🚨 The grisly details of the 2026 NASA budget.

🚀 A rushed, self-sabotaging Mars program.

📉 New charts to understand the proposal.

How do you summarize a 500-page disaster masquerading as a budget proposal? As we were preparing to brief congressional staff on the FY 2026 NASA budget — details of which were finally released on May 30 — we were left searching for the right words. We settled on three:

Unprecedented. Unstrategic. Wasteful.

This budget is broadly destructive to most areas of NASA, particularly science. But it’s also an exercise in self-sabotage. The administration’s own stated goals are not well served in this proposal.

The Mars pivot for human spaceflight is rushed and ill-defined (literally, the document has numerous statements along the lines of “[we will] define the content of this new program and will brief Congress as soon as appropriate” for program proposals costing hundreds of millions of dollars). More to the point: the nascent Mars effort will be marked by its association with the destruction of popular NASA programs, from STEM education to nuclear propulsion to science. A tragedy in and of itself for an endeavor that should be a uniting force in the world.

In three years, another administration and Congress will have to carry on the project of sending humans to Mars. Absent any broad support, and with such a divisive origin, it is unlikely that the next one will accomplish that, particularly if the next President is from a different political party. Even a future Republican president may just have no personal interest in Mars, and, upon finding that there is little built-in support for the effort, may elect to abandon it altogether. Any long-term policy borne from such division is unlikely to last.

The outcome from this proposal, then, is massive cuts to NASA, political division, and a Mars program that won’t last more than three years.

Unprecedented. Unstrategic. Wasteful.

We’ve spent the past few weeks briefing members of Congress and their staff, the media, and our members on these facts. Notably, there has been little, if any, effort to defend this proposal. Jared Isaacman’s nomination was pulled the day after its release, a loss to both NASA and the Administration, which now has no surrogate responsible for promoting its own policies.

Ted Cruz (R-TX) has already proposed an outright rejection of this budget’s major cancellations on the human spaceflight side, proposing $10 billion to restore full ISS operations, finish the Gateway station, and provide SLS rockets for Artemis IV and V. Even though it doesn’t address the science cuts, it could provide breathing room for future appropriators later this year.

We are committed to this fight for as long as it takes to secure a future for space science and exploration that is worthy of our ambitions. I hope you’ll continue to stand with us.

Until next month,

Casey Dreier

Chief of Space Policy

The Planetary Society