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Preliminary budget cuts proposed by the Trump Administration would slash a huge swath out of NASA's Venus science funding. And it would spell the end of the space agency’s much anticipated $500 million DAVINCI mission, an orbiter and atmospheric probe, which had been due for launch to our sister planet in 2030. The Trump White House shared a draft version of its 2026 budget request for NASA with the space agency, as Ars Technica first revealed last week.
The proposed preliminary budget calls for a 30 percent cut to the space agency’s planetary science budget, taking it down to only $1.929 billion, Ars Technica reports. DAVINCI is a NASA-led mission; not only is it a return to Venus, it's a return to the surface, which has not been done for a long, long time, Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California, Riverside, and a member of NASA’s DAVINCI science team, tells me by phone.
The American planetary science community is also fearful that if DAVINCI is axed, there may be a domino effect in Congress that would endanger funding for VERITAS, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Venus mapping mission due for launch in 2031. The budget proposal would also decimate NASA research grants that are the lifeblood of career planetary scientists and as well as early career doctoral and graduate students doing Venus-related research. The U.
S. planetary science community is pretty much in a state of shock over the proposed cuts and it’s uncertain as to whether Congress will try to help NASA defend its Venus science programs. Venus is an extreme example of a planet gone awry, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and surface pressures some 93 times that of Earth.
But new technologies are finally enabling the scientifically long-neglected planet to be explored in a way that has never previously been possible. It's just astounding that it's the nearest planet, the same size as Earth and we still know very little about the chemistry and composition of the atmosphere, says Kane. If we can't understand Venus, then we've got no hope for an exoplanet that's 100 light years away, he says.
Prior to the November presidential election, Kane flew to Washington, D.C. on behalf of The Planetary Society to lobby both sides of the aisle in Congress and emphasized the importance of staying the course with NASA's planned Venus funding.
Kane tells me that he was well-received by both Congressional Democrats and Republicans, but said the new administration’s proposed cuts will jeopardize the work that’s been done in U.S. Venus science over the last decade and a half.
Prior to the recent change in presidential leadership, Kane says that both NASA’s DAVINCI and VERITAS missions as well as the European Space Agency’s EnVision Venus orbiter were on a pathway for launch by the early 2030s. But he says that because the three missions are so interconnected, if one or more is canceled, it’s not clear how EnVision would be impacted. If these cuts go through, they will also represent a blow to American soft power.
NASA is the biggest source of soft power that the United States wields, meaning that anywhere you go in the world people love NASA, says Kane. That's not something that you can buy, he says. And perhaps the most frustrating and ironic aspect about these potential cuts is that in the scheme of the U.
S. government’s overall budget, Mars gets much more of the planetary science budget than Venus. And if you compare U.
S. Venus funding to everything else, it’s kind of like we’re talking accountancy errors, says Kane. I have trained graduate students working on Venus who are now wondering if they have invested all their efforts into something which isn't actually going to go anywhere, says Kane.
What can we expect in the next few months? The final NASA budget is going to take months to resolve, and, meanwhile, we have to somehow keep our heads in the science, says Kane. It’s very difficult to keep doing the good science whilst concerned about the existential nature of this impending budget crisis, he says. What happens if these cuts go through? We’re going to see a decimation of U.
S. science leadership and if we lose that, it's going to take decades to rebuild, says Kane..
