The Most Vulnerable NASA Missions Under Trump
Reading the tea leaves on the president-elect’s space policy
About a week before the presidential election, NASA invited reporters to its facility in Greenbelt, Maryland to look at the observatory it hopes to launch in two years, to a point far beyond Hubble’s orbit, where it will continue that telescope’s search for distant stars and galaxies. Charlie Bolden, the head of the space agency, took questions, including one from a reporter for The Guardian, who asked Bolden whether the program was safe, regardless of the election’s outcome.
Bolden cracked up immediately, and the rest of the room followed. He explained that most of the billions of dollars in funding the James Webb Space Telescope received was spent early on in its years-long development. He wasn’t worried now, “but I think anybody would be
