[gammarator]

Comments about SLS miss what’s happening. SLS is inefficient and wasteful, but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1].

Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, Swift, and many more in planetary and heliophysics. This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.

The private sector is irrelevant here: SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/trump-administration-m...

[godelski]

  > the world leader in space science.

I also want to add that science is a critical investment area for anyone interested in engineering.

There is this common belief of "I just want to make things work" and that science is really unimportant here and are concerned with things that don't matter. The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground.

In a lot of ways, science is just like engineering (I say this having been both, professionally). Any good engineer knows it is important to find problems. Then you fix those problems. Well... that's really what science does too. When doing science you're just working at the next level of abstraction. It is all about "making things work." Everyone is on the same team here and I'm not sure why we draw these divisions. I mean what would science even be about if it wasn't "making things work?"

So I hear people say that engineering is where we get the real value (especially monetarily), but I'd disagree. It matters, but I think it is framing things weirdly. I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever. I'd make a slightly less confident wager that the economic value of calculus is more valuable than all inventions post 1700. That's just one thing too... even if it was the only Science/Math "investment" then it seems like a pretty good ROI

[0] Yes, math, but I'm throwing under science. Nitpick if you want but you're missing the thesis

[fragmede]

I don't know that this is a good argument for science. We should fund science because we want to discover new things, not because we can draw a dotted line to an ROI. Similarly, we should fund the department of giving poor people money for food. Not because there's an ROI somewhere down the line. There's never gonna be a return on that investment, but we should do that because we're humans and we want to lift our fellow human out of misery.

[eru]

> The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground.

That doesn't mean that government investment in science is necessarily a good idea.

> I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever.

Where they financed by the government? Btw, I can also look at winning lottery tickets and say that their return-on-investment was awesome, but that doesn't mean buying lottery tickets is a good idea.

[jacobolus]

The point seems to be to cut US scientific capacity (and more generally intellectual research capacity) across the board, as a way of hitting back at "the elites" who have the temerity to call GOP politicians and donors out for their lies and bad behavior.

[JumpCrisscross]

> a way of hitting back at "the elites" who have the temerity to call GOP politicians and donors out for their lies and bad behavior

True for academic institutions. No evidence this is the motivation at NASA. Simpler: science costs money and leadership believes that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut than paying for poor folks' healthcare or basic research.

Fortunately, it looks like Beijing is ready to pick up the torch [1].

[1] https://www.fdd.org/analysis/policy_briefs/2025/03/19/aiming...

[Supermancho]

I think NASA cuts are about giving money to billionaires, so they can build or expand their capitalist version. Obviously, this will be more efficient because it funnels money to the wealthy directly.

[kamaal]

>>This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.

Many people grossly underestimate restarting a stopped process which took tremendous inertia to get rolling at the first place.

For all practical purposes its almost like you permanently lose the ability.

[potato3732842]

>but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1].

Sounds like ye olde Sowell quote[1] about organizational priorities and budget cuts in action.

[1]https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budge...

[overfeed]

This isn't cogent, IMO, since Republicans control all 3 arms of government. Who would be the target of intentional public outrage? Also, this is far less incendiary than the cuts to public benefits.

[dehrmann]

Bureaucracies like to grow, and they're very resistant to cuts, so they become inefficient entities poorly suited to current needs. Private companies have competition as a force that forces some amount of accountability, but I have yet to hear a strategy for effectively discontinuing work the government shouldn't be doing.

[cyphertruck]

These cuts are absolutely not the ones I would make, but the reality is not as it is being portrayed.

The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putting humans there. Finally, literally everything that SpaceX has done or built is a result of science that SpaceX has had to do, including colder than ever propellants, and life support systems, etc. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was not a replication of the 1960s spacewalks, as it was based on new suit science, etc.

Somehow, people like to pretend that probes landing on other planets is the only form of science that is done.

And the reality is that new entrants from RKLB, SpaceX, Firefly, and a lot of smaller companies are doing exactly this kind of science as well--- but at vastly lower cost.

The inescapable reality-- and this will always be the case with political organizations like NASA-- is no matter how well meaning they cannot do science as effectively as private organizations. NASA slows science down in large part because they are hamstrung by congress.

Yes, it looks like some way too expensive projects are getting cancelled and that means some waste of money. It's not the choice I would make.

But in the next 10 years, nearly %100 of all science will be done outside of NASA.... because the NASA overhead is too much, makes things too expensive, and less reliable.

For example, it's better to blow up 1 falcon one, and 2 falcon 9s, to get 500 successful falcon 9 launches at 1/100th the cost per kilogram of mass to orbit than to have a completely successful SLS system that launches only 2-3 times a decade.

The former accelerates science, lowers the cost of all science and more science gets done per dollar than the latter.

That transition is happening whether government, the senate and congress is aboard.... or not.

[jrflowers]

> they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts

Exactly. Like if I am an uber driver and I bring a surgeon to a hospital, it counts as me doing surgery since the most important part of surgery is the process of driving to the place where it happens

[goku12]

> but the reality is not as it is being portrayed.

This is exactly how anyone would describe your reply. Your claim is so bizzare and its logic so convoluted that the only reason I can imagine for it is political motivation. But I could be wrong and don't want to get into a flamewar. So let's ignore the reasons and reassess the logic instead. Most of the counter I can come up with are variations of what the other commenter replied, so I will leave that to them. Instead, let's look at why your argument never pans out.

Private companies always look for short to medium term profits, since it affects their balance sheets and ultimately their survival. That constraint isn't favorable for scientific research and science missions, because there is a long lead time for the research results to be converted into a commercially viable products. Some companies with a large product portfolio and steady profits still do some research, as long as it isn't too costly or time consuming. An example is the pharma industry.

But science involving the biosphere, atmosphere, astronomy/astrophysics, space, interplanetary missions etc are on the other end of that spectrum - extremely costly and no commercialization for the foreseeable future. The only way private industries are going to do it is if the government funds them with short term profits - in which case, it's the government's program, not the industry's. Even Musk's Mars dream is dependent on government funding in that manner, though his intent isn't science either. What makes you think the private industry will take it upon themselves to fund and conduct research that makes no economic sense?

[quantified]

SpaceX launches stuff. What scientific instruments do they design, what findings do they obtain? Anything beyond just how to launch stuff?