NASA budget: Congress saves science, but says goodbye to Martian samples

The House and Senate have wiped out the cuts proposed by the White House. Major missions already launched and planned are confirmed, but the agency has suffered a drastic reduction in staff. The Mars Sample Return mission will not go ahead.

BY EMILIO COZZI

Like moles that stand out on a statuesque body, two pieces of bad news cannot overshadow the good one: the United States Congress has almost entirely rejected the proposal to cut Nasa’s 2026 budget, put forward by the Trump administration last May.
If confirmed, the White House proposal would have reduced the resources allocated to the space agency by 24 percent, and science and planetary missions by as much as 47 percent, cutting future missions or shutting down those already under way.

Instead, the budget approved first by the House and then by the Senate on January 15 exceeds 24 billion dollars. According to calculations by the Planetary Society, which monitors the agency’s funding, if the allocations of the Big Beautiful Bill Act signed last summer are added, ten billion dollars over six years, in particular for activities related to human spaceflight, the result is that NASA will receive just over 27.53 billion dollars in fiscal year 2026. Based on the data available in the Society’s historical budget tracker, this is the largest NASA budget since 1998 when adjusted for inflation.
The moles referred to are the loss of a treasure, namely a large portion of the workforce, and the cancellation of the Mars Sample Return program.

Science strikes back

The Planetary Society itself had launched a campaign called Save Nasa Science and collected signatures to avert the budget axe. Now, on the dedicated web page, the phrase “We saved Nasa science in 2026” stands out, a cry of victory that nonetheless suggests the battle could return in the future.
For now, all the missions that the Trump administration had slated for cancellation are safe. Starting with those yet to come, the Neo Surveyor space telescope is saved, designed to detect potentially dangerous objects approaching Earth. Davinci and Veritas are also safe, and the contribution to the European Space Agency’s EnVision mission has been restored. All of them will launch at the beginning of the next decade to study Venus.

Among the missions already launched, Osiris Apex, formerly Osiris Rex, which collected and sent to Earth samples from the asteroid Bennu and will now investigate the ominous Solar System resident Apophis, will not be shut down. Funding has also been restored for other major, even iconic, missions such as Juno in orbit around Jupiter, New Horizons at the edge of the Solar System after delivering the first close up views of Pluto, and Mars Odyssey, Mars Express and Maven around Mars. Along with the shutdown of these missions, rovers such as Perseverance and Curiosity would probably have struggled to transmit data back to Earth. The contribution, which is crucial, to the European mission that will carry the Rosalind Franklin rover to the Red Planet in search of evidence of past or present life beneath the surface has also been confirmed.

Those working on probes exploring the cosmos and studying the Sun can also breathe a sigh of relief, including teams behind the Chandra X ray telescope, the Parker Solar Probe, which flies extremely close to our star, and the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission dedicated to studying Earth’s magnetosphere. On the space weather front, HelioSwarm, a future mission to the Sun, and the Geospace Dynamics Constellation remain on track. Cuts to the contribution for a highly ambitious European mission have also been reversed, Lisa, a space based interferometer designed to listen to the vibrations of space time in the form of gravitational waves.

No calculator would have been needed to measure the abyss into which research dedicated to our planet and climate change would have fallen. Scientists around the world had been alarmed by the zeros next to missions such as Earth observation satellites Landsat Next, Terra, Aqua and Aura. The two billion 153 million dollars allocated to the Earth science division allow it to breathe again.

Earthlings and Martians: what Nasa has lost

That said, not everything has gone well, and the Planetary Society highlights one striking fact: despite the largest availability of funds in almost thirty years, Nasa has fewer employees than it did in July 1960, at the dawn of the space age.
About four thousand people have joined the deferred resignation program, encouraged by the administration through severance packages. The alternative would have been an almost certain layoff. Even so, some offices have been closed and part of the staff has indeed been dismissed. In the private sector as well, some have chosen to leave the field or move abroad. Rebuilding the workforce will be another challenge.

The end of Mars Sample Return

And Mars? The ultimate destination for extending the boundaries of knowledge and of a multiplanetary civilization does not see any NASA mission on the horizon. Mars Sample Return would have been a complex and ambitious program in collaboration with the European Space Agency. It envisioned landing on Mars with a lander and a rover or a helicopter to retrieve the samples collected by Perseverance, stored in capsules and left on the ground. The capsules would then have been loaded onto a small rocket and, once in orbit, transferred to an orbital probe that would head back to Earth to deliver uncontaminated samples for analysis in terrestrial laboratories, far more sophisticated than those aboard Perseverance. It would have been an extraordinary opportunity to search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

For two years, Mars Sample Return had been in limbo. Escalating costs and delays, it was originally planned for launch in 2028 and later pushed to the early 2030s, led Nasa’s then administrator Bill Nelson to place the project on hold in April 2024 following an independent and unforgiving review. It found that eleven billion dollars would have been required instead of the seven initially planned, and that the mission would not take place before 2040 rather than 2033. A lower cost solution was then sought by appealing to the ingenuity of private companies, without success.

In updating the budget, the administration therefore placed greater emphasis on human spaceflight, with the idea that flesh and blood astronauts would eventually collect the Martian samples. An idea even more hyperbolic than the one that was abandoned. Now, in Nasa’s accounts, there are 110 million dollars allocated to Future Mars missions. A surprise could emerge from there, although China appears to be better positioned. Beijing has its own Mars Sample Return planned, called Tianwen 3, which could launch in 2028 and bring Martian samples back to Earth as early as 2031.