America Is Killing Its Chance to Find Alien Life

The Atlantic

2 days ago

In April, scientists announced that they had used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to find a potential signature of alien life in the glow of a distant planet. Other scientists were quick to challenge the details of the claim and offered more mundane explanations; most likely, these data do not reveal a new and distant biology. But the affair was still a watershed moment. It demonstrated that humans have finally built tools powerful enough to see across interstellar space and detect evidence of biospheres on distant worlds—in other words, tools truly capable of discovering alien life.
Given the telescope technologies we astronomers have now and the ones we'll build soon, within a few decades, humans might finally gather some hard data that can answer its most profound, existential question: Is there life beyond Earth? What's arguably even more remarkable is that unless something changes very soon, the humans making that epochal discovery might not be NASA and the American space scientists who power it.
The U.S. space agency is facing a funding and personnel crisis that the Planetary Society has called ' an extinction-level event.' The Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget—a version of which passed Congress and now awaits the president's signature—slashes NASA's funding by almost a quarter. That means, adjusted for inflation, NASA would get the same level of funding it had in 1961, before John F. Kennedy called for the United States to put a man on the moon.
The modern version of NASA has far more on its plate: maintaining the International Space Station, hunting for Earth-killing asteroids, and using its Earth-observing satellites to help farmers monitor soil conditions. The president's budget also calls for an aggressive push to land humans on both the moon and Mars. It's hard to see how the agency can safely and accurately fulfill its current responsibilities—let alone develop advanced (and expensive) scientific equipment that would advance the search for alien life—with such reduced funding. ('President Trump's FY26 NASA Budget commits to strengthening America's leadership in space exploration while exercising fiscal responsibility,' a NASA spokesperson wrote in an email to The Atlantic. 'We remain fully committed to our long-term goals and continue to make progress toward the next frontier in space exploration, even as funding priorities are adjusted.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
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. SMD's engineers and scientists built the rovers that helped scientists show that Mars, now a freezing desert, was once warm and covered in rushing water. The researchers it funds developed probes that revealed vast subsurface oceans on some of Jupiter's moons. SMD is also where you'll find the folks who built the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and a flotilla of other instruments. These extraordinary machines have provided views of colliding galaxies 300 million light-years away, captured the death throes of stars like the Sun, and recorded portraits of interstellar clouds that birth new generations of stars and planets.
In 2023, the scientists and engineers of the SMD were tasked with building the all-important Habitable Worlds Observatory, designed specifically to find alien life on planets light-years away. Slated to launch sometime in the 2040s, the HWO is planned to be about the same size as the JWST, with a similar orbit beyond the moon. Unlike the JWST, the HWO's sophisticated detectors must be able to tease out the light of an exoplanet against the billions-of-times-brighter glare of its host star, a signal as faint as the dim glow of a firefly flitting around a powerful field light at the San Francisco Giants' Oracle Park, but detected from all the way across the country in New York City.
But now, many astronomers fear, NASA might never get the chance to build 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. Under Donald Trump's plan, NASA would be forced to abandon 19 'active' missions. These include Juno—which is revolutionizing astronomers' understanding of Jupiter and could help them understand similarly monstrous worlds in other solar systems with other Earth-like planets—and New Horizons, a mission that took nearly 10 years to reach Pluto and is now flying into uncharted space at the edge of the solar system.
The budget also decimates the future of space-science exploration. Scientists have been desperate to get back to Venus, for example, after a chemical compound associated with life was potentially detected high in its atmosphere in 2020; the two missions that would get us there are axed out of the administration's budget. The plan for the Nancy Roman Telescope, which would test key technologies necessary for the HWO, is so withered that many astronomers worry the telescope might never leave Earth.
Worst, the development for the HWO takes an 80 percent cut in the president's proposed budget, going from $17 million in 2024 to just $3 million in 2026, before rebounding in 2028. The HWO represents one the most ambitious projects ever attempted, and the technological innovation needed to build it, or probes that might land on Jupiter's ocean moons, get measured across decades. In order for such missions to succeed, investments have to remain steady and focused—the opposite of what the Trump administration has proposed.
Amid all the difficulties the country faces, the losses in space science might seem trivial. But American science, including space science, has paid enormous dividends in keeping the nation strong, prosperous, and worthy of the world's respect. If the original budget passes, one in every three of NASA's highly skilled workers will lose their job. 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. As the cuts take hold, plenty of NASA scientists might be forced to take jobs in other countries or early retirements they didn't want, or simply be let go. And the agency will be set back decades more into the future by choking off funding to young researchers at every level.
Just as the U.S. is stumbling and falling back in its efforts to find alien life, astronomers around the world are preparing for the steep climb. The European Space Agency has a list of missions aimed at studying exoplanets. China has announced a 2028 launch date for Earth 2.0, a space telescope designed to find Earth-size exoplanets in the habitable zones of their stars. If it succeeds, that mission would put China on a path to building its own version of the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
In my work as an astrophysicist, studying the possibilities of life on exoplanets, I travel around the world representing American science. In those travels, I consistently find people in other countries wearing two icons of American culture: the Yankee cap and the NASA logo. That a kid in Florence or a middle-aged guy in Bangkok would wear a NASA T-shirt is testimony to the power of its legacy. NASA—with its can-do spirit and its willingness to dream like no other organization in the history of the world—is America. If protected and nurtured, it would almost certainly lead the charge to answer that most existential question of life beyond Earth. But if this administration's shortsighted budget passes, it might be some other nation that discovers we are not alone in the universe.