The White House's proposed budget for NASA would slash Earth science missions and the agency's entire Office of Education while maintaining the focus on commercial involvement in space exploration and on human missions to space.
The 2018 budget blueprint put forth by President Donald Trump would cut NASA funding from roughly $19.3 billion to $19.1 billion _ largely sparing it the more brutal bloodlettings proposed for other science-heavy institutions such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health.
But the plan for NASA would still shift money around in ways that largely reflect Trump's stated intentions to have the agency focus less on monitoring Earth's vital functions and more on space exploration.
"This is in line with our funding in recent years, and will enable us to effectively execute our core mission for the nation, even during these times of fiscal constraint," acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a statement.
The proposal would cancel plans to send a lander to Europa, Jupiter's large icy moon that is thought to hide a global ocean. It's one of the solar system's most promising potential homes for extraterrestrial life.
But the Europa Clipper mission, which would send a spacecraft to fly by the frigid waterworld, survived. So did the Mars 2020 mission to send a sample-collecting rover to the Red Planet. Both are based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.
The budget would cancel the controversial Asteroid Redirect Mission, a plan to capture an asteroid and bring it close to Earth. That mission has earned its share of critics over the years. One scientist went so far as to call it a "one-off costly stunt" that distracted from the agency's long-term goal of getting humans to Mars.
Still, much of the technology developed for the asteroid mission will be preserved and put to use in future projects, Lightfoot said.
"We will continue the solar electric propulsion efforts benefiting from those developments for future in space transportation initiatives," he said.
The White House blueprint saves $115 million by eliminating NASA's Office of Education, arguing that it was "performing functions that are duplicative of other parts of the agency."
The budget targets the agency's work on environmental science, cutting funding for Earth science research grants. It would also eliminate several missions that are still in development, including Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, which was intended to monitor the Earth's ocean health; the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, or OCO-3, an instrument to precisely monitor the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere; and the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory, or CLARREO, pathfinder, which would have used a solar spectrometer to produce highly accurate climate projections.
The White House would also cut NASA's role in the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite that was originally proposed by former Vice President Al Gore, who has long warned of the dangers of climate change.
NOAA's budget for Earth and ocean sciences would also suffer under the proposal, which eliminates more than $250 million in grants and programs that support coastal and marine management, research and education.
The blueprint allocates $3.7 billion to continue developing the Orion capsule and Space Launch System as part of the effort "to send American astronauts on deep-space missions."
This appears to be in line with Trump's call for more human exploration missions: "American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream," he said last month while addressing a joint session of Congress.
The proposal does not mention any plans to send humans back to the moon, a direction in which some Trump advisers had shown interest. Nor did it contradict NASA's goal, established under President Barack Obama, to get humans to Mars by the mid-2030s.
The proposal did, however, highlight a push for more industry involvement in space exploration, including in the operation of the International Space Station and what it called "public-private partnerships for deep-space habitation and exploration systems."
Other agencies whose missions involve research in science, health and technology faced far more dramatic cuts under the Trump budget. The Environmental Protection Agency's budget would decrease by $2.6 billion, a 31 percent cut, and the National Institutes of Health would lose nearly $6 billion, about 20 percent of its funding.
The Department of Energy would get more money to maintain its nuclear arsenal but take a significant hit to its clean energy programs. ARPA-E, which funds and promotes cutting-edge energy research, would be eliminated entirely.
The proposal is far from the last word on the 2018 fiscal year: Congress ultimately makes the budgetary allocations and the negotiation process is likely to take several months.
