by The headquarters of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) can be seen in Washington DC Credit – Anadolu Agency – Get Pictures
On July 21 – the 56th anniversary of Apollo 11 Moon Walk – 287 current or former NASA employees signed or approved a strongly formulated open letter to the incumbent administrator Sean Duffy. The letter rejects the draconian budget of the space authority and the Personal Curves of the Space Agency proposed by the White House. 131 openly wrote their names of these signatories. The remaining 156, who worried about their work, gave their support anonymously.
And then 17 other names were added at the end of the letter – and it was 17 people who did not tell whether their names were used or not. This included Gus Grissom, Ed White, Judith Resnik, Christa Mcauliffe, Willie McCool, Kalpana Chawla and the other explorers who lost their lives in Apollo 1 Fire, the Challenger explosion and the Columbia resolution. The names were there for more than the feeling; As a point, they were memories of what can go wrong in the White Knuckle business of space-what too often goes wrong-when the corners are shortened, the financing is reduced and the workforce is reduced in short-term budget gains.
“Safety is compromised in every respect,” says the three -time space veteran and the retired NASA astronaut Cady Coleman, a signatories of the letter, in a conversation with time. “We have a different room disaster.”
Coleman has this danger more acute than most others. During the training of the Columbia Crew, she worked as a Capsule Communicator – or Capcom – the only voice between mission control and the astronauts. When the crew actually went into space, she ended a rotation in the Antarctic and supported the Meteor Collection program of NASA. She was on her way home and stayed with friends in New Zealand when the terrible word came down from space. “My friend called and said ‘Cady, we lost Columbia. I remember that I thought:’ How could we lose her? ‘It was definitely a hard journey home.”
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It is not only the loss of occupation security that the 287 signatories of the open letter – the explanation of NASA Voyager are defended. There is the scrap of projects such as the Mars rehearsal Return mission, which is already underway, with the endurance rover can be detected for later return to earth on the surface of the marble on the surface of Mars. There is the early cancellation of the SLS rocket of the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion Crew Capsule, the only crew of the NASA back to the moon. There is the proposed 50% of the NASA World Commercial Science missions, including the brand new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, all that has completed $ 4 billion for the start of the start in May 2027, which could now be made to simply get in his clean room in Greenbelt, Maryland. Overall, NASA with a budget shortening of 24% of USD 24.8 billion in 2025 has been $ 18.8 billion in 2026 and the lowest level of financing since 2015.
“We are not in the closure of the missions for which the congress has acquired funds because it represents a permanent loss of the ability for the United States in both space and on earth,” wrote the signatories. “We are not in the implementation of indiscriminately cuts at NASA science and aviation research, as this is the American people without the unique public well -being that NASA offers.”
And there is more. There is the loss of intellectual capital that comes when highly qualified civil servants either get out of control or pack their bags and bring their talents into the less political private sector, where job security is greater and the compensation is higher.
“Thousands of NASA officials were terminated early, stepped down or retired, taking highly specialized, irreplaceable knowledge of the implementation of the NASA mission decisively,” the letter said.
Says the retired NASA astronaut Terry Virts, now a candidate for a US Senate seat in the Democratic primary school in Texas: “These Trump employees are undermined to form future generations of engineers and scientists as well as the middle of the career, which with the climax of competence and competence, at the peak of the damage, in the damage, the damage.
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The number of anonymous signatories of the Voyager declaration letter is perhaps a sign of a cautious administration that is famous intolerant – and the punishment for criminal administration, which carried out infidelity. But NASA employees have at least a measure of institutional security. According to the Columbia disaster in 2003-a accident, which was partly the result of employees with lower echelon who feared for their work if they spoke out through security violations, NASA found his technical authority protocol, which protects employees protection for anomalies or dangerous corner cutting edges to superiors outside of their direct command chain
The signatories also cite an official guideline of the NASA directive, which also ensures the support for speaking truth with power. “NASA supports the complete and open discussion of questions of all kinds … including alternative and different views. Different views should be encouraged and respected in an environment of integrity and trust without oppression or retaliation.” The catch: The date of the entry into force was January 29, 2020 and the course on January 29, 2025.
Will the letter have an effect at all? The recent history does not start well. In June, employees of the National Institutes of Health wrote a similar open letter that achieved little result. At the beginning of this month, the employees of the Environmental Protection Agency submitted their own letter with poorer results. 140 of them were put in administrative leave.
But the NASA supporters do not give up hope. On the one hand, the steep budget, which shorts the white house, is still too approved by the congress, and with thousands of NASA workstations in dozens of congress districts, the legislators are not inclined to take money from the pockets of their voters. The SLS and Orion were spared in 2010 when President Barack Obama scraped them up, and Capitol Hill said no cubes.
And then there is also the less tangible, lyrical side of the space travel, which rustles in favor of NASA. “I’m an optimist,” says Coleman. “There is something about the room that is convincing. There are things that we don’t know. I think a letter about the room will reach people. I think people understand that we also say it about microbiology, if we say this about the space, also about sustainability.”
An individual open letter may not be enough to change national space policy, but millions of votes that express their support for this, May.
Write Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.
