Trump's Trials - Why a NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. NPR's Rebecca Hersher reports.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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And I'm Michelle Martin. The Trump administration is considering terminating two NASA satellite missions that measure carbon dioxide. That's according to current and former NASA employees. This despite the fact that the equipment in space is state of the art and data they collect are extremely valuable to scientists and to farmers. NPR's Rebecca Hersh is here with more to tell us more about this. Good morning, Rebecca. Good morning. So why is the Trump administration considering ending these missions? You know we don't know. The

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and NASA didn't respond to my questions about this. In a statement the Office of Management and Budget only said that that office quote had nothing to do with NASA Earth Science leadership's request for termination plans. But here's what we do know. We know that NASA staffers who work on these two carbon dioxide monitoring missions have been

asked to draw up plans that NASA could use to terminate those missions. And that's according to current and former NASA employees. And if NASA were to put those plans into action, which could happen as soon as early October, one of the missions would likely burn up in the atmosphere. So it would be completely destroyed permanently. And there's nothing wrong with this equipment that we know of. No, I spoke to a lot of scientists who use the data that these missions collect, and they all

said everything's working great. There are two missions up there. They have identical equipment One has its own free-flying satellite orbiting the earth. That's the one that would burn up The second one is attached to the International Space Station and terminating that mission would just mean turning off the equipment on the space station These things they launched pretty recently in 2014 and 2019 and an official review by NASA in 2023 found that, quote, the data are of exceptionally high quality. And at that point, NASA actually recommended continuing missions for at least three years. And how much do these missions cost? Well, here are some numbers.

So the two missions together cost about $15 million every year to maintain. That's according to David Crisp, a long time NASA scientist who actually designed the equipment that's on the missions and managed them until he retired from NASA in 2022. And I asked Crisp to put that $15 million price tag in context. The two missions together cost the American taxpayer about $750 million to develop launch into space. So yeah, that $15 million a year to maintain the missions up in space and get the data from them, it's a small fraction of the investment that's already been made.

And that's before you take into account the value of the data itself. And what about the value of the data itself? Who uses it? Well, it's used by a really wide variety of people. And that's because of a surprising thing that happened with these satellites. They were designed to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They do that really well. They're actually the only US satellites that were built to measure greenhouse gas.

So they're a crucial source of that information and they've revolutionized our understanding of how carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, which is obviously really important for understanding climate change. But these missions can also measure plant growth, which is totally unexpected and super powerful. NASA has turned that into maps that are used for agriculture, like to predict crop yield. So farmers actually use this information as well, and they rely on it. Which is the kind of thing that happens with basic research, right? I mean, you research one thing and it turns out to have a whole other use, which might never have expected. That is NPR's Rebecca Hershon. Becky, thank you. Thank you

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