brucesterling:

https://www.edge.org/the-last-question

startswithabang:

Horrible FY2019 Budget To Gut NASA Astrophysics, Destroying Cutting-Edge Science

“WFIRST is unprecedented: it’s an observatory the size of Hubble, with the same depth, but with more than 50 times the field-of-view. It would be outfitted with two incredible instruments: a wide-field imager and a coronagraph. The imager is capable of surveying huge areas of the Universe to better understand galaxies, the intergalactic medium, dark matter, and dark energy. It would find thousands of new Type Ia supernovae out to unprecedented distances, and determine to better than 1% whether dark energy is a cosmological constant or something more exotic.”

Today, February 12th, 2018, the Trump administration unveiled their budget proposal for the Fiscal Year 2019, proposing huge cuts to a variety of departments. The biggest surprise loser, however, is NASA. Not only will the Office of Education be eliminated, along with five NASA Earth Science missions, but the flagship astrophysics mission of the 2020s, WFIRST, has been put on the chopping block. NASA gets one of these flagship missions every 10 years; Hubble was it for the 1990s, there were none for the 2000s owing to the “faster, better, cheaper” debacle, and James Webb will be the one for the 2010s. WFIRST, for years, has been the plan for the 2020s, with all the design work complete. It will measure the distant Universe, from exoplanets to galaxies to supernovae and dark energy, as never before. And unless we work with Congress to save it, we won’t have flagship-level science coming out of the 2020s. As Thomas Zurbuchen said last month, speaking for NASA:

“What we learn from these flagship missions is why we study the Universe. This is civilization-scale science… If we don’t do this, we aren’t NASA.”

Come read and understand what the horrible FY2019 budget proposal would do to NASA, and then contact your congresspeople. The time to act is now.

This is to be expected, though it would seem that if Republicans finally achieve their goal of bankrupting the country by 2020s all of this will be moot. And yet, the time to do something about it is indeed now.