Two of NASA's historic data-collecting missions — used by scientists and earthbound agriculturalists to track carbon dioxide and crop health — may be permanently grounded as the Trump administration looks to shrink the agency's spending.
When they launched over a decade ago, the satellites known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCOs) revolutionized the collection of carbon data and greenhouse gas science. To put it simply, the OCOs changed how we understand our impact on the planet. Experts rely on the data for studies on greenhouse gases and severe weather and climate disasters, as well as other practical uses, including modeling the effectiveness of eco-friendly transportation on carbon dioxide emissions and even mapping plant photosynthesis and crop failures around the world.
OCO-2 has been orbiting Earth since 2014, designed initially to measure regional carbon dioxide sources and natural "carbon sinks" that absorb greenhouse gases. OCO-3 was launched in 2020 to supplement previous OCO missions, and is attached directly onto the International Space Station. The satellites run the government around $15 million in annual maintenance costs, reports NPR.
The equipment was expected to last in space for several more years, NPR reports, but NASA employees have recently been tasked with drawing up plans to terminate their use.
The agency has been looking to private scientific partnerships to keep its missions running, as the Trump administration and other Republican leaders double down on attacks against climate change science. President Trump shut down the federal climate.gov website in June, following a May executive order that outlines a new "gold standard" for federal scientific research and enables agency heads to deem research that fails to align with the stipulation of the order as "scientific misconduct." The site now redirects visitors to the climate page of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Compared to his first term, Trump has slowed the federal government's investment in its space program. But the president's stance on proactive climate policy has remained the same across administrations: In 2019, Trump issued orders to withhold climate modeling research in federal assessments, following the deletion of federal climate change websites hosted by the EPA.
In the last month, Sean Duffy, secretary of transportation and acting NASA administrator, and other agency leaders have preemptively begun scaling back NASA's workforce and structure in order to align with a proposed 2026 budget cut that would see $6 billion of excised funding and the termination of dozens of science programs and missions, reports Reuters.
Dozens of NASA employees signed a letter in protest of the proposed budget, writing: "We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement and efficient use of public resources. These cuts are arbitrary and have been enacted in defiance of congressional appropriations law. The consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire." The letter explicitly calls out the irreversibility of decommissioned spacecraft and the loss of mission observations, as well as cuts to research in "space science, aeronautics, and the stewardship of the Earth."
