Comments about SLS miss what’s happening. SLS is inefficient and wasteful, but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1].
Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, Swift, and many more in planetary and heliophysics. This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.
The private sector is irrelevant here: SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research.
Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, Swift, and many more in planetary and heliophysics. This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.
The private sector is irrelevant here: SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/trump-administration-m...