OF SPECIAL INTEREST
OF SPECIAL INTEREST NEWS
Sputnik’s launch on October 4, 1957, marked the beginning of the Space Age. Americans were shocked that the USSR was ahead of us, seriously affecting our leadership position in the world and in the hearts and minds of people everywhere. A huge bi-partisan national effort brought major upgrades in national education, generating benefits people enjoy today. Science was seen by all, correctly, as being the path to a bright future. It still does (see the Benefits section), but American support has waned, for no good reason. Worse, the value of “Science” seems to be lost in Washington today, as measured by the only thing that counts, Federal funding.
USA SCIENCE DECIMATED
The budget requests submitted recently by the White House will decimate America’s scientific capability, leadership position, and the training of future scientists and engineers. The public’s quality of life will be lowered significantly for a long time to come. All aspects of American Science will be adversely affected or canceled.
National Science Foundation
NSF’s budget will be cut by more than 50% under the proposal. NSF is the world’s premiere scientific funding resource, and such draconian and unnecessary cuts will stunt America’s scientific prowess for decades to come.
The proposed NSF budget would zero-out America’s global climate change research program and all research on clean, renewable energy sources. Further, DOGE zealots have been removing all existing references to climate change and renewable energy from government websites. Three-fourths of present NSF-funded scientists will lose their grant support. Young people in the pipeline to become vitally-needed scientists and engineers will suffer greatly, too; NSF would no longer support teacher professional development activities and the prestigious CAREER program, which gives five-year study grants to hundreds of promising young investigators would disappear.
Another example of this comically-ridiculous action is the plan to cripple the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). You may not have heard of LIGO before, but the Nobel Prize Committee certainly has; they awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the LIGO’s detection of the gravity waves Einstein predicted decades earlier. LIGO uses detectors in two observing sites, one in Connecticut and the other in Louisiana, working in tandem in order to provide the gravity wave detection capability. NSF plans to close one of them, rendering the entire LIGO system useless, akin to “flying an airplane with only one wing.” NSF has yet to push back against the effective closure of the system. For more details about this travesty, see: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/shattering-nsf-budget-proposal-threatens-gravitational-wave-science.
NSF was somewhat over-extended in its support for large astronomical telescopes, and was spending a lot of money on the construction of two giant telescopes in Chile - ~$6B, as mentioned in previous A+StW installments. The mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope have been completed and are in storage; the site prep for the GMT has barely started but work will be slowed due to being budgeted only for ~$ 1.5B. The Thirty Meter Telescope has yet to advance to the Final Design Phase, and gets axed completely in the 2026 budget request, accepting prior expenditures as a loss and “disappointing” TMT partners who’ve already invested in the facility’s development (National Institutes of Natural Sciences of Japan, the Department of Science and Technology of India, and the National Research Council of Canada).
For more on the adverse effects of cutting NSF’s budget, see: https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-s-proposed-budget-would-mean-disastrous-cuts-science and https://www.science.org/content/article/final-nsf-budget-proposal-jettisons-one-giant-telescope-amid-savage-agencywide-cuts.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NOAA’s budget will be cut by more than 24% under the proposal. “Almost all of the reductions will be from climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs.” Earlier this year, NOAA endured a forced RIF, losing 800 employees, greatly diminishing the information flow needed for accurate weather prediction and weather hazard monitoring. For more information on that front, see: https://www.space.com/the-universe/climate-change/scientists-warn-of-consequences-as-over-800-noaa-workers-are-fired-censoring-science-does-not-change-the-facts.
The changing climate of Earth can no longer be credibly ignored. It’s real and humans are largely responsible, and it’s only going to get worse. Monitoring the Earth environment from orbit is one of the primary tools available to those who would monitor and help alleviate the damage we are causing. Stopping the monitoring will not stop the problem. In real time, the reduction of climate meteorologists during a time of increasingly-violent storms will lead to more lives lost, storm damage, insurance problems, and more.
The huge numbers of satellites being launched these days, and the sheer numbers of satellites re-entering (or rockets exploding) has a significant effect on the chemistry of the Earth’s upper atmosphere. You might think the debris is trivially-small, but after the huge number of satellites now planned for have been aloft awhile and start de-orbiting at the present observed rate, more than 3300 tons of vaporized metal will be dispersed in the ionosphere each year. NOAA’s 2026 budget has no provision for mitigating the effects of this level of pollution.
For more on the consequences of the drastic cuts in NOAA’s budget, see: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-team-looks-to-drastically-cut-noaa-staff-and-budget/; https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/hurricane-season-approaches-trumps-noaa-budget-cuts-threaten-safety, and https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fired-rehired-and-fired-again-noaa-employees-are-caught-in-a-liminal-state.
National Institutes of Health
NIH’s budget will be cut by 37% under the proposal. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget will be cut by 39%, in part by eliminating the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, and the Global Health Center. Such reductions, along with RFK’s ridiculous ideas about vaccines, is already killing Americans with diseases that were once defeated. Where would we have been without the NIH vaccine development during the 2022 COVID epidemic?
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The size and effect of the cuts to NASA will be presented in the NASA NEWS section below.
MethaneSAT Lost
The Environmental Defense Fund partnered with the New Zealand Space Agency to design, build, launch, and operate a small satellite that could detect and measure methane sources. The Bezos Earth Fund contributed $100 M for the project. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas; industrial releases of methane are very undesirable. “Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas. We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released.”
MethaneSAT was launched on March 4, 2024. On June 20, 2025, contact with the spacecraft was lost, for reasons unknown. Recovery is unlikely. For more about the mission, the latest info on the spacecraft, and the material with the quote above, see: https://www.methanesat.org.
OF SPECIAL INTEREST FYI
GOLDEN DOME
“The Golden Dome air and missile defense system will be fully operational in two and a half to three years and cost about $175 billion to protect the U.S. homeland against a wide range of attacks by missiles, aircraft and drones, President Donald Trump said May 20.
“The Oval Office announcement came after the Pentagon submitted proposals to comply with Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order to establish an “Iron Dome for America,” including space-based interceptors. The concept was later renamed the Golden Dome.
“In his remarks, Trump said the system would have nearly 100% effectiveness against air and missile threats, but released few key details, including the various sensors and effectors, as well as the areas to be actively defended.” Quotes above are from: https://aviationweek.com/defense/missile-defense-weapons/trump-outlines-175-billion-three-year-golden-dome-plan.
The U.S. Space Force and numerous experts have lauded the concept, but are highly skeptical about the budget and time-line. Other negatives to the plan include the need to continue to slash NASA’s science-related budget, including NASA’s nascent ability to protect us from non-military dangers, such as asteroid impact.
The technological aspects of identifying, tracking, and intercepting hypersonic targets is formidable. Further, since the GD program will have to have powerful orbit-based weapons firing downward near/at the United States, the prospect for friendly-fire missiles was not discussed (recall that many of the American deaths during the Pearl Harbor attack were civilians hit by anti-aircraft misses).
However, the United States is facing a much more dangerous set of adversaries than it did at the dawn of the Space Age. The present balance of power has been maintained in large part by the use of orbital reconnaissance to allow the USA and Russia (USSR) to see and understand what the “other guys” are up to, but other players are gaining power, and a rogue nation/group could deny access to LEO by exploding objects in it that would at least temporarily take out our eyes in the skies.
Stephen N. Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Force, spoke on the need for Space-based military assets at the recent USSF Space Symposium last month; see: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/us-needs-orbital-interceptors-to-win-a-war-in-space-space-command-chief-says.
In addition, “Space Force officials have expressed interest in commercial solutions for space access, mobility and logistics (SAML) technology that would enable military satellites to be easily refueled on orbit or allow for the rapid servicing or deorbiting of an ailing spacecraft.
“Those company investments are coming to fruition: Northrop Grumman announced April 9 that a Mission Extension Vehicle developed by the company’s Space Logistics subsidiary recently performed the first undocking between two commercial spacecraft in the geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO) graveyard, when the spacecraft decoupled with Intelsat’s IS-901 satellite after providing five years of life-extension services.”
For more info on this topic, see the source of the above quote at: https://aviationweek.com/shows-events/space-symposium/debrief-us-space-force-orbit-maneuvering-demos-tap. For more about the Space Symposium 2025, see: https://aviationweek.com/space-show-news and https://aviationweek.com/podcasts/check-6/podcast-spatial-awareness-live-40th-space-symposium .
Could the U.S. Lose Its Leadership in Space? is an interesting podcast posted by Aviation Week recently.“Is the United States in danger of losing its enviable leadership position in Space? As Space becomes an increasingly contested domain and US adversaries develop new capabilities, the alarm bells are growing louder by the day. Make no mistake, the US Space industry is still on the cutting edge. The concern is whether the federal government is equipped to harness innovations that are being rolled out at a breakneck pace.” For more on this important topic, see: https://aviationweek.com/podcasts/check-6/podcast-could-us-lose-its-leadership-space.
For Those of You in the Colorado Springs Area: The Space Foundation Discovery Center on Garden of the Gods Avenue has undergone a significant expansion and updating. Find out more about it at: https://discoverspace.org and more about the Space Foundation at: https://www.spacefoundation.org. In addition, the Planetarium at the U.S. Air Force Academy offers a variety of public programs; for more information, see: https://www.usafa.edu/facilities/planetarium. But be advised that the Academy has new stringent requirements to enter. The Academy also has great STEM outreach programming for students and teachers, see: https://www.usafa.edu/research/stem-outreach.
Jack Cross: I have met an interesting fellow on-line via one of NASM’s wonderful Docents. His name is Jack Cross, and he proudly served in the U.S. Navy from 1950 to 1954 as a Bosun’s Mate. He was on a series of warships at first, then he moved over to the USS Yellowstone, a tender that served the Navy’s Sixth Fleet. He joined the Navy and saw the world!
Now retired, Jack has put together a series of picture-rich PowerPoint presentations. He kindly gave me permission to post three of them already, one about D-Day, one about “A Day of Mercy in the Sky,” and one about his Navy career, which gives a real interesting look at what Navy life was like at the start of the Cold War. Check all three out on the Archive: Other Stuff page of the website! Thank you, Jack!
OF SPECIAL INTEREST LINKS AND OTHER INFORMATION
IN THE NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
I recently had the privilege of visiting the National Air and Space Museum, both the original building on the National Mall, now undergoing renovation, and the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy building at Dulles Airport, where a number of planes and other artifacts normally downtown are now on display. A number of Docents and museum staff get A+StW, and I thought I could expand the Of Special Interest section to include info relating to NASM programming, collection, and research. I hope the new material makes you want to made the trip to see NASM in person!
NASM’s Bong P-38: Richard I. Bong, the highest-scoring American fighter pilot in WWII, came back to the U.S. before the end of the War. In addition to his appearing at bond drives, he became a test pilot. He was a Wright Filed outside Dayton on April 16, 1945, slated to fly a P-338 with an experimental control system. The test went awry before it began, when the right engine exploded. Major Bong was able to land the aircraft without further difficulty. That very aircraft is now on display in the Hazy Center today! For more information on Dick Bong, see the Item of the Week in this installment. For more on the NASM P-38, see: https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/lockheed-p-38j-10-lo-lightning/nasm_A19600295000.
Vintage Aviation News recently posted a piece about the changes being made in NASM’s Pioneers of Flight Gallery. NASM folks already are familiar with this, but those of you waiting to see the National Mall Building of NASM after its ongoing renovation will want to check this out: https://vintageaviationnews.com/aviation-museum-news/pioneers-of-flight-gallery-at-the-national-air-and-space-museum.html!
DOCENTS (and all others interested in Solar System exploration history): If you don’t have an on-line copy of Fordham University’s Asif A. Siddiqi’s fabulous book, Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration, you should. You can find it at: https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/beyond_earth_detail.html.