The White House Just Ordered NASA To Destroy A Very Important Satellite

In a controversial move, the White House has ordered NASA to terminate two climate change-monitoring satellite missions, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO). As NPR reported, Trump administration officials instructed the agency to start drafting termination plans, even though the satellites offered high-quality, critical data on the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One of the OCO satellites flies separately, and the other is fastened to the International Space Station. Should it be shut down, the stand-alone satellite would be intentionally deorbited and destroyed, burning up on reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The missions have played a critical role in providing detailed mapping of CO?, which is utilized by scientists, farmers, and even oil and gas firms to monitor emissions and determine the environmental and agricultural effects.

The ruling has elicited massive opposition among scientists. The move was met with great concern by NASA scientists and its former employees, who doubted the motivation and applicability of the move. Terminating NASA missions that are delivering incredibly valuable data, said David Crisp, a former NASA scientist who helped develop the OCO instruments, is not economically sensible. He pointed out that the cost of keeping the missions going is only 15 million dollars a year—a fraction of the 25.4 billion dollars NASA spends.

A 2023 review revealed that the data provided by the satellites was of an extremely high quality, with estimates indicating that they should be able to continue functioning at least a few more years. Critics point to the firing as politically driven, consistent with the climate change denial and environmental science attacks former President Trump has long advocated.

The two satellites are only a subdivision of an even larger package of proposed science reductions in the Trump administration’s FY26 budget. The plan has been criticized by lawmakers, such as Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Zoe Lofgren, as anti-science and possibly unlawful, because it would override an earlier-approved FY25 funding.

Lofgren said cutting these missions would leave us incapable of tracking and responding to climate disasters. This is now widely regarded as a potentially hazardous effort to stifle climate science at a moment of mounting worldwide emergency.