nortex97 said:
I dunno. My guess is he'd be making an announced request for something like a 30 percent across the board budget cut for discretionary executive agency/department spending, maybe with some exceptions like defense.
If we cut back on climate/SLS spending, and some other overhead silliness at nasa, and also focused on mars instead of the moon, science/planetary exploration might still not get a net budget cut, especially if the 'prize money' for instance is allocated outside of the nasa budget. Planetary science after all is less than 15 percent of NASA's budget, and earth science is nearly the same size. We can't responsibly cut astrophysics, of course. The Exploration budget is dominated by SLS, and is overall something like 25% of the total nasa budget.
But that's all just speculation/guesswork, almost certainly wrong. The Boeing statement to employees is portentous of SLS being cancelled at least, though.
I've argued most of my career that the only way for NASA to achieve it's full potential is triple the budget or cut it by 75%. Making NASA really lean is the only way to cut the fat in the bureaucracy. I don't mean that there is a lot of true waste or abuse, just that it can takes engineers months to get approval to make changes due to the numerous working groups, panels, and boards required to approve such changes.
At one point early in my flight controller career the ISS crew started complaining about Norton Antivirus pop-ups interfering with their use of a laptop computer. We didn't have the ability to remote into those computers back then so we asked the crew for a picture of the pop-up message. It appeared that the engineers forgot to activate the Norton Antivirus license before they burned the disk image for that computer.
I put a procedure together to instruct the crew in how to obtain the product ID #. I then called Symantec, gave them my personal credit card, and $29.99 later I had the activation code.
I was still a back room controller so I wasn't running our console and my front room controller got cold feet and asked engineering to confirm we had the right activation code before proceeding.
Eleven and a half months later… engineering approved activating the anti-virus license. In that meeting I informed Engineering that as soon as we activate the license we will get new pop-ups notifying the crew that the virus definitions files are out of date but that I had given the flight controllers who update the virus definition files on other onboard computers the file path to the update folder on our computer so they could include it in the weekly file updates.
Engineering lost their collective **** because virus definition files include .DLL files which are executables and they didn't have the budget to re-certify the software load every week. I laughed in their faces and called them idiots. These updates had already been approved by another engineering branch for other laptops on ISS and they didn't have to recertify their computers every week. I got some song and dance about how the requirements for their computers must have been different, bla, bla bla…
This story is long enough, but we never did get new definition files on that computer before it was decommissioned. I've got even stupider examples of otherwise smart people getting in the way of actual work but they're far more technical than can be easily explained here.
Anyway, after fighting the system as a contractor for 27 years, I took a civil service position 4 weeks ago. If there is a reduction in staffing, I'll be one of the first to exit since I'm still well within the 1 year probationary period.
I love operations and the broader mission at NASA so I'll be disappointed if I'm a casualty for DOGE but I'll be even more disappointed if NASA doesn't take this opportunity to restructure itself and make itself more agile and adaptive to changing technologies like our commercial counterparts (SpaceX).
I've spent a lot of time in Hawthorn and got to observe Elon for a few hours while he took up residence at a console in their mission control next to the one I was working at. SpaceX has the purest meritocracy I've ever observed and I wish I would have had the opportunity to test myself in that environment when I was younger.
