Who will take the lead in space research as NASA cuts bite?

Swingeing cuts to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) budget proposed by the Donald Trump administration in May sent shock waves through global space and astronomy communities because of their potential impact on university-based space research and the future of space missions, not just in the United States.

In anticipation of the proposed cuts – 25% overall and, crucially, a 47% cut to NASA’s science spending – NASA has flagged 40 major projects, including 23 active missions, for closure.

Since the first announcements, proposed cuts to some specific missions have been rejected by the US Senate as the NASA budget continues its passage through the US Congress, but a full picture of the situation is unlikely to emerge before early 2026.

Deep uncertainty over where the axe will fall and its possible global impact was a major topic among eminent astronomers meeting from 3 to 8 November for the Hong Kong Laureate Forum (HKLF), an annual event that gathers winners of the international Shaw Prize for astronomy, life sciences and mathematics.

In particular, scientists pointed to the importance of maintaining global collaboration in astronomy and space science in the face of threats to axe, scale back, or delay space missions by a decade or more.

Uncertainty rules

“The main issue in the United States at the moment is uncertainty because the decisions seem at some level to be arbitrary and quite capricious,” said Simon White, emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany, and a member of Britain’s Royal Society.

He was speaking to the media at the HKLF event sponsored by Hong Kong’s Lee Shau Kee Foundation.

“They [the US] change from one time to the next, and so people become very uncertain,” said White, who received the prestigious Shaw Prize for Astronomy in 2017 for his work on understanding the formation of structures in the universe.

Officials of the European Space Agency (ESA), which currently collaborates with NASA on around 19 of the European agency’s science missions, say the majority can be adjusted within ESA, which has the technical, if not the funding, capability to replace the NASA contribution.

However, White noted that ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, a collaboration between ESA and NASA to put three separate satellites millions of miles apart in space and measure the distance between them extremely precisely in order to detect gravitational waves, is in jeopardy. “It looks like NASA is going to cut funding,” he noted.

“You can’t really down-scope this, because it’s supposed to have a configuration of three satellites. If you only put up two, you can’t do the same thing … This is a 30-year project, so if this gets derailed, getting another project going is not going to happen in less than 10 years.”

Recovering from this, he added, “is going to be a long process”.

At a ‘critical point’

Reinhard Genzel, winner of the 2008 Shaw Prize for Astronomy and the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of a “supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy” (he and his team proved the existence of a supermassive black hole by tracking the movement of planets around it), used more direct language: “We are at a critical point in the world,” he said, adding that the US was “falling apart”.

Genzel is co-director of Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics and holds professorships at the universities of Munich in Germany and Berkeley in the US.

He pointed out that NASA and the ESA, the latter with 23 member states including some non-EU countries like the United Kingdom and Switzerland, worked together in the past. “But right now, we have a minimum of that because of the political situation [in the US].

“We've tried collaboration between Europe and Japan … that worked a little bit. Not yet have we tried China and Europe, but that certainly will come, no doubt.”

Michael Perryman, who led ESA’s Hipparcos project in the 1980s and 1990s and the ESA’s flagship Gaia mission in the 2000s, told University World News: “The general consensus is that the gaps that they [the US] have created for themselves are quickly going to be filled by others. What they will find – and I think the American scientists are fully aware of this – is that it is going to be a difficult process for them to recover.”

Some look to ESA, though it has just one-third of the current NASA budget (before the proposed NASA cuts), together with big science funding agencies that funnel research funding for space to universities, such as the Max Planck Society and France’s national research agency (CNRS), to try to bridge the gap.

But stagnant science funding in European countries, in part due to stepped-up defence budgets, makes European leadership less likely.

While ESA has more stable and long-term funding than NASA, Perryman said: “Our space effort is not on anything like the scale of the US.”

Global realignment

LISA, the first space-based observatory to study gravitational waves, is due for launch in 2038, but now a Chinese gravitational waves mission is planned for the early 2030s. “I think we’ll see that launch now before the European’s,” noted Perryman.

Perryman, who previously chaired a committee for the implementation of the LISA gravitational wave mission, criticised the speed of the European effort. “I think we’ve been very, very slow in Europe in developing that, and China is coming along very, very quickly.”

But he declined to characterise it as a race. “What will happen with the Chinese mission is the first detection of much higher-frequency gravitational wave sources. It’ll be very exciting, but LISA, if it does eventually fly, will detect many, many more,” he told the media in Hong Kong.

However, “from a European point of view, from a competitive view, if you want to continue to take some kind of initiative, some kind of lead, there is the danger of losing that initiative [to China].”

Other scientists have spoken about an important global realignment in collaboration if the NASA cuts go through.

John Peacock, professor of cosmology at the University of Edinburgh, who won the Shaw Prize for Astronomy in 2014 for his work on galaxy formation and evolution, said if NASA pulls out of LISA, he has heard there could be a collaboration between ESA and the Chinese Space Agency.

This would require negotiation, but he also stressed ESA would want to carry on working with NASA; otherwise “painful choices will have to be made and things [missions] will have to be descoped”, he said.

More recently, the US Senate has retained funding for LISA in its NASA budget proposal, but Washington-watchers monitoring the passage of the bill through Congress note LISA is far from being out of the woods.

Is China ready to fill the gap?

Despite huge progress in China, with several important astronomy facilities and ambitious space missions in the pipeline, prominent astronomers noted China may not be ready to assume the pole position that the US, with NASA, maintained for decades.

In Hong Kong, Perryman noted “strong development” in papers on astronomy authored by Chinese scientists in the past 10-15 years. “They have their share of very pioneering papers, very technically advanced.”

Perryman later told University World News, the Chinese are “very important players. On the technical side they are coming up with projects that are very big and very, very competitive on the world stage. They are very serious players and seem to be able to move with a lot more speed and alacrity than Europeans and Americans.”

China’s FAST telescope in Guizhou province, officially called the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope and known as Tianyan (Sky Eye) in Chinese, is the world’s largest radio telescope.

The National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced last year FAST had identified more than 1,000 new pulsars, which it said surpassed the discoveries of “all foreign telescopes combined during the same period”.

Another major astronomical facility in China is LAMOST, or the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope, which conducts large-scale spectroscopic surveys of stars, galaxies, and quasars.

Genzel described these two facilities as a “tremendous achievement, and they are in fields that have a tremendous international impact. They are taken extremely seriously on the world stage.”

Strength lies in collaboration

However, Max Planck’s White was more circumspect about China’s emergence as a space power. “There’s been a huge expansion in astronomy in China with many new [academic] positions. I think it went up very steeply, and now it’s probably flattening out, but it certainly hasn’t flattened out completely yet.

“Time will tell how well this works, because when you employ a lot of people over a short time scale, it's difficult to be sure that it will all turn out to be good.”

White added: “Many of the people employed do have experience outside China, whereas before, Chinese astronomy was very isolated, and this was a big disadvantage.

“Whether the people who are now being hired turn out to be the world’s best or not, we don’t know. But at least they have contacts outside China with the rest of astronomy, so I think this should be positive.”

The best way is for them to collaborate “with people abroad who have longer experience in the same kind of astronomy”.

Genzel expressed doubts about China’s broader commitment to collaboration. He said NASA was not only huge, but it was a collaborative endeavour.

He alluded to technology nationalism in China, noting that China prefers to take credit for its own breakthroughs. “Does the Chinese government prefer to have their own triumph with their own mission, or do they want to be part of a bigger but international mission?”

“If you go to a bigger mission, you cannot claim that this was you alone. And then you have to accept it's been a work together,” said Genzel.

Genzel declined to categorise China as a new global science power or space power. “I would say it is a hub,” he said.

However, he pointed to a strong collaboration between the Max Planck Society and the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, Beijing, led by Professor Luis Ho. “Several of Professor Ho’s students have become postdocs in our group and have come back [to China] now.”

“It’s a really wonderful collaboration.”

European countries can’t compete with NASA

White said while Germany’s Max Planck Society’s annual budget of around €3 billion (US$3.458 billion) a year, with around 10-20% going to astronomy, was “pretty good” in international terms, it cannot compete with NASA.

“The biggest projects in the world have now grown to the scale where they can’t be supported by the Max Planck Society or by a single university, or even by a single country in some cases,” he said.

The largest telescopes in Chile, for example, are supported by a European consortium, the European Southern Observatory headquartered in Garching, while the Atacama Large Millimetre Array, or ALMA Observatory, is a consortium between North America, Japan and Europe.

“The larger facilities are global, so you can contribute a part of it, but everything has to be done cooperatively,” he noted.

He also pointed to collaboration with space agencies in India.

However, worldwide collaboration was not always smooth sailing. “In some cases, it’s not always easy because the political and structural interests of the partners are too far apart; it becomes very difficult to make decisions,” he said.

Nonetheless, with NASA pulling back, collaboration at the international level “is where we should be going”.