The New Year begins with some good news for New Horizons and for many other NASA missions. The US House and Senate have passed a bill that rejects the cuts to NASA first proposed in June by the White House and instead approved $24.4 billion for NASA this year, of which $7.25 billion will go to the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.
New Horizons will continue to be
funded, as will all but one other NASA mission.
While the total NASA budget is
slightly below that of 2025, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly rejected
the controversial proposal to cut 24% of NASA’s total funding of which 47%
would have been cut from NASA science missions.
This reversal did not just happen
on its own. Credit goes to the Planetary Society for its tireless efforts in
lobbying against these cuts. According to an announcement of the good news sent
by the Planetary Society, these efforts included close to 100,000 messages sent
to Congress, outreach to Senators and Congress members in every state and
district, and two days of lobbying action on Capitol Hill in October in which
346 people participated.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the
Planetary Society and all who took part in these efforts for saving so many
valuable space missions, including readers of this blog.
No current mission can do what New
Horizons is currently doing because it is the only spacecraft with operational science
instruments deep in the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons continues to observe this region
up close while also studying the solar wind as well as structures and processes
in the Milky Way.
Efforts to find a third flyby
target, another KBO in the spacecraft’s path, are ongoing.
Sometimes, it’s hard to remember
that this overwhelmingly successful mission endured multiple cancellations
before it even launched. It is a mission that happened because people believed
in it and fought for it over years and even decades.
When the NASA cuts were proposed
last summer, New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern joked, “We’ve been
dead before.” That statement held an underlying truth—that this particular
mission has survived numerous attempts to cancel it. If it were as “dead” as it
were those times, things might not have been as bad as they seemed.
And sure enough, New Horizons is
once again back from the brink of death.
Advocacy and action by large numbers of people can and does make a difference.
Democracy is not a spectator sport. The tireless efforts of many brought this
and various other crucial NASA missions back from near death.
A third New Horizons flyby may not be a given, but I certainly wouldn’t count
it out just yet.
