Space Policy Edition: NASA’s 2026 budget

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

The Planetary Society

Technology, Science

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Alicia Brown from the Commercial Space Federation and Brittany Webster from the American Geophysical Union join the show to discuss NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, and welcome to this month's space policy edition of Planetary Radio.
0:24.8	I am Casey Dreyer, the chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society.
0:29.8	And I should say this is actually not this month's standard episode.
0:34.3	This is a special episode devoted exclusively to the train wreck masquerading as the
0:40.7	fiscal year 2026 budget request for NASA that was dropped just as I record this over a month ago,
0:48.5	the full details. You may know some of the details what's in this budget. You may be learning about them for the first time, but I wanted to devote an entire special episode of the Space Policy Edition just to what is in here and how to read and interpret some of what's going on.
1:08.0	The 2026 budget request, the full details, the full grisly details were released on May 30th.
1:15.2	We knew already that NASA was going to be cut by about 25%, and that science within NASA was
1:22.1	going to be cut by 47%. Both of those already we knew were historic levels of cuts. This is unprecedented.
1:32.9	Additionally, what we learned from the full details of this budget is some of the new
1:38.4	initiatives directing human spaceflight exploration towards Mars, while at the same time undermining some of the very
1:45.9	technologies, infrastructure, and capabilities necessary to get them there. And by being so profoundly
1:53.9	divisive and by effectively not even publicly talking about this budget, NASA itself and the administration that has
2:04.4	proposing this radical change to NASA is avoiding any level of strategic implementation
2:11.0	and strategic focus, creating the opposite, in a sense, of a foundation to build on when it inevitably must pass
2:20.8	forward these plans to the next administration. Instead, this budget is an anti-strategy or an
2:28.3	unstrategic budget. This budget is also profoundly wasteful, even though it pertains to save money by cutting spending.
2:37.3	It does so at the expense of well-performing capabilities, well-performing spacecraft,
2:44.1	and by literally throwing away and turning off perfectly well-functioning systems that would
2:50.7	require billions of dollars to restore.
2:54.5	This is an unstrategic, wasteful, and unprecedented budget proposal for NASA.
3:01.9	None of these three words are hyperbole.
	...

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