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OPINION:
The heavens are beckoning. Shaking off its navel-gazing-style obsession with the inner workings of Earth’s climate, NASA is once again focusing its attention on its original mission of sending humanity outbound into space. A round of applause is in order; the American spirit to pioneer is stepping toward the stars for the ultimate adventure.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy recently announced the agency’s shift of resources from terrestrial climate science toward extraterrestrial exploration. “All of the climate science and all of the other priorities that the last administration had at NASA, we’re going to move aside,” Mr. Duffy said during an appearance on Fox Business. “All of the science that we do is going to be directed towards exploration, which is the mission of NASA,” he said.
Aligning with President Trump’s efforts to rein in out-of-control federal spending, Mr. Duffy’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal would make a deep, 52% slash in funding for skyborne study of Earth’s climate, putting such satellite research subjects as sea-level and carbon-dioxide measurements on the chopping block.
Overall, the space agency’s appropriation would be reduced by an unprecedented 24%, to $18.8 billion.
As painful as these cuts appear, untouched by the budget blade would be the agency’s core aims: missions considered essential for manned flights to low earth orbit, the moon and, eventually, Mars, where the hoped-for establishment of colonies would transform humanity into an interplanetary species.
Predictably, howls of resistance have arisen from backers of the powerful climate change industry, despite the capabilities of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which was designed to accomplish similar functions. “This budget, if enacted, would not only abandon decades of American leadership in space science and exploration, but would also sabotage its own stated ambitions, setting the nation’s space program on a path to political polarization, economic uncertainty, and surrender of the final frontier,” the Planetary Society wrote in opposing the planned cuts.
On the contrary, political polarization is already firmly entrenched in Washington, and the relentless conflict doesn’t need a boost, in a manner of speaking, from NASA. The same goes for economic uncertainty, thanks to decades of federal overspending. Far from surrendering the “final frontier,” NASA’s budget plan is specifically intended to redirect the agency’s earthbound climate gaze outward toward the potentially life-sustaining resources and habitats of a vast universe.
Congress, of course, has the last word on federal budgeting, and even the president’s fellow Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, has defended some NASA projects on the chopping block.
The policy thrust toward deep space exploration is a natural aim that aligns with the president’s muscular “America First” stance. Moreover, it constitutes the next logical chapter in NASA’s storied series of voyages that resulted in U.S. astronauts planting the Stars and Stripes on the moon in 1969. Although no other nation has managed to match that feat during the intervening years, it is a national embarrassment that no American has returned to the lunar surface in more than five decades.
Serving as steppingstones toward a return to the moon are a series of missions, highlighted by late August’s back-to-back rocket launches. First, NASA collaborated with entrepreneur extraordinaire Elon Musk to send SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on its 33rd resupply mission to the International Space Station, where it delivered 5,000 pounds of scientific equipment. Two days later, the 10th test flight of SpaceX’s Starship atop the company’s Super Heavy booster launched from Texas’ South Padre Island. The rocket successfully practiced deployment of dummy satellites and engaged in reentry experiments.
The Trump administration’s plan to refocus NASA on human space exploration is a sensible effort to maintain America’s lead in the race to populate space. With China intent on its own astronauts soon claiming swaths of lunar real estate for its own, there is little time to waste.
Beyond the moon, the establishment of manned colonies on Mars is a pressing order of business. Skills to be acquired on both planets are deemed essential for success in harvesting valuable extraterrestrial minerals needed on Earth. Not to be forgotten is the possibility, however remote, that an extinction-level collision could annihilate humanity’s home planet and necessitate the flight to a ready extraterrestrial refuge.
Amid the ebb and flow of ambition during human history, there is occasion for courageous thrusts into the unknown. Few people have matched Americans’ inquisitiveness, as demonstrated by their record-shattering advances in science and technology. NASA’s plan to trade navel-gazing climate science for stargazing missions into the void of space signals that America is ready, once again, to tank up and take off.
• Frank Perley is a former senior editor and editorial writer for Opinion at The Washington Times.
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