Get the latest tech news
America Is Killing Its Chance to Find Alien Life
Cuts to NASA mean that the U.S. likely won’t build the next great space observatory.
Almost all of NASA’s divisions face dramatic cuts, but the proposed nearly 50 percent slash to its Science Mission Directorate poses the greatest threat to hopes of future grand discoveries, including finding life on other worlds. But now, many astronomers fear, NASA might never get the chance to build the HWO—or carry out a slew of other missions that maintain the U.S.’s strong advantage in space science, as well as keep it ahead in the hunt for alien life. The agency, in turn, will lose decades of hard-core technical experience: Not many people know how to blast a robot science rover from Earth, have it cross hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, and then land it—intact—on the surface of another planet.
Or read this on Hacker News
