The amount of the cuts in context of the federal budget are like a few pennies hidden under couch seat cushions. But the damage the cuts will do is huge.

In its budget request to Congress in June, the Trump administration proposed slashing NASA’s budget by almost 25 percent, prompting a public letter of protest signed by several hundred NASA employees. NASA’s science arm, which includes climate and earth science, solar-system missions and astrophysics, would face a cut of 47 percent, to $3.9 billion from $7.3 billion.

Nineteen currently operating science missions, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Juno mission at Jupiter and the two Orbiting Carbon Observatories, which measure atmospheric distribution of planet-warming carbon dioxide, would be turned off under the plan.

[–] wickedrando@lemmy.ml 5 points 7 hours ago

They want to drive this to be privatized, and it will suck. Things that depend on these services will also be boarded up and replaced with worse, more expensive alternatives motivated by profit.