The Space Advocate Newsletter, January 2026

This month

💰 Congress rejects cuts to NASA!
📊 The productiveness of ultra-low-cost science missions
📣 2026 Day of Action registration is open

You helped save NASA Science. After almost a yr of advocacy, Congress lastly handed H.R. 6938, which included funding for NASA in fiscal yr 2026. We obtained almost every little thing we needed: it rejected almost each minimize proposed by the White House, preserved NASA science funding, and preserved almost each house science mission (solely Mars Sample Return was minimize). The White House indicated that the President will signal the invoice.

This is nice information. Our advocacy efforts labored. Savor this victory. Juno will proceed to skim the cloud tops of Jupiter; New Horizons will push into the sting of our Solar System, our telescoped eyes to the Cosmos will stay open.

But be ready. Next yr’s finances cycle will start quickly. The White House may once more suggest deep cuts to NASA science. If they do, we’ll be able to push again once more.

Can house science be carried out on a budget? Jared Isaacman, our new NASA Administrator, recently posted that it’s “better to have 10 x $100 million missions and a few fail than a single overdue and costly $1B+ mission.” Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, made the same argument in an op-ed to SpaceNews. Recent finances victories apart, there’s unlikely to be any main new scientific flagships proposed by the present Administration. Instead, the main target appears to be on speedy, high-volume science missions carried out in partnership with business and educational establishments.

Better, quicker, cheaper 2.0? In the Nineties, going through a declining finances and led by a change-minded NASA Administrator, the house company applied a technique of upper threat, lower-cost science missions generally known as “Better, Faster, Cheaper.” Costs and growth instances have been capped, over finances tasks ruthlessly canceled, and failures have been tolerated — up to some extent. It led to a big improve in science missions (together with Pathfinder, WMAP, Deep Impact, and others). But the double-failure of two Mars missions in the summertime of 1999 successfully ended the experiment. Since then, even NASA’s “low-cost” missions have steadily gotten more expensive. The emergence of the business trade and part requirements, reminiscent of CubeSats, are pushing the re-evaluation of this technique.

Does 10 x 100 = 1,000? The primary premise is that we will get the identical total scientific output from larger charges of small missions than one giant mission. Can science be divided like that? Multibillion-dollar flagship missions produce high-impact science by touchdown on Mars, orbiting Saturn, peering again to the origins of the Universe, or flying extraordinarily near the Sun. These kinds of missions should survive in novel, unforgiving environments to gather their knowledge and sometimes require distinctive engineering options and extremely specialised instrumentation.

To check this, I seemed on the scientific productiveness of each NASA house science mission launched since 1994. We counted the variety of peer-reviewed publications that used mission knowledge and analyzed the variety of instances they have been cited by different scientists — a generally accepted metric to find out scientific impression. Publications with greater than 100 citations are thought-about to be “high impact”, in different phrases, they’re extremely related to the scientific group.

Historically, missions costing <$100 million don’t lead to many high-impact publications. Results differ by scientific self-discipline, too. For planetary science, 0% of high-impact publications have come from ultra-low-cost missions, as a result of each single one in every of these missions have failed (maybe indicative of a price flooring as a result of complexities of interplanetary journey). Heliophysics had 8% of its high-impact publications because of these missions, nevertheless, and a a lot larger quantity and success charge.

It takes time to provide good science. The shortest period from begin of mission growth to the first high-impact publication was three years (for the Clementine lunar mission). Ultra-low-cost tasks, although quicker to provide, are inclined to accumulate citations extra slowly.

Flagships aren’t the reply, although. The candy spot of excessive impression science and price are mid-sized missions within the $500 million to $1 billion vary (once more, it depends upon which scientific self-discipline). These are additionally missions that produce high-impact science quick.

We ought to be cautious a couple of pivot to ultra-low price science missions. There isn’t any motive to not experiment with low price missions, however they don’t seem to be going to be a substitute for extra difficult and costly efforts. I consider there are notable alternatives for extra mid-cost missions that host novel payloads or collect knowledge from under-explored locales.

I’ll be publishing extra on this analysis within the coming months.

Until subsequent month,

Casey Dreier
Chief of Space Policy
The Planetary Society