Throughput: Telling Women They’re Womening Wrong, But In Space

[ThTh1] Blue Origin had their 11th crewed space launch earlier this week. What made this one unusual was that the crew were all women: two scientists and four celebrities, including Katy Perry and Lauren Sanchez (who is also Bezos’ fiancé). The short suborbital trip took about ten minutes, went above the Karman line and returned safely.

Unfortunately, because this is the era we live in and the flight involved women, it couldn’t just be left at that. First, there was a wave of people claiming this was a pioneering ground-breaking event to have an all-woman crew. Then a backlash began, with people deriding the flight as a stunt and criticizing Katy Perry for holding up a flower on the flight¹ And now a backlash to the backlash is brewing. What should have been an “oh, that’s cool” space flight has suddenly devolved into the internet’s favorite hobby: telling women they’re womaning wrong.

My view? Meh. As is always the case with these things, I’m somewhere in the middle. I think it’s great that more people are getting to go into space. No, it’s not a huge breakthrough for women. They were passengers, not flight engineers. But it’s not anything to get mad about either. If I had the money and connections these women had, I’d be buying a Blue Origin ticket yesterday. And so would many of the critics.

Blue Origin is chasing a different path than SpaceX or other private interests. SpaceX, for all their glitz and media attention, is working on what I would call industrial space travel. Trying to make it cheap and routine to put things into orbit. Their Falcon family is one of the most successful launch vehicles in human history, having notched 472 successes in 475 tries. If Starship becomes a reliable vehicle, it will transform the space industry, making it cheap to put up … well anything.

Blue Origin, by contrast, is chasing space tourism. Right now, they’re launching suborbital vehicles with celebrities — Shatner, one of the Mercury 13 and now a gaggle of women — to drum up interest. Deriding this flight as a “stunt” misses the forest for the trees — all of Blue Origin’s crewed flights are stunts. If the cost ever comes down to where normal people can afford it — say in the $10-20,000 range, there could be a market there. I’d buy a ticket at that price. I’d even lose weight so I could fit in the capsule door. But this is how we get there. If space tourism is ever to get within the financial grasp of ordinary people, you have to start out with the wealthy. This is not about haves and have-nots. It’s about have-nows and have-laters.

So, no, these women aren’t pioneers or heroes. They’re wealthy and/or connected and were able to get a ride on one of the most exclusive tourist rides on the planet. But … that’s fine. Space travel is good. More people in space is good. I’m happy that they got to have an experience only a few hundred people have ever had. And I hope that it, along with Blue Origin’s other flights, blazes a trial so that many other people can have that experience. Because I believe, in my heart, that going into space will be transformative to the human race and the world.

That’s not so bad, is it?

[ThTh2]. Ok. So … having dipped my toes into one controversy, it’s time to break out the soap box for real. The draft budget plan from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget has come out and … well …

NASA’s science budget could be cut nearly in half under an early version of President Donald Trump’s budget proposal to Congress, a move that would terminate billions of dollars’ worth of ongoing and future missions, according to two individuals with direct knowledge of the administration’s plan.

The budget plan, sent to NASA by the Office of Management and Budget, would give NASA’s Science Mission Directorate $3.9 billion, down from its current budget of about $7.3 billion, according to the individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the details.

…

The budget proposal, though not yet formally submitted to Congress, would eviscerate a long list of planetary and astronomical missions, including the next major NASA space telescope and the agency’s goal of bringing samples of Mars back to Earth to search for signs of ancient life.

NASA’s astrophysics budget would take a huge hit, dropping from about $1.5 billion to $487 million. Planetary science would see a drop from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion. Earth science would drop from about $2.2 billion to $1.033 billion.

Let’s be clear: this would be a disaster for astrophysics and a giant self-inflicted wound for the country. Goddard Space Flight Center — one of the most critical facilities in the world — would likely be shut down. Exploration of the Solar System would basically end. Every space telescope except JWST and Hubble would be shut down. The Roman Telescope — assembled and maybe a year away from launch — would be cancelled. And considering Hubble’s orbit is decaying, it would probably shut itself down within a few years as well. Entire areas of the electromagnetic spectrum — X-ray, gamma ray and almost all ultraviolet — would become invisible to us. And while JWST and Hubble are good, they can only look at one part of the sky at a time and there are some things they can not do.

Full disclosure: I am a soft-money researcher who currently draws 100% of his salary from NASA astrophysics. So this would end my career. It would also end the careers of several hundred of the brightest and most industrious minds on the planet who I am fortunate enough to call colleagues.

It’s also a black eye to the taxpayers. Legacy missions — like the Swift program I work on — continue to deliver cutting-edge science for essentially pennies. The most expensive part of any space telescope is building and launching it. Once it’s up there, it makes sense to keep it going as long as possible. You would also be losing millions of man-years in experience and knowledge that the taxpayers invested in over the last few decades.

But more than that … once upon a time, the Republicans cared about American exceptionalism. There are few areas where America is as exceptional as astrophysics and space. For most of the world, America is astronomy. We do more research, put up more telescopes and discover more of the universe than the rest of the world combined. If we throw that mantle of leadership in the garbage, China will be happy to pick it and dust it off.

The big question I keep coming back to is why? The savings are trivial compared to the massive spending increases the Administration is planning for other areas of the government. Insiders believe this is coming from OMB director Russell Vought, a Christian nationalist and Project 2025 alum. Project 2025 wanted big cuts in NASA science, mainly to NASA’s research into climate change. The obsession with pretending climate change doesn’t exist is also what they want to gut the National Weather Service and NOAA. So I suspect what we are seeing here is an intersection of anti-science sentiment, climate change denial and religious zealotry.

Now the good news is that NASA has generally enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Congress, not the least because some of its most critical centers are in red states like Texas, Florida and Alabama. The bad news, however, is that this Administration believes they have no obligation to spend money Congress has authorized. So Congress could pass a budget fully funding NASA and it could get slashed anyway out of sheer anti-science crankery.

Look, I realize that the entire national stove is on fire right now. The cuts to USAID are going to kill millions. The Administration is claiming the power to strip citizenship and send people to an overseas gulag. HHS is run by an anti-science crank and bigot who is gutting vaccine funding and fueling pandemic growth. The global economy is reeling from the tariff madness. The Trump Administration has turned out to be worse than even I feared and we’re only three months in.

But the battle must be joined on all fronts. And protecting the US dominance of space science is one of the fronts. We want to save the country for something. And the US continuing to be a beacon of scientific discovery is one of those things.

[ThTh3] Speaking of space telescopes, what has JWST been up to? Oh, not much. just unveiling the core of a dying star.

[ThTh4] Oh, it also may have detected signs of life on another planet. I would temper any enthusiasm for this. This is still pushing the cutting edge of what is possible and there are other potential explanations for the signal they are claiming. However, I think it is inevitable that we will find biosignatures that can’t be explained away.

[ThTh5] And just to round off this all-space Throughput: our Mars rovers are continuing to uh, break new ground in exploring Mars. It would be a pity if we stopped investigating.

1. Yeah, I don’t know what that’s about either.