What's Causing Mike's Indigestion Now? — Special Artemis II Edition (3 April 2026)
"Houston, we have a priorities problem."
Right now, as you’re reading this, four human beings are flying through deep space at roughly 25,000 miles per hour in a spacecraft named Integrity. And if that name doesn’t end up being the most ironic thing about this week, I’ll eat my hat.
US astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 1st and have now broken Earth orbit for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. NASA Let that sink in. Fifty-three years. The Artemis II crew is currently further from home than any human has been since the Nixon administration, looking back at our little blue marble while making history in real time.
And back here on the ground? The administration just proposed cutting NASA’s science budget by nearly half.
Great timing, guys. Maybe they’re sore about a conspiracy they backed being debunked?
The Numbers, Because They Matter
The FY2027 White House budget request would cut NASA’s Science Mission by 47%, dropping it from $7.25 billion to $3.9 billion, with the overall agency taking a 23% hit. The Planetary Society points out that adjusted for inflation, this would be the smallest NASA budget since 1961 - which, for reference, is before John Glenn had even orbited the Earth.
The official framing from the White House budget office is that it “terminates over 40 low-priority missions to transform the Science program into one that is more focused and fiscally responsible.” (SpaceNews) Low priority. We’re talking about missions studying asteroids that could hit us, Earth’s climate systems, and decades of planetary science. But sure, low priority. Makes total sense.
This isn’t even a new idea. They tried this last year. Those proposed cuts were used to shrink research programs, draw up termination plans for 19 in-flight missions, and push more than 4,000 civil servants out the door. Congress said no - loudly, and with rare bipartisan agreement. So the White House just... submitted the same proposal again this year. “That’s a bold strategy, Cotton.”
The impact goes well beyond cancelled missions. These cuts would gut space science research programs, cripple university departments and NASA centers, wipe out a generation of the STEM talent pipeline, and trigger widespread layoffs across a highly skilled workforce in both government and industry. (Spaceflight Now) California alone could lose nearly 14,000 jobs. JPL, the lab behind the Mars rovers and Voyager, would be looking at an existential crisis. NASA’s workforce could drop to its lowest level since the Apollo era. (Astronomy.com)
Where Have We Seen This Movie Before?
Here’s the thing. This pattern is not unique to space policy. Anyone paying attention to the tech industry over the past few years will recognize the playbook immediately.
Record profits. Record layoffs. Record executive compensation packages. Rinse and repeat, and blame it on “restructuring.” I know plenty of folks personally impacted by this. Some never make it back into the field and switch tracks. Like any one in tech, I am looking over my own shoulder.
Amazon posted $716.9 billion in revenue in 2025, a record, and still announced 16,000 layoffs, framed as a push to “flatten management layers.” Block’s CEO was at least honest about it: “This is not driven by financial difficulty, but by the growing capability of AI tools to perform a wider range of tasks.” (International Business Times) At least someone said the quiet part out loud.
And AI is the key word here, because the “AI will do it better and cheaper” logic that has been gutting tech workforces is absolutely leaking into government decision-making now. Why fund a generation of planetary scientists when some future model could theoretically analyze the data? Why maintain decades of institutional knowledge when you can just prompt your way to an answer?
The standard corporate line always includes some version of “restructuring for AI efficiency” or “rightsizing for current market conditions.” What that actually means is: we can do more with fewer people, and we’d rather boost margins than maintain headcount. The productivity gains are starting to peak through, finally. But the benefits just flow straight to the top, not to the people who actually built ‘the thing’.
No offense to my boy Claude.ai, but I am not a substitute for a career NASA scientist. Neither is any other AI. They don’t land on asteroids. They don’t look out a capsule window and inspire the next generation of engineers. And they definitely don’t carry 53 years of hard-won institutional knowledge, instinct, or respect for heat shield erosion and orbital mechanics.
What We’re Actually Losing
The modern playbook, in corporate America and apparently in Washington now too, optimizes for the next quarter, the next earnings call, the next news cycle. Long-horizon investments like space science are at a permanent disadvantage because the returns don’t show up fast enough to move a stock price or win a midterm.
NASA was specifically built to do the opposite. It exists for missions that take a decade to plan and another decade to fly, with payoffs that ripple out for generations. You can’t apply short-term efficiency logic to that without breaking it. GPS, memory foam, water filtration, scratch-resistant lenses: half the technology you used today has a lineage that traces back to someone at NASA who didn’t know exactly what they were building yet.
More than 100 members of Congress co-signed a bipartisan letter calling for a $1.75 billion increase to NASA Science. Congress will probably reject these cuts again. But every year this fight has to happen is another year of deferred missions, demoralized researchers, and talented people going somewhere else. And this subset of science has been luckier than many. Just ask the folks who’ve protected us as part of the CDC, WHO, NOAA, and countless other experts whose work has been deemed “inefficient” while we divert funds to prop up egos and unleash chaos on the world.
The Artemis II crew will fly around the Moon, come home around April 10th, and it will be genuinely awe-inspiring. It deserves every bit of attention it gets.
Then the awesome and irreplaceable people who made it happen will walk back into their offices and wonder if there’s still going to be a program next year. But hey, at least we can fund inflicting more pain!
That’s the part that should make all of us a little sick to our stomachs.