On April 11 the White House submitted a budget proposal for NASA (known as “passback”). This is a first step in the negitiation process but its contents is extremely worriesome. It certainly goes beyond what anyone could have imagined in their worst nightmares. If enacted, it would effectively end astrophysics as we know it! Not only in the US, but globally.
The proposal aims to reduce funding for astrophysics at NASA by almost 70%. It includes statements like “Passback supports continued operation of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes and assumes no funding is provided for other telescopes”. Thinks about what this would mean! Even focusing only on telescopes relevant to my own field (time-domain and multi-messenger astrophysics) this would be the end for the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, Fermi, Chandra, IXPE, NuSTAR, TESS, the recently launched SPHEREx, and others. It would most certainly also mean the end (or very long delays) of joint missions in preparation like the LISA gravitational wave observatory, the NewATHENA flagship mission for X-ray astronomy, and many others.
Equally shocking is the proposed closure of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, an idea so outlandish I can hardly grasp the consequences. Everybody in the field has many friends among its 10.000+ people working there, running crucial services for the global astronomy community like HEASARC, the General Coordinates Network (GCN), and supporting many widely used tools like xspec, ftools, etc. The center holds a vast reservoir of know-how and expertise that cannot be replaced.
By pure coincidence, just a few hours before this passback proposal was announced, I gave a presentation at the 1st ACME project workshop in Toulouse/France. I offered an overview of the current landscape of tools and platforms essential for multi-messenger astrophysics. In my closing remarks, I raised the concern that some infrastructures have become so vital to our field that they could serve as single points of failure, with potentially devastating consequences if they were to disappear. I actually had systems like the GCN run at Goddard in mind, but didn’t say this out loud, fearing it might sound alarmist. Just hours later, this and many other essential infrastructures, satellites, and observatories are truly at risk of being shut down forever.