This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The Trump administration recently proposed a 24% budget cut for NASA,

and if it passes, it will be the largest slash to the agency's budget in a single year ever.

Their proposal also includes cutting NASA's science budget almost in half and shifting the agency's

priorities to sending people to the moon and Mars. So what's at stake here? Sophie Bushwick,

senior news editor at New Scientist in New York, is here to break it down and tell us more about

this week in science. Sophie,

welcome back. Thank you. Let's get right into this. What kinds of cuts does this budget include?

What's on the chopping block here? So this budget would cut major NASA science programs. So for instance,

the sending robots to other planets like like the rovers on Mars,

would be in trouble. There's a mission to bring rocks back for Mars. That would be in trouble.

There was a proposed space station around the moon that would be at issue. And closer to Earth,

the international space station would lose funds to send astronauts there and to have

research done. These are like the jewels of the NASA space program, aren't they?

Yes. And there's also the Nancy Greece Room in Space Telescope, which is sort of considered

the next big telescope after the James Webb Space Telescope. And that one is almost complete. It's on

track to be done soon, but this budget proposes removing any support to actually get it into space.

So we've spent all this money to send rovers to Mars to collect samples that are waiting

there, right, to be picked up? That's right. You can learn so much by bringing back rock samples from

other bodies in space, you know, samples from the moon or from an asteroid. And these Mars rocks

could be really, really amazing sources of information for scientists here on Earth. And they're

just kind of sitting around waiting for us to bring them back. So let's be clear. If this budget passes, it's going to fundamentally change NASA, right?

Yes, this would be a major change in NASA's priorities. And like you said, the biggest single year

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