Trump’s Dismantling of NASA Has Officially Begun
Newly announced layoffs highlight the troubling impact of DOGE on the space agency and federal workers as a whole.
So weird. SpaceX's competition? Getting attacked by little d and fElon?
Who could have imagined?
It's not really competition anymore though, since they often use SpaceX rockets for what they do now.
They were never competition, exactly. NASA doesn't make spacecraft, they buy and sometimes modify them from industrial concerns and always have.
What they did do was be a federal space agency, with all that implies otherwise, which means a private company can't charge premium rates to do the things that absolutely have to happen that they were doing.
This is the privatization and militarization (through the inevitability of Space Force absorbing some responsibility) of space.
A Republican voter told me Trump would be thrown out of office if America loses the space race to China. Whenever I need a half-correct monkey paw fortuneteller, I guess I know where to find one.
The US is gonna be so humiliated when China lands people on the moon and we have no infrastructure or tech in place to answer their move.
The US is already humiliated
We currently have no one meeting this head on with real leadership. Anyone with political capital to travel and speak with world leaders (as trump did when he wasn’t president) could be helping save this YET.
America is so deeply fucked, and 70-something million of them are too brainwashed to know it yet.
Another eighty million are too lazy to care.
And the remainder of us who are somewhat higher on the spectrum of both sanity and giving a fuck about humans and the world are losing our fucking minds at a distressing pace
So, is SpaceX just going to do all the infrastructure? Because this is just royally dumb.
Yup, and they'll do it half as well for three times the cost.
Efficiency!
Rocket lab will be putting hands up and competing for some of the contracts
This deeply pisses me off. You have no idea how excited I am to go back to the moon and if that goes down the drain imma lose it.
They are absolutely gonna kill the Artemis project. They already killed the launch vehicle (though, to be fair, SLS was an absolute albatross).
I'm super worried about JWST... It's been absolutely amazing so far, and that fucker might just fucking axe it.
JWST is fine. It's not going anywhere, and unless it is purposefully destroyed it will keep sending us data.
The NASA Deep Space Network collects it and distributes it, but Europe could just as easily set up their own interface to receive the data. DSN was already in place, so it made sense to keep using it.
2 out of the 3 DSN locations aren't even in the US or managed by NASA.
Also, fun fact, the Canberra complex has the only antenna that can communicate with Voyager 2!
I mean, it’s already up there and there’s no docking port for future service missions.
A lot of countries contributed to JWST, if the US drops it, someone else will pay people to keep it in orbit.
Trump's? Or Musk's?
From the article ...
NASA announced on Monday that it will be closing the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy; the Office of the Chief Scientist; and the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Branch of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Twenty-three employees will be affected by the cuts,
The title only claims that the process has started.
The title only claims that the process has started.
The article says "will be" (future tense), and not "has been so far". 🤷♂️
There may be more to come (knowing Elon/Trump), but I can only quote the article, ethically.
Oh! Oh! Can Canada get its aerospace engineers and industry back? We've been missing them ever since the Avro Arrow project got cancelled by American pressure and they all ended up in NASA.
I would fucking love that. I find it unlikely but I really want to work in space manufacturing without moving to the USA. I know there are a handful of companies here, but not enough.
The race to the bottom!
“It’s one small step backwards for man, it’s”, scans notes looking for last section of speech. Shrugs. “I think that’s it folks. One small step backwards it is.”
Wait, weren't they going to take humanity into space?
Science Mission Directorate cut by 50%?
It's not the people building the rockets getting cut the most.
It's the people studying the planets and responsible for understanding and protecting their state before human development s'encubre.
Yes and it covers way more missions than most people would think, like the Mars rovers, all of our sample return efforts, etc. It would all but kill US planetary science.
Changing our space program from that of scientific exploration and understanding our neighbors to one of colonization and conquest.