¶White House proposes massive NASA and NOAA science budget cuts. The draft version of Trump’s fiscal-year 2026 budget cuts NASA’s budget by 20%, with the majority of these cuts in the Science Mission Directorate. The Directorate, which oversees planetary science, Earth science, and astrophysics research, would have its budget decreased by close to 50%. These cuts include “a two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.” The world-class Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is fully assembled and on budget, would be cut entirely, as would Mars Sample Return efforts, and the DAVINCI Venus mission. “The budget cuts also appear intended to force the closure of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the agency has 10,000 civil servants and contractors.” Meanwhile, the White House also proposes to “eliminate the research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, close[ing] all weather and climate labs,” which will cut NOAA research by 75%. This would not only set back climate research but also critical weather forecasting, tornado and hurricane modelling, and disaster prediction and response. This seems likely to be a decision that kills people. The budget draft will almost certainly evolve, and we hope Jared Isaacman (if confirmed), Congress, Elon, and others push back. Unfortunately, if these cuts go through, along with those to the NSF, NIH, and other agencies, it seems like the US government’s decision to hand off stewardship of scientific progress to Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world will continue. The US’s science and technological leadership is in no small part due to federal R&D funding reaching as high as 1.4% of GDP in the post-World War II era, while the 2025 continuing resolution puts just 0.64% of GDP toward science and technology R&D. With the proposed cuts to NASA, the NSF (a budget cut of more than half has been suggested), and others, this number looks like it will fall dramatically. This has the feel of a poorly laid plan. |
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 | Federal R&D spending has dropped significantly since it peaked in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Further cuts proposed for FY2026 could make this line dip precipitously. |
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¶Papers- The inner Oort cloud, a mere 1,000-10,000 AU from the Sun, may have more structure than previously thought. Based on supercomputer simulations, “the Oort cloud looks like a spiral disk about 15,000 AU across, offset [from] the ecliptic by about 30 degrees. But more interestingly, it has two spiral arms that almost make it look like a galaxy” (paper). These spiral structures primarily result from the gravitational Galactic tide experienced as our solar system moves through the galaxy, and only minimally due to the movements of our system’s planets.
- Analysis of how Mars’s northern ice cap deforms the planet below it leads to some interesting findings (paper): Mars’s upper mantle is cold and highly viscous, much more so than Earth's (by 10-100x). The observed rate of ongoing deformation (0.13 mm/year) also suggests that the ice cap is surprisingly youthful, only 2-12 million years old. (This is probably because Mars's axial tilt changes periodically without a nice large moon to stabilize it, causing ice to shift from the poles to lower latitudes.)
- Charged dust grains in the early Universe may have experienced acceleration by radiation from the first stars, causing large-scale electrical currents that gave rise to weak but vastly extended magnetic fields (paper). These early fields, stretching over thousands of light years, could have shaped the pervasive magnetic fields we observe over intergalactic distances today.
- Researchers ran millions of simulations of the classic three-body problem, in which three interacting gravitational bodies undergo typically chaotic interactions. A visual map of the starting conditions and their outcomes (below) finds regions of regularity where similar starting conditions result in similar outcomes (paper). Outside of these regions, the chaotic behavior dominates. (Someone tell the Trisolarans.)
- Relatedly, presumably in a system residing in one of those coveted isles of regularity, rings and planets can simultaneously orbit three suns (paper).
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 | “Millions of simulations form a rough map of all conceivable outcomes when three objects meet, like a vast tapestry woven from the threads of initial configurations. This is where the isles of regularity appear.” Image credit: Alessandro Alberto Trani. |
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| ¶News in brief. NASA’s Lucy will fly by main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson this week ● Bangladesh joined the Artemis Accords ● Amazon delayed their inaugural Kuiper launch (c.f. Issue 313) due to ‘stubborn cumulus clouds’—the next launch attempt will be April 28th ● Intelsat became the first satellite operator to complete a life extension mission after its IS-901 GEO satellite, that’s been docked with Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle for the past 5 years, finished its mission and entered a graveyard orbit ● Astroscale US meanwhile plans to refuel two Space Force spacecraft in GEO in 2026 ● Jared Isaacman outlined a parallel plan for pushing toward both crewed Moon and Mars missions during his Senate confirmation hearing for NASA chief (which seems hard, especially with even less funding) ● D-Orbit acquired Italian EO company Planetek to bring together in-orbit servicing and space data ● Voyager Technologies plans to acquire space-based cloud services provider LEOCloud ● Luxembourg-based Exobiosphere secured a $2.2M seed to accelerate drug discovery in space ● Now private, Astra miraculously raised $80M to buy out shareholders and refinance the company, and hopes to resume launches next year ● Juno entered safe mode twice during its 71st close flyby of Jupiter, and is now back to normal operations ● Soyuz MS-27, carrying one NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts, launched and docked with the ISS ● NASA also extended their seat bartering agreement with Roscosmos into 2027, ensuring that there is at least one American and one Russian on the ISS should either Soyuz or US commercial crew vehicles be grounded ● Indian startup TakeMe2Space raised ~$642k pre-seed for AI processing in orbit ● UK-based Aurora Avionics raised £500K for launch vehicle and rocket engine controllers ● Chinese startup Letara raised ~$4.5m for spacecraft engines which use plastic as fuel ● A SpaceX Falcon 9 successfully launched and re-landed for a record setting 27th time ● Blue Origin completed their 11th human spaceflight mission on New Shepard, NS-31, carrying six well-known female now-astronauts to sub-orbital space for 10 minutes. |
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 | Blue Origin’s NS-31 crew, marking the first all-female space crew since Soviet Union cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo trip in 1963. (We mentioned Tereshkova recently due to Fram2 breaking her record for the highest inclination crewed mission.) |
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¶Etc.- NASA recently installed a heat shield on the first private spacecraft headed for Venus—this is Rocket Lab and MIT’s Venus Life Finder mission, currently planned for launch next year.
- The Lyrids meteor shower will peak overnight on April 22/23 next week.
- Unlike most US and European launches, China has been leaving upper stages in orbit as they have begun launching two mega-constellations, Guowang and Qianfan. At 700 km, these stages, which have a history of breaking up into debris clouds, will linger for centuries. Hopefully, this practice changes soon.
- The SpaceNet 9 challenge just launched with the task of developing algorithms to align optical and SAR imagery for better disaster response. $50k in prizes.
- How to spot comet SWAN (C/2025 F2).
- Titanium is “the ninth most abundant element in the [E]arth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100.” Despite this, because titanium bonds so readily, it wasn’t used in metallic form in industry until about 1950. This article presents a history of the miraculous aerospace metal.
- An absolutely fabulous video shot from the ISS of the Progress MS-10 launch in 2018.
- NASA’s Planetary Defenders Documentary premieres today, April 16th.
- Spaghetti science. What it sounds like… a surprising number of studies into spaghetti-related phenomena.
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