Trump cuts (but not defence) and relaunches the Golden Dome

The Trump administration's proposed $1.7 trillion budget for the next fiscal year is the leanest ever. Compared to the current situation, the document outlines cuts of 163 billion for the allocations of the various agencies and departments of the federal government. The cuts, of course, are not evenly distributed, but faithfully reflect the visions and priorities of the administration, which, however, will have to defend the proposal before Congress, which is already very concerned about the social and electoral consequences of such drastic interventions.

Not surprisingly, in a landscape of generalised cuts to scientific institutions and social initiatives, the big winners are the defence and national security departments with substantial increases in their funding. The richest is the defence department, which receives an increase of 113 billion, or 13% of the current budget. This will allow the Golden Dome, one of the projects closest to the heart of the president who announced it on Tuesday together with the defence secretary. Designed on the model of the Iron Dome that protects Israel's skies, the Golden Dome is to be of much larger proportions as it will have to cover a much larger territory. In addition to sophisticated ground-based systems, there is talk of putting between 400 and 1,000 satellites in orbit capable of detecting, tracking and intercepting missiles launched from anywhere in the world. This would be the first time that there are plans to put weapons in orbit and certainly not good news. Although rather sketchily described, the project would seem to be a rehash of the Strategic Defence Initiative proposed in 1983 by President Reagan that was abandoned due to its disproportionate cost. The Golden Dome also has the air of being a rather expensive project with rough estimates that could reach 830 billion over 20 years. To be sure, Trump has said that the project will absorb 175 billion over the next three years and in the 2026 budget 25 billion is planned. It will be a boon for space industries, first and foremost SpaceX, but not all space is smiling. In the president's proposal, Nasa's budget is cut by 24 per cent, a total reduction of $6.34 billion compared to the budget of $25.4 billion allocated for the 2025 fiscal year. At $18.8 billion, Nasa will have more or less the same funding as in 1980 ($18.9 billion, adjusted for inflation). After all, as already pointed out, the proposed budget for all federal agencies is the lowest ever. Never mind that economists say that reducing research by 25% will reduce federal revenues by 4% per year. This is the president's vision and NASA will have to adapt even at the cost of running into trouble with its international partners who were certainly not happy to learn that there is no room in NASA's new budget for the Gateway, the small space station designed to be the human outpost in orbit around the Moon as part of the Artemis programme. While it remains true that the president and his trusted advisor Elon Musk continue to prioritise plans to return astronauts to the Moon ahead of China (which plans to have the first taikonauts on the lunar surface by 2030) and to be the first to send humans to Mars, the implementation modalities want to be different from those worked out in the past. It is a pity that international partners such as the European Space Agency (ESA) together with the Canadian agency Csa, the Japanese Jaxa and the Bin Rashid Space Center of the United Arab Emirates had joined the Gateway project. Each partner had signed memoranda of understanding committing to provide components, which are already under construction. Some are already ready, such as the Halo (Habitable And Logistic Outpost) module structure, built by Thales Alenia Space of Turin, and already shipped to Northrop Grumman in the USA for integration and testing. Together with the lunar station, the new vision, which can be deduced from the proposed budget for NASA, cancels the very expensive Space Launch System (Sls), which should be retired after the third Artemis mission (the one that will take astronauts to the Moon), but also the Orion capsule, whose service module is provided by Esa. Once Starship is in operation, Sls and Orion will be obsolete, much to the satisfaction of SpaceX and equally great annoyance of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman who would see their contracts cancelled in favour of more 'cost-effective' solutions. And we are talking about the human exploration sector, which is the only one to have seen an increase in NASA's budget compared to the previous year.

In all other fields, NASA must do more as less, but, above all, it must respect the priorities of the new administration. In addition to eliminating all initiatives that have any bearing on gender equality and the inclusion of minorities, the peremptory order is to drastically reduce research on climate change and clean energy, but also to cut space research from astrophysics to planetology, via solar physics. And to think that the echo of the astonishing results of the analysis of samples from the asteroid Bennu with as many as 16,000 types of organic molecules, including 16 of the 20 types of amino acids that our cells use to make proteins, has not yet died down. Also found were adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil, i.e. the five bases that make up DNA and RNA. We do not know whether the wealth of organic molecules found in the samples from the asteroid Bennu prove the extraterrestrial origin of life on Earth, but, certainly, if NASA's science programmes are cut, or drastically downsized, it will be much more difficult to find an answer.