Bill Nye leads charge to save NASA science from deep Trump cuts

October 5, 2025

A proposed 47% cut to NASA science from the Trump administration has sounded the alarm among scientists and space advocates — and Bill Nye is leading the charge to stop it.

Driving the news: Nye — known as "the Science Guy" — will join more than 300 advocates from a coalition of nearly 20 science and education groups in Washington for a Day of Action on Monday, urging Congress to save NASA science.

Zoom out: The gathering in DC stems from the Trump administration's plan to gut funding, while a government shutdown has already furloughed 85% of NASA staff.

• The White House has even floated mass firings during the shutdown, putting long-term missions and jobs at risk.

• Meanwhile, China is accelerating: planning a Mars Sample Return by 2028, a major Jupiter mission, a Venus atmosphere probe, and an asteroid defense swarm.

Flashback: Nye isn't new to stepping in a political battle; he took over as CEO of The Planetary Society in 2010, turning his public science credibility into policy muscle.

• Under his tenure, the society has led high-visibility advocacy campaigns that helped block or reverse cuts to NASA's planetary science budget — including restoring tens of millions in funding in 2014.

• Though it doesn't run missions like Europa Clipper or Mars Sample Return, the Society has become a central voice pushing Congress to protect long-term space science.

Big picture: Nye's shift from TV show host to space policy advocate tracks a broader moment: scientific communicators increasingly stepping into advocacy as research funding faces political headwinds.

• He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Biden in 2025.

Between the lines: NASA science isn't just about exploration — it's economic and geopolitical.

• NASA pumped $75 billion into the U.S. economy in 2023, supporting 300,000 jobs across all 50 states.

• People who are critical of the cuts say ending missions prematurely would waste $12 billion in taxpayer investments in still-healthy spacecraft.

What they're saying: "We have to explore space. There are two deep questions we've all asked at some point in our lives:

• Where did we come from? And, are we alone in the Universe? … Cutting NASA funding means turning our backs on discoveries that change the world.

It means falling behind in innovation and international leadership. It means losing jobs," Nye, CEO of The Planetary Society, told Axios.

• The Trump administration has not responded to Axios' request for comment.

Casey Dreier, the Planetary Society's chief of space policy, told Axios that Congress has already signaled bipartisan opposition to the cuts.

• "But we need to get this legislation over the finish line … to demonstrate once again that the public cares about this unique and noble activity of our space program."

• Nye added: "That's why The Planetary Society has built this coalition — to bring 300 supporters to Capitol Hill to urge Congress to save NASA science."

Some of the groups include the American Association of Physics Teachers, National Space Society, Association of American Universities and Black in Astro.

The bottom line: With China doubling down on space science, Nye and other advocates warn that slashing NASA's budget would threaten not only America's scientific future — but its global leadership.

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/05/bill-nye-nasa-science-trump-cuts

https://www.planetary.org/save-nasa-science

Rep. Peterson Announces Passage of Bill to Designate NASA Day of Remembrance

October 3, 2025

COLUMBUS—The Ohio House of Representatives yesterday passed legislation to designate the fourth Thursday of January as NASA Day of Remembrance, announced State Representative Bob Peterson (R-Sabina).

House Bill 293 aims to provide Ohioans an annual opportunity to honor the lives lost in pursuit of space exploration and scientific discovery, including the crews of Apollo 1 and space shuttles Challenger and Columbia.

“As a young boy at the time of the Apollo 1 tragedy, I appreciate our space explorers and the risks they take,” said Peterson. “I believe it is important to remember those who sacrificed for our future.”

Ohio is known as the birthplace of aviation and ranks fourth in the nation for producing astronauts, with 26 calling the state home.

The legislation now moves to the Ohio Senate for consideration

https://ohiohouse.gov/members/bob-peterson/news/rep-peterson-announces-passage-of-bill-to-designate-nasa-day-of-remembrance-138145

Strange rings of light appear to link together in space in new discovery

October 4, 2025

Astronomers are marveling at a distant galaxy surrounded by two giant, intersecting rings of radio light in space, each about 300,000 light-years wide.

The discovery, made by volunteers in the RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory citizen-science program in Mumbai, is what's known as — and we're not kidding — an "Odd Radio Circle." The rings both sit within an even bigger radio cloud that stretches nearly 3 million light-years.

These circles, sometimes called ORCs for short, were only found six years ago, and their origin is still a mystery. They may be shockwaves from merging black holes or galaxies. Most are 10 to 20 times larger than the Milky Way, but only a handful are known so far.

The newly reported ORC, named RAD J131346.9+500320, is the most distant and powerful ever found. It sits so far away in space that astronomers see it as it was when the universe was just half its current age of 13.8 billion years, because light has taken so long to reach Earth.

What makes it even more extraordinary is that it's composed of two overlapping circles — a double-ring phenomenon seen only once before.

"ORCs are among the most bizarre and beautiful cosmic structures we've ever seen," said Ananda Hota, founder of the program, in a statement, "and they may hold vital clues about how galaxies and black holes co-evolve, hand-in-hand."

This is the first ORC discovered through citizen-assisted science and the first identified using LOFAR, a network of antennas spread across the Netherlands and other European countries. ORCs can only be detected by radio telescopes.

The discovery came from volunteers using their own eyes to scan deep space maps, searching for unusual patterns that computers may have missed. The findings were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The authors suggest that these rings might be created by powerful winds blowing out of certain galaxies, which toss material out into distant space and shape it into these structures.

An animation created by the program, shown below, depicts the rare double-ring ORC expanding after an explosive event in the central galaxy.

https://mashable.com/article/space-discovery-odd-radio-circle

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/543/2/1048/8267915

https://www.radathomeindia.org/

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Science history: Edwin Hubble uncovers the vastness of the universe with discovery of 'standard candle' — Oct. 5, 1923

October 5, 2025

On the night of Oct. 5 to 6, 1923, Edwin Hubble discovered a new star — and revealed the utter vastness of the universe.

Hubble was looking at the cosmos with the 100-inch Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California, when he homed in on a faint smudge of light.

He took a series of photographic plates of the object. The rather fuzzy, unimpressive images would go on to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos.

At first, Hubble thought the object was a nova, a type of exploding star, but a closer look revealed the star's light varied in intensity over the course of the night, brightening, dimming and brightening again in a predictable pattern.

On one photographic plate, he crossed out the "N" for nova and replaced it with "VAR!" for variable star.

Named M31-V1, it was a cepheid variable star, a type of star that fluctuates in intensity with striking regularity. Hubble wasn't the first to discover these cosmic "standard candles."

In 1912, Harvard observatory astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt had cataloged the luminosity and period (pattern of brightening and dimming) of 25 cepheids in the small magellanic cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy.

The brighter a cepheid, the slower it flickered, she found.

But Hubble's observations proved to be pivotal to a great debate raging at the time.

Astronomer Harlow Shapley thought the Milky Way constituted the entire universe, while his rival Heber Curtis had done a rough measurement of the distance to neighboring Andromeda, also known as Messier 31, that suggested we lived in an "island universe," teeming with large and staggeringly distant galaxies.

On a dark night, our neighboring galaxy had always been visible to the naked eye, but over the years, skywatchers had debated whether it was a constellation, a nebula or another galaxy.

Hubble's discovery of the cepheid next door buttressed Curtis' argument that Andromeda was a separate galaxy from our own. Hubble would go on to measure M31's cepheid on several nights over the year.

The flickering star's variable light intensity enabled Hubble to calculate that Andromeda was a vast 900,000 light-years away.

Leavitt's work on cepheids proved invaluable for Hubble's other great finding: the expansion of the universe.

While others, such as Georges Lemaître, had theorized that the universe was expanding by using Einstein's theory of general relativity, Hubble confirmed it with precise calculations.

He combined Leavitt's cepheid distance data with data from Milton Humason and others that showed galaxies' "red shift" — in which wavelengths of light are stretched, or shifted toward the redder end of the spectrum, by the Doppler effect as they move away from us.

More-distant objects had a higher red shift, showing they were moving away faster than objects nearby.

Hubble's calculated expansion rate would come to be called the Hubble constant.

Since cepheid M31-V1's discovery, multiple lines of evidence have confirmed that we live in an ever-expanding universe, and with the discovery of dark energy in the 1990s, we now know that expansion is accelerating.

But modern measurements of the universe's expansion rate don't line up with each other. Determining the source of the discrepancy could pave the way for us to discover new physics, and upend accepted cosmological models once more.

https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/science-history-edwin-hubble-uncovers-the-vastness-of-the-universe-with-discovery-of-standard-candle-oct-5-1923

https://www.space.com/astronomy/moon/new-darpa-field-guide-looks-for-ways-to-jump-start-a-moon-economy

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/AUPress/Display/Article/4250446/the-commercial-lunar-economy-field-guide-a-vision-for-industry-on-the-moon-in-t/

New DARPA 'field guide' looks for ways to jump-start a moon economy

October 5, 2025

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is promoting a case for economic activity on and around the moon.

In some quarters, it's all blue-sky yammering. On the other hand, there does appear to be growing support for making a business case for mining the moon.

A recent study shouldered by DARPA laid out a step-by-step process that could enable an economic link between Earth and our nearest celestial neighbor. But how real is the promise of giving the moon an industrial makeover?

Off-Earth economic development

DARPA seeks to transform the moon into a vibrant marketplace via an effort dubbed the LunA-10 initiative, a 10-year blueprint aimed at forging scalable lunar infrastructure and unlocking the economic potential of the moon.

Meanwhile, how best to embed industry on the lunar landscape in the near-term is explored in a new document called "The Commercial Lunar Economy Field Guide: A Vision for Industry on the Moon in the Next Decade.

The guide, issued by Air University Press, offers a look at foundational technology concepts that could help orchestrate off-Earth economic development.

It does so over the course of 23 chapters crafted by more than 130 authors, which flesh out ways to create self-sufficient, monetizable services for future lunar buyers and sellers and sustain off-Earth economic vibrancy.

Insurance and temperature tantrums

"It's an expansive exercise and makes you realize just how much work will have to be done to make this vision real," the new guide's editor, Michael Nayak, a DARPA program manager, told Space.com.

He said there were surprises in putting the document together — interesting revelations that deserve more attention.

"One big surprise was the surprising role of space insurance in commercial activities, a huge cost-driver and a significant cost barrier," said Nayak.

"If you want to create a commercial ecosystem, you have to create a better way to make the risk understandable to space insurance companies."

Nayak said another revelation involves the need to deal with the moon's large temperature swings.

"The ability to manage the heat that's created by things like drilling and heavy-duty machinery is a huge, fundamental problem," he said, requiring additional plumbing to keep things warm and cool them down, depending on the circumstance.

As brought out in the Field Guide, a commercial economy cannot thrive if it can only operate during sunlit hours.

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Open question

"One of the things we do well at DARPA is incentivizing commercial industry in directions that help the government, but don't substitute for government investment," Nayak said.

"We talked to a lot of investors that are super-interested in space," he added. "But in terms of answering a key question — What is monetizable on the moon? — I think that's still an open question. There's nothing that has been shown to be directly profitable."

The Field Guide is organized around services, such as power, communications, data and positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), said Nayak. But power for what? Data for what? PNT for what?

Best guess at the moment

"What really came out are the potential resources on the moon," Nayak said. "Mining is at the center, and that's the best guess at the moment.

The question is, What are we mining, what is its concentration, and is it actually economically viable?"

Another DARPA undertaking, said Nayak, is a program called Lunar Assay via Small Satellite Orbiter, or LASSO for short.

LASSO supposes that low-altitude, high-resolution measurements of resources across the entire lunar surface can be the most compelling commercial application, according to DARPA's Strategic Technology Office.

"If there is commercial value, at least based on what we now know, I would argue it's the moon's subsurface," said Nayak.

'Push this rock uphill to the finish line'

As for what lunar resources could provide an economic windfall, there are a couple of candidates.

"The first is rare-earth elements, but again, we need more data. The other is platinum group metals. If they exist [on the moon], they would be significantly deep and energy-intensive to extract," Nayak said.

"Those are best guesses based on the way Earth geology works. But we don't know if that's a good assumption for the moon."

Nayak's bottom line about a potentially high-profit moon focuses on the need for more information.

"There's so much learning we need to do. There are so many different directions. It's challenging to list them all and seems like an insurmountable problem."

In his closing remarks in the Field Guide, Nayak explains that "envisioning the future is easy. Dragging it into the present and making it real is not.

We have our work cut out for us, but it is possible, and the time for action is now. I hope this work inspires you to help us push this rock uphill to the finish line."

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https://avi-loeb.medium.com/why-is-the-orbital-plane-of-3i-atlas-inclined-by-5-degrees-relative-to-the-ecliptic-plane-3b07e5222bff

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/3i/atlas-interstellar-comet-survives-violent-energy-blast-from-sun-sparking-alien-technology-theories/articleshow/124309902.cms

https://usaherald.com/mysterious-rogue-planet-suddenly-starts-devouring-matter-at-record-breaking-rate-as-scientists-link-magnetic-activity-while-3i-atlas-raises-new-galactic-questions/

Why is the Orbital Plane of 3I/ATLAS Inclined by 5 degrees Relative to the Ecliptic Plane?

October 5, 2025

On October 3, 2025, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS passed within 29 million kilometers from Mars and on March 16, 2026 it will pass within 54 million kilometers from Jupiter.

This encounter with multiple solar system planets requires two independent coincidences:

1. A near alignment by 4.89 degrees of the retrograde orbital plane of 3I/ATLAS with the ecliptic plane of the Earth around the Sun — having a probability of 0.002.

2. A fine-tuning of the arrival times at the planets’ orbital radii — with a net probability of 0.0002, given the circumferences of the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The combination of these two independent coincidences has a likelihood of less than a millionth. If the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS was designed by extraterrestrial intelligence, why is it inclined by about 5 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane?

The ecliptic plane is defined by the motion of Earth around the Sun. The orbital planes of Mars and Jupiter are inclined by 1.9 and 1.3 degrees relative to it.

If the planetary system around the Sun was discovered through a transit survey of stars, then the extraterrestrial observers who could have discovered it are located within a conical disk aligned with the ecliptic plane, from where the solar system planets appear to cross the face of the Sun.

What is the opening angle of this conical disk? The answer depends on the quality of the telescopes that extraterrestrial observers use.

If 3I/ATLAS is technological in origin, then the fact that its mass is larger than 33 billion tons (as deduced here), suggests that its senders have access to technologies far more advanced than humans possess — as humanity’s biggest rocket, Starship, weighs 6 million times less, only 5.5 thousand tons.

Therefore, it would be reasonable to assume that the telescopes used by the senders of 3I/ATLAS are capable of noticing transits by rocky objects that are smaller than Earth.

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The main asteroid belt is a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, containing numerous asteroids and minor planets.

The largest dwarf planet there is Ceres with a mean diameter of 940 kilometers, roughly the size of the state of Texas, and an orbital radius of about 2.8 times the Earth-Sun separation.

The asteroid belt contained the building blocks of planets, so-called planetesimals, in the primordial solar nebula. In the region between Mars and Jupiter, the gravitational perturbations from Jupiter disrupted the coagulation of these building blocks into a new planet.

Jupiter’s gravity added relative speed to colliding planetesimals and shattering most of them. As a result, the vast majority of the asteroid belt’s original mass was lost in the first 100 million years of the Solar System’s history.

Nevertheless, the remaining debris could still be noticed from afar in transit surveys with advanced extraterrestrial telescopes. Analysis of the transits would show a characteristic orbital period of 3–6 Earth years.

What is the opening angle of the conical disk relative to the ecliptic plane, inside of which solar transits of main belt asteroids can be observed?

The thickness of the asteroids’ doughnut is of order 150 million kilometers and its diameter is about 800 million kilometers, implying a conical opening angle of about 10 degrees above and below the ecliptic plane of the Sun.

Given that, we should expect extraterrestrial civilizations in our cosmic neighborhood that discovered our planetary system through transit surveys to send interstellar probes on the shortest straight trajectories to intercept the path of the Sun with an orbital inclination of up to 10 degrees, comparable to the 5 degrees inclination of 3I/ATLAS.

So far, 3I/ATLAS displayed 7 anomalies (detailed here) in terms of its size, jet, composition, polarization, inclination, timing, and angular alignment with the “Wow! Signal”.

Whether these anomalies reflect chance coincidences for an interstellar comet of a natural origin or intelligent planning, remains unknown as of now.

Counting our blessings without knowing their origin, we can take advantage of the proximity of 3I/ATLAS to Mars and Jupiter.

Here’s hoping that imaging and spectroscopy (as detailed here) by 7 human-made spacecraft around Mars: MRO, Mars Express, TGO, MAVEN, Tianwen-1 and Hope, as well as by 2 human-made spacecraft related to Jupiter: Juice and Juno, will help us figure out the true origin and nature of 3I/ATLAS.

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