White House Aims To Halt Fantastical NASA Missions Across Solar System

The White House bid to terminate NASA’s leading-edge flights of exploration “across the solar system” threatens to explode American leadership in discoveries that have reshaped civilization since the rise of the first Space Age, says one of the world’s top planetary scientists.

As space powers across the continents vie to map and image planets and moons, comets and ice-worlds circling the sun, slashes to NASA’s funding would represent a great leap backward, crippling it even as rivals race ahead, says Alan Stern, a one-time leader at NASA and a globally acclaimed space scientist.

The president’s new proposed budget drastically cuts appropriations for NASA, with outlays for its planetary science missions—the exploration of Pluto and other celestial worlds by space-borne rockets and robots, cameras and telescopes—axed almost in half.

Now facing the guillotine—inexplicably—are constellations of technologically advanced space probes developed by NASA and spearheading scientists across America, including the Juno imager now orbiting Jupiter, the Mars Odyssey and Maven spacecraft gliding above Mars and the asteroid hunter OSIRIS-Apophis.

“Incredibly, this budget proposes to turn off 55 perfectly working, productive spacecraft across the solar system,” Dr. Stern, who once headed NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, tells me in an interview.

Stern took up that post after conceiving and designing one of the American space agency’s most sensational missions ever – the New Horizons spacecraft that aced a close approach with Pluto while sending back fantastical images of the otherworldly orb and its moons – a miniature planetary system that generated billions of hits when it began beaming down across NASA’s website.

While New Horizons continues its super-speed flight through the outer solar system, charting the mysterious frozen reaches of the Kuiper belt, the president’s plan calls for the spacecraft to be cast away.

Abandoning the $900-million mission in order to recoup the minimal costs of its ongoing operation makes no sense economically or scientifically, Stern says.

“With New Horizons,” he says, “there are a lot of important scientific objectives still ahead, things no other spacecraft can do.”

“Terminating this mission would also represent a tragic loss of soft power projection for the U.S.”

The Horizons craft, and its array of next-generation cameras and spectrometers, is exploring a region beyond Pluto that no other human-created probe has ever entered, with a treasure trove of potential discoveries waiting.

“This would be like sending a message to [Christopher] Columbus to sink his ships while they were in North America,” Stern tells me, upending a new age of discovery.

“With New Horizons, we have the power and the fuel to run this mission for another 20 years … and we have more Kuiper belt objects to explore.”

The White House, in issuing its slashed budget plan for NASA, never provided a logical rationale for torpedoing some of the agency’s world-leading missions to survey and image the solar system.

Its inscrutable sinking of some of these vanguard voyages was unveiled with the terseness of a telegram:

“Operating missions that have completed their prime missions (New Horizons and Juno) and the follow-on mission to OSIRIX-REx, OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer, are eliminated.”

The OSIRIS spacecraft, which had been slated to rendezvous with the closely approaching Apophis asteroid ahead, is a precursor mission to defending the Earth’s eight billion citizens against doomsday cosmic strikes by colossal comets or asteroids of the future.

The robotic photographer Juno has snapped an endless kaleidoscope of imagery as it floats around Jupiter. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab have posted raw impressions of the orb and its moons and invited “citizen scientists” to Photoshop and launch them across the cybersphere. In the process, they are becoming part of the spacefaring civilization that is spreading out across the globe.

During its own space odyssey, New Horizons has astounded stargazers, students and scholars worldwide with its technicolor panoramas of Pluto, covered in surreal ice-fields and cryo-volcanoes, and its age-old companion Charon.

The twin netherworlds—named after the mythical Greek god of the underworld and the pilot who shuttled souls across the river Styx—circle more than five billion kilometers distant from the sun, along an orbit that Stern’s Pluto expedition took nine years to reach.

Now, even as it whizzes beyond all of the classical planets, New Horizons, and its future, has entered the purgatory of potential excommunication by mission controllers—and their masters—six worlds away.

“This is a vast and tragic mistake,” Stern says, “because the issue is larger than just NASA, it also affects U.S. world leadership [and] responsible government that protects taxpayers from waste like this.”

The administration’s crash-and-burn dismissal of the solar system’s trailblazing robotic discoverers has triggered trepidation across NASA, whose ranks of pioneering scientists are likewise set to be culled.

Within NASA, Alan Stern is a pole star of cutting-edge exploration, helping guide more than two dozen missions.

After his New Horizons spacecraft rendezvoused with Pluto, the agency bestowed its highest honor on him – the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.

“Stern led the team that returned remarkable imagery and other data from the Pluto system last summer, generating headlines worldwide and setting a record for the farthest world ever explored,” NASA’s leaders said.

“New Horizons represents the best of humanity and reminds us of why we explore,” added Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science. “The first flyby of Pluto is a remarkable achievement.”

Being given the chance to lead the close encounter with Pluto, Stern said on accepting the award, “has been the greatest honor of my lifetime.”

Around the same time, NASA film-makers paid tribute to Stern, his 2000+ Pluto mission colleagues, and the target of their interplanetary expedition in the captivating documentary “The Year of Pluto.”

Stern has himself chronicled his trek across the twilight reaches of the star system in a series of fascinating books, including Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System and Chasing New Horizons, and in a torrent of acclaimed papers.

Scholar Stern predicts that if the White House’s proposed death sentence for flotillas of pathfinding space missions is actually carried out, that would mark the decline and fall of NASA’s planetary science breakthroughs, and the comparative rise of its competitors in the renewed space race of the 2020s.

If NASA’s funding and inter-planet journeys are decimated, he tells me, “These cuts will absolutely destroy U.S. leadership in all the space sciences.”

“This is tragically misguided.”

The potential death knell for an armada of space discovery missions has been reverberating not just across NASA, but also throughout the U.S. universities that help conceive or design these flights.

“Certainly termination of the New Horizons mission would be terrible,” says Kip Hodges, who as founding director of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration helped transform the university into one of the top American space studies centers.

“This a real frontier mission at this point,” he tells me in an interview, “delivering important new information about distant parts of our Sun’s heliosphere.”

Professor Hodges, one of the top space scholars in the U.S., predicts that the Swords of Damocles now hanging above New Horizons and other new-frontier flights could still be lifted.

If the White House plan to cut away at NASA and its revolutionary planetary scouting missions were enacted as is, he predicts, “a great many folks in industry, the NASA labs, and academia will be disappointed.”

Yet he adds that “the budget for NASA evolves over several stages,” with the president’s initial proposal just one of competing models—one that could be rejected as the Senate and House of Representatives look afresh at NASA’s missions, goals and funding.

After the twin chambers reach a consensus on reshaping NASA for the next phase of its evolution, Professor Hodges adds, “Quite often, the appropriated budget is not the president’s budget.”

That means space aficionados across America who seek to overturn the president’s capital sentence on NASA’s boundary-breaking missions have a clear channel of recourse, Stern says.

Would-be petitioners for a reprieve, he advises, “should contact their elected representatives in Congress and tell them this is a huge mistake.”