NASA’s budget woes could doom $2B space telescope

NASA spent $2.2 billion to build and launch the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in 1999, and it has performed brilliantly, scrutinizing deep space, black holes, galaxy clusters and the remnants of exploded stars. It sees things that other space telescopes can’t see because it has X-ray vision.

It also has some old-age problems. Without careful planning, it can overheat, apparently because the reflective insulation on the telescope isn’t as shiny as it used to be. That’s just an educated guess — for 25 years it has been orbiting Earth, and no one has had a close look, much less touched it with human hands. But Chandra continues to be a scientific workhorse, delivering otherwise unobtainable views of the cosmos.

Chandra’s future, unfortunately for the astronomers who love it, is gloomy. If Congress approves the Biden administration’s 2025 budget request for NASA science missions, they say, the Chandra mission will be effectively terminated.

The old telescope’s uncertain status is part of an acute budgetary problem at NASA’s science mission directorate. There’s not nearly enough money for all the planetary probes, Mars rovers and space telescopes already built or on the drawing board. And officials have made clear to everyone that additional money is not likely to descend magically from the heavens.

The taxpayers do provide resources, including about $7.5 billion per year for NASA science missions. But the budgets haven’t been able to keep up with the scientific ambitions, including costly attempts to retrieve samples from Mars.

NASA’s strategic vision can also be swayed by competition from abroad. China and other nations are launching spaceships right and left. China could put astronauts on the moon in just a few years. There is talk in military and national security communities about the “Space Race 2.0,” and of space as a war-fighting domain.

In tight budgetary times, there are winners and losers. Chandra could be just one of several missions in the latter category.

NASA does not say it is killing the Chandra mission. But the language in the March 11 NASA budget request did not sound promising: “The reduction to Chandra will start orderly mission drawdown to minimal operations.”

The telescope has been funded at a little under $70 million per year, but the fiscal 2025 budget request cuts that to $41 million, then to $26.6 million the following year, dropping all the way to $5 million in fiscal 2029.

“We had to make some tough choices in order to keep a balanced portfolio across the science mission directorate,” NASA’s top science administrator, Nicola “Nicky” Fox, said. “Chandra’s very, very precious … but sadly, it is an older spacecraft.”

Last spring, after a rancorous budget battle on Capitol Hill, President Joe Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which raised the federal debt ceiling but required limits on federal spending. Across much of the government, agencies are coping with flat budgets, at best, even as inflation makes everything more expensive.

Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, wrote in a recent column that even with a 2% bump in NASA’s overall budget in the 2025 White House request, it still represents a $2 billion loss in buying power since 2020 due to inflation.