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of the Union address to Congress late last month.
“American footprints on distant worlds,” the president said, “are not too big a dream.”
Yet the budget calls for cutting $102 million from NASA’s efforts to study the home planet, including eliminating four missions.
Two have at least some implications for Goddard, a 58-year-old Greenbelt institution that employs some 10,000 civil servants and contractors.
Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, noted there is a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers interested in space funding — in part because the agency has operations in both Republican and Democratic districts, but also because many feel the agency’s work ultimately contributes to the economy.
“I do think that if the president’s budget became real it would significantly change the mission at Goddard and significantly change the number of people employed at Goddard, which would be a major loss,” Cardin said. “The work there is extremely valuable to the quality of life in America.”
One of the Goddard-related programs zeroed out in the budget proposal is the PACE mission — short for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem. Being tested at Goddard, it would monitor the health of earth’s oceans, including the cycling of carbon. Scientists are eager to study the effect of algae called phytoplankton that absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into oxygen.
A report last year by NASA’s inspector general pegged the total,life-cycle cost of the project at between $805 million and $850 million.
The Trump budget also cancels funding for two instruments on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite. Known as DSCOVR, for Deep Space Climate Observatory, it was launched in 2015 to detect solar storms that can affect electronics, the power grid and other satellites. The NASA instruments monitor changes in the earth’s ozone as well as the energy reflected and emitted from the sunlit face of the planet.
The budget calls for eliminating funding for the earth-viewing apparatus, not the solar instruments. The mission, first proposed by former Vice President Al Gore, is led by NOAA at the agency’s satellite facility in Suitland.
NASA performs analysis and processing of data coming down from the earth instruments. The agency had requested $1.2 million for that work in the upcoming fiscal year.
It is not clear how many jobs are associated with either project.
NASA’s earth science program includes 18 missions in orbit, including sensors mounted to the International Space Station. Several new missions are nearing launch in the next few years.
“We remain committed to studying our home planet and the universe, but are reshaping our focus within the resources available to us — a budget not far from where we have been in recent years, and which enables our wide ranging science work on many fronts,” NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a statement.