with science.

Mr. French: Yeah. So a fundamental change in sort of the scope and, you know, scale of the science budget. But so we talked about a couple things before, right, breadth of cut, spectacularly large cut, right? Fifty percent range of cut. The breadth of programs cut also just sort of – sort of great. So, Mars sample return takes a cut. That’s a little, you know, less surprising, right? We’ve had multiple years of discussion on the Hill about how do we do this, right?

Mr. Swope: The last administration did this also.

Mr. French: So – exactly. So that’s not a surprise. But things like the Roman Space Telescope, which is essentially ready to go, that, to me, speaks much more about hitting a budget targets versus sort of saying something about a program. But also, there’s got to be – when you have that level of cut there’s a lot of stuff not named, right? The only way you can meet that cut is through significant program cuts across all portfolios, right? Whether that’s planetary, Earth science, astrophysics. All of them would take, you know, sort of a dramatic cut. And so, you know, what do you see there?

You know, I think NASA science has become – is a global leader. And it’s a science – it’s sort of enabled its own science discipline, right? So when we want to understand – space allows us to understand our planet and sort of how it’s changing, but also it’s weather, it’s temperature, you know, all kinds of aspects that are important to life. It also helps understand our universe. And it’s answering some pretty fundamental questions, right? Like, is there life elsewhere? (Laughs.)

Mr. Swope: And I think national prestige, that’s a fine reason to do this.

Mr. French: Yeah. Absolutely.

Mr. Swope: I mean, what is the, Thucydides, you know, three reasons countries go to war – honor, fear, and interest. Well, I think the same really apply to space exploration. A lot of what we’re doing is driven by China. It’s hard to not think about that. And the prestige is involved, and so is fear to a certain degree. It’s layered into the interest, but I think it’s a similar reason why we – why we reach, why we’ve always done that. Why explorers have gone to the South Pole, the North Pole, governments have financed that. Churchill told Shackleton, you go explore the South Pole, even though it’s the start of World War I. He said, go do that. I think that’s an important priority. So I don’t think that’s new. I don’t think that’s unique to space.

Also, this ties to a question from Marcia Smith from Space Policy Online. She’s also asking: How about the cuts in science and space technology? Both are cut in half. Both, by the way. So we can talk about technology too. So just tossing out there, this also related to a question from the audience.

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah, great. No, I mean, so this is one of the ones that is, for me, one of the toughest ones, because I just have a deep love for the NASA science portfolio. Some of my favorite missions are, you know, the planetary science mission. Those are the ones that kind of give me the most hope about the future, right? The idea that we’re going to be able to take probes –

Mr. Swope: I mean, Voyager.

Dr. MacDonald: Voyager, one of my all-time favorites.

Mr. Swope: Both of the Voyagers, right?

Dr. MacDonald: Right, absolutely.

Mr. Swope: It led to a really not very good Star Trek movie, but still – (laughter) – it’s a good – it’s a good –

Dr. MacDonald: I actually quite like that Star Trek movie, but that’s a whole other discussion.

Mr. Swope: Still, it’s a good – it’s a good – yeah.

Dr. MacDonald: But, you know, Dragonfly.

Mr. Swope: Actually, we have a question about that.

Dr. MacDonald: You know, as you pointed out Mars sample return is kind of one of these longstanding debates. And so I put that almost in a different category, because that’s a specific project and it has its own history. But the precedent of a, you know, 50 percent – over 50 percent budget cut – or, not quite, 47 percent, right – 47 percent budget cut to SMD is massive.

You mentioned jobs, right? So you take fully burdened FTEs, right? Roughly 200,000, right, is your usual going assumption. So a total – a $6 billion cut is 30,000 jobs. People who are kind of living the dream, working on space science, working on space hardware, who, under this budget, would no longer be working on it. Two point – I think two-five of that cut is from SMD. So that’s over 10,000 in the science budget alone.

Mr. Swope: And it’s all around the country, do you think, Alex, or?

Dr. MacDonald: Absolutely. It would absolutely be all around the country.

Mr. French: I think you’d see – you’d see some very strong regional impacts, right? So this budget would have a very strong impact at Goddard Space Flight Center, because it’s – when you look at NASA’s science portfolio, how it operates, you know, Goddard runs quite a few programs both across sort of the disciplines, and particularly in the earth sciences, astrophysics, you know, portfolios. You also see an impact – you’ve already seen a big impact to JPL, right? We’ve seen layoffs at JPL. A lot of that had to do with the Mars sample return.

What you – what we – what’s going to be harder to sort of directly pinpoint, but has a has a very broad impact, is the way science operates, it operates under a principal investigator model, but has partners. So you can imagine a university is sort of the lead, and then it has – it has people building spacecraft sort of throughout the country. So as these programs get canceled or delayed, you have this sort of waterfall, this cascading effect of people that get impacted sort of beyond that center that runs it. And there you start seeing some nationwide impacts, and particularly in some of our sort of leading technology, science technology, you know, centers of excellence.

Mr. Swope: But all these jobs, they’re not just Ph.D.s or rocket engineers, right? These are jobs at all levels that support these activities that ultimately are affected in all of these affected in all of these areas. It’s kind of like that trickle-down effect, too.

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah. And it really comes down to kind of what is the shifting signal of the motivating purposes of, you know, the national aerospace program. And I think this is kind of where one of the hard things for the community is, is dealing with this shift from kind of living in kind of the Star Trek ideal, where, you know, we did space exploration for science, for international partnerships, for kind of peaceful exploration. And we’re moving maybe just a little bit more to the kind of doom world, right, where space flight is about power and resources and conflict. And I think that that’s a hard part of what the community is struggling with. Whether or not that needs to happen is a different discussion. But I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of the reactions you’re seeing.

Mr. Swope: Does it make it more routine with this approach? And again, I’m just feeling there is a drive to use more services. And, routine just in the way that – not that it’s not a big deal, but that it is like dropping an envelope in a mailbox?

Dr. MacDonald: That’s certainly the ideal. And we’re certainly seeing some of that with some moderate success in CLPS. But there’s no way that you’re going to make a routine activity out of sending a probe to explore the methane lakes of Titan around Saturn. So I think that’s really the part – nor are you going to make a routine business out of building these exquisite telescopes. And now maybe you don’t need to do that anymore, right? But those are things that people spent decades of their life building. They require very specific sets of knowledge. They’re very difficult to do. And so I think that’s what is a little bit at risk, which is that skill set and those things that aren’t going to be made into services. Not everything can be made into services. In fact, science is one of the hardest ones to turn into services.

Human spaceflight is actually relatively easy, because it’s the same thing you’re doing every time. You’re taking humans taking humans up to a place. The humans are roughly the same size, have roughly the same oxygen needs, roughly the same food needs, right? That part you can turn more easily into a service. But pushing the frontier of science, you’re always asking new questions. So you need new sensors –

Mr. Swope: That’s interesting, yeah. How do price that? Well, how do you price that? How do you price –

Dr. MacDonald: Indeed.

Mr. Swope: And come up with something new that no one’s thought about before, no one’s – something that we can’t even conceive of? Here’s how to pay for that as a service. That’s hard.

Dr. MacDonald: And the things that build the most prestige are the things that are the greatest signals of the impossible, right? Doing the things that are the hardest, that may be the most expensive, are actually the things that traditionally have bought people the most prestige and, you know, in a Thucydides context, honor, right?

Mr. Swope: Yeah. Honor. Right.

Dr. MacDonald: You know, the Eiffel Tower wasn’t cheap when it was built. It became, you know, a symbol of the World’s Fair in Paris in the late 19th century. It was because it was expensive and complicated and showed the capability of a nation. And that’s what space flight does.

Dr. MacDonald: And I guess sort of, as I think of these dramatic cuts, you’ve got to think about them in sort of their disciplines, right? So when I think about them across the disciplines, I think about does one of three things happen? Does it mean we’re doing – we’re just doing fewer of something we were doing, right? We just have less money to put up? That’s a – that’s how a lot – that’s how space technology, for example, works. That’s how ARROW works, right? Because those areas, they’re looking at cutting-edge technologies as well as partnering with industry to forward U.S. capability.

Mr. Swope: So that’s, like research – basic research and development.

Mr. French: Basic research and above, though. Some of it’s getting, you know, from almost flight ready to flight ready, right, to provable and sellable, right, commercializable. So that’s sort of in those buckets, if I have – you know, if I have $10, I can do 10. If I have $5, I can do five, right? But those numbers are really important. And, you know, we all want – there’s always more, right? There’s a lot of good ideas we can’t fund in those areas. There’s other areas where, with less money, you say, OK, we got to do it different, right? And maybe we’re going to do sort of the same outcome, but differently, right?

And I think that’s a lot of the arguments we hear in areas, where we’re saying can we procure this differently, right? Can we buy this under a different contract method? Can we do this as a service versus government run? Sort of I think that’s sort of that answer there. And then the sort of the third bucket is where it’s just a level of money that we can’t do it, right? It just breaks it, right? And so the area where that is evident in the skinny budget, to me, is in that infrastructure account, right? So –

Mr. Swope: Within space operations.

Mr. French: No, not in space operations, no.

Mr. Swope: Oh.

Mr. French: This is in – it’s called SSMS. So it’s how many – it’s the back – it’s sort of the infrastructure of internal operations for NASA.

Mr. Swope: Oh, for NASA.

Dr. MacDonald: Facilities –

Mr. Swope: OK, got it. Yeah.

Mr. French: So it’s an organization one. So that one you can’t just – there’s a certain point where you can’t just do less, right, or do it differently. At a certain point it just – it breaks. And so that account is about $3 billion. Of that, about half of that is people. That’s it. It’s people. It’s paying for people who do stuff across all these other programs. And so when you propose – a 40 percent cut is proposed there, the only way that happens in a year is people. So when we think about this idea of – you know, when we talk about that there’s a potential large rift coming, that there’s plans for large agency reform, that area of the budget sort of signifies, right? That’s matches that sort of discussion.

Mr. Swope: And that might be a trend, though, across the budget, the federal budget in general. You know, I think back even to the ’90s with President Clinton, who wanted to reduce the size of the federal workforce – the size of the federal bureaucracy. We’re talking, like, almost 400,000 jobs. I mean, something like that was federal government-wide. So you think about the impacts on each agency, each department, there was – there was a cut. So it feels like, in the similar vein, what we’re seeing now is kind of that same motivation impacting NASA, both the dollar amount but also the people.

I think to your point, though, Mike, though, that some areas, though, are just not sustainable when they go below a certain threshold. Not that necessarily reductions in size are bad or there’s the first time we’ve done that, but then you get to a certain point –

Mr. French: It has to be different. It can’t do what it’s doing.

Mr. Swope: There’s a certain point it can’t sustain that.

Mr. French: Yeah.

Ms. Swope: But I think, you know, to your point on the – I don’t know how I’d phrase it, like, scaling, aeronautics, and technology that you pay – you know, you pay a certain amount for an activity, and then that could then be commercialized. And it could drive a lot of economic growth, job creation. I think of the material that’s on the bottom of the Varda return capsule, that was developed in NASA and, through a technology transfer, commercialized to do commercial activity. So it’s kind of hard also to measure, you know, dollars spent in aeronautics, a dollar spent in technology, how that then trickles down to other activities then, that create further economic growth, help build the space economy, help do these things that weren’t necessarily apparent when that dollar went to that basic research, that basic – you know, that science, if you will, at NASA.

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah, we haven’t really talked about STMD specifically. Also cutting 50 percent. You know, long effort to get that account up to a billion dollars. Flight programs were a big part of that. Seems to be very hard to imagine how STMD continues doing flight programs at that level. There’s a lot of congressionally required elements. SBIR is in there. And that is a certain guaranteed percentage based on total development. So that’s going to still be in the, you know, hundred million-plus, 150, who knows? You know, so there you may see some really big strategic shifts where they move away from doing flight projects at all, and really then only do basic research, because that essentially may be all they can afford to do.

Mr. Swope: Do you think that’s how this split would be? They’d prioritize kind of that basic research?

Dr. MacDonald: It’s what I would do.

Mr. Swope: Yeah. But you’re a smart guy.

Dr. MacDonald: I mean, I would basically refocus STMD on projects kind of only up to TRL 7. And then it’s up to either commercial industry or to one of the other mission directorates to pick it up and take it further.

Mr. Swope: To pick it up.

Mr. French: You have – so in that account you have some of the – a lot of the money is going to some very specific things. In the space technology account, one of the areas that’s gotten a lot of interest, has quite a bit of congressional support, is in new forms of propulsion. And many of that’s nuclear. So nuclear propulsion types, whether the thermal propulsion, electric propulsion, has had quite a bit of Hill interest now for going on almost nearly a decade. A lot of work based throughout NASA centers. And what’s – you know, I think it was – I thought it was quite interesting that the skinny budget actually specifically called out alternative propulsion as an area that’s to be reduced. You know, if you sort of look from a research perspective, the National Research Council actually had an important report several years ago about how nuclear propulsion is sort of key to more timely access to Mars.

Mr. Swope: Maybe for Mars, yeah.

Mr. French: You know, sort of longer term – again, back to these sort of long-term ways to expand the human presence. It’s sort of a key concept. And so I think when we look at – you know, we talk about these big things on sort of the big level of an Artemis program or a Roman Space Telescope. You know, there’s versions of that – at this little cut, there’s versions of that in every account. And so I think the one you’re going to see quite a bit of energy around as we turn to the Hill will be around these nuclear propulsion and new forms propulsion, because it’s become a really important part of that account.

Dr. MacDonald: And to build on that, when we were doing the kind of first Trump administration’s kind of Moon to Mars Strategy, we laid out a strategy that we sent to the president for the Great American Space Odyssey, right? This was going to be a specifically nuclear propulsion-enabled mission to Mars, with a Venus fly-by along the way. And so we were kind of baseline nuclear. And that was one of the ways in which it got built into STMD.

There is a lot of cost associated with that. There’s been a lot of discussion about, well, maybe in a future where, you know, Marshall isn’t building SLS components, maybe they’re able to build some of these propulsion elements for nuclear. But it’s hard to see how that gets squared with an overall reduction in the total budget, because those things are not cheap. You don’t build a nuclear propulsion system off of SBIRs and tipping point awards. You’re going to need real serious, billion-dollar levels of program budget to get there.

Mr. Swope: I’m going to do rapid fire, we’re about five minutes out, for some of these audience questions, if that’s right. I think we addressed a lot of them. Question from a concerned citizen, name anonymous. I don’t know if I know him or her. The question is, is Dragonfly at risk of being canceled? I know you mentioned it, Alex.

Dr. MacDonald: I certainly hope not, but it challenges – once you’ve got that level of cuts, it’s hard to know, you know what gets – you know, what gets preserved. You got to remember that these projects, they have their own inherent challenges in sticking to the original proposed budgets due to inherent optimism in cost estimation. And so, you know, I certainly – I certainly hope not, but hard to say.

Mr. French: Yeah. And I think a typical thing to think about from the science side, a typical technique there which makes quite a bit of sense, right, when you see a big reduction, is the program will look at where is something in its development, right? Has it met its development gates? And sort of as you’re closer to ready to fly, right, sort of the more likely you get prioritized to move forward. You know, there’s more to it than that, but I think that’s kind of a good back-of-the-envelope way to think about it, for smaller programs.

Mr. Swope: This question is from Sherry Chen. She’s at Columbia University: Just a general question about the ability of America to compete with China. She phrased it as space-based influence operations, but I think she’s looking at, looking at the rest of the question, areas that are dual use. That do have a scientific purpose, that do have a commercial purpose, that do have a military purpose – satellites, space-based ISR, she says, international partnership, we talked about. Is this a cold wind up ahead when we look at this budget for kind of these areas?

Dr. MacDonald: Well, one of the things we haven’t talked about at all is that, say you did lose 30,000 jobs in the civil side. We haven’t yet seen the budget proposal for Space Force and for other associated military space accounts. So if those went up, you might just simply see a flow of people from civil work to military work. It depends a little bit on that.

Mr. Swope: That’s interesting, yeah.

Mr. French: You know, it’s sort of – you know, sort of that got me thinking about something we haven’t talked about, that maybe if we have few minutes we probably should, right, is what happens next? Does this matter?

Mr. Swope: Yeah.

Mr. French: Right, you know? And so I think, sort of just, you know, those of us who are – know this process well, the president proposes, Congress, you know, disposes. You know, we would in normal times see the Congress mark up. You have hearings, have budget hearings. We’d expect, you know, to the extent we have Isaacman confirmed, that he would go to the Hill and answer questions about this budget. And then you’d see the Senate and House come up with their own version of this budget, ostensibly it would be passed, and the next fiscal year would have its budget, which begins in the federal calendar on October 1, right?

One of the things that we – you know, sort of we talk about a lot in the policy circles here, is this idea of, you know, even if there is a certain budget level, does the administration spend to it, right? I think that there’s sort of a much nearer term question here, which is we live in a land of continuing resolutions, of CRs, right? And so as we head – we’re going through a difficult reconciliation battle right now on the Hill. As we get through that and the summer gets further, you know, are we likely headed to another continuing resolution? If you have a short-term continuing resolution, that means sort of less than just a full year continuing resolution, normal order – right, this isn’t – this isn’t something that would be out of the ordinary. Normal order is the Office of Management and Budget instructs the agency to operate at the lowest level of the House mark, the Senate mark, or the president’s budget request, right?

So we could very much be, come sort of October 1, in an environment of we don’t have – you know, we don’t have – we’re under a short-term continuing resolution. And under normal process, under normal order, OMB is holding NASA and all these agencies to operate at this incredibly low level, right? And, you know, sort of, given what we talked about, those aren’t small changes, right? And so that’ll be a very interesting environment. Sort of we saw like a mini version of this, I think, during sequester, during those years in sort of the mid-2010s. This would be a different level of that. And that would all happen without entering into this world of – this would not – this would be charted territory, if you would, from a policy perspective.

Dr. MacDonald: Yeah. And I think the other thing to look for is the extent to which the FY ’26 priorities are attempted to be put into the ’25 ops plan, which is something that, you know, is in process. And the way in which we’re seeing kind of impoundment being interpreted means that potentially you might see attempts to not spend some of the money, even if it is appropriated for. And so there are parts that are also uncharted, from a NASA perspective, as well.

Mr. Swope: Well, I say on that, any final-final thoughts? Final-final-final thoughts of this discussion that we’ve had today? Kind of maybe – I mean, I’ll just say, I’m excited about the idea of using things as a commercial service. I think that demonstrates that we’ve gotten to a point in space where we are thinking of it in terms of routine activities. I also like the notion of looking – and we don’t know the details yet – but looking at things as how can this be, like, the seed corn for jumpstarting a lunar economy, a cislunar economy – jumpstarting a space economy that is not just dependent on the government.

I think if we look at something like the COTS program, that really is the – you could say, really is the foundation for the success of SpaceX. That was – you know, for every dollar spent there the government obviously has a big payout now in a dominant player on the global launch and a lot of other space businesses right now and probably has generated a lot of jobs and economic development in the United States. So, like, things like that, I am hopeful. I want to see that that level of detail, that there’s this thought that that’s a reason for us to do space too.

I think I mentioned earlier, invest in the international – transcontinental, whatever – transcontinental railroad to the Moon or to space. That could be infrastructure, like communications. There’s probably a lot of economic activity that you can hang on those activities. I’m hoping to see that when we look at the more details of this budget, that that is one of the drivers, thinking about that from a commercial standpoint. So I guess I’ll just kind of end on that. That’s something that I think is really good. When you think about saying why are we doing this, I think it ties directly to that – kind of that business reason, that commercial case.

That, you know, arguably, that’s just kind of how the United States works. I mean, we’re very market-based system. So I feel like – you know, I expect that in the budget that we’ll see. So that’s my takeaway. As we close out, you know, Alex, what’s yours? What are you thinking? Positive, negative? I’ll take either of those.

Dr. MacDonald: Well, the old phrase is never waste a good crisis. And I do think there’s no way to look at this budget and not see that it will create a type of crisis at NASA. But at the same time, a $19 billion agency dedicated to space exploration is very substantive, right? Countries around the world would be delighted to be working in such a system. And so there are huge opportunities in this. I think it will require pretty significant and difficult decisions by agency leaders over the years to come. But if the opportunity to make serious reforms is taken, I think there is a new NASA that can emerge out of this, that can leverage commercial capabilities, think about doing business in leaner ways. It can ultimately still kind of create a future where, you know, NASA, over its next 50 years, is still doing amazing things. But I – you know, my heart goes out to anyone who’s affected by this. I worked on a lot of these programs that have been proposed for cancelation. This is not an easy time. Keep the faith.

Mr. French: And so, from my perspective, I think just looking – sort of – I’m sort of thinking about this as sort of the beginning of maybe a six-month, eight-month process. And as I think about it that way, I see this as the low end of the error bars on a budget perspective, on a budget that’s primarily driven from an overall cost perspective versus programmatic decision perspective. We’ve got signals in some key areas, but what we also have – and that I think is very promising – is a very energetic House and Senate on the substance here, led by leadership of the same party as the president. And you also yet have political leadership at NASA, which really is the necessary counterweight in the intra-administration budget process, right?

So sort of we missed the phase that usually happens that didn’t get to happen because where this was. So I think we’ll see a lot of that sausage-making that usually happens sort of within the administration happen somewhat externally, with a cross between new political leadership at NASA, potential of new political leadership within the White House, outside of the OMB structure, and an already energized and thoughtful Congress on both sides. And so I see this, again, sort of the low end on the error bars. And, you know, I see kind of a lot of room where we move those – we move those bars up. And at the same time, we move them up with some thoughtful policy driving it. So it’s sort of – kind of where I see it. And maybe we meet in eight months and see where we are. (Laughs.)

Mr. Swope: Yeah, well, Mike, Alex, thanks. I felt like I learned something in this conversation. I enjoyed it. Thank you for spending time with us. For those that have been watching online, thank you for your time. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for letting us opine about space, about NASA. Look forward to seeing you again at another CSIS event. Thanks.

(END.)