This month
💰 Congress rejects cuts to NASA!
📊 The productivity of ultra-low-cost science missions
📣 2026 Day of Action registration is open
You helped save NASA Science. After nearly a year of advocacy, Congress finally passed H.R. 6938, which included funding for NASA in fiscal year 2026. We got nearly everything we wanted: it rejected nearly every cut proposed by the White House, preserved NASA science funding, and preserved nearly every space science mission (only Mars Sample Return was cut). The White House indicated that the President will sign the bill.
This is great news. Our advocacy efforts worked. Savor this victory. Juno will continue to skim the cloud tops of Jupiter; New Horizons will push into the edge of our Solar System, our telescoped eyes to the Cosmos will remain open.
But be prepared. Next year’s budget cycle will begin soon. The White House could again propose deep cuts to NASA science. If they do, we’ll be ready to push back again.
Can space science be done on the cheap? Jared Isaacman, our new NASA Administrator, recently posted that it’s “better to have 10 x $100 million missions and a few fail than a single overdue and costly $1B+ mission.” Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, made a similar argument in an op-ed to SpaceNews. Recent budget victories aside, there is unlikely to be any major new scientific flagships proposed by the current Administration. Instead, the focus seems to be on rapid, high-volume science missions done in partnership with commercial and academic institutions.
Better, faster, cheaper 2.0? In the 1990s, facing a declining budget and led by a change-minded NASA Administrator, the space agency implemented a strategy of higher risk, lower-cost science missions known as “Better, Faster, Cheaper.” Costs and development times were capped, over budget projects ruthlessly canceled, and failures were tolerated — up to a point. It led to a significant increase in science missions (including Pathfinder, WMAP, Deep Impact, and others). But the double-failure of two Mars missions in the summer of 1999 effectively ended the experiment. Since then, even NASA’s “low-cost” missions have steadily gotten more expensive. The emergence of the commercial industry and component standards, such as CubeSats, are pushing the re-evaluation of this strategy.
Does 10 x 100 = 1,000? The basic premise is that we can get the same overall scientific output from higher rates of small missions than one large mission. Can science be divided like that? Multibillion-dollar flagship missions produce high-impact science by landing on Mars, orbiting Saturn, peering back to the origins of the Universe, or flying extremely close to the Sun. These types of missions must survive in novel, unforgiving environments to collect their data and often require unique engineering solutions and highly specialized instrumentation.
To test this, I looked at the scientific productivity of every NASA space science mission launched since 1994. We counted the number of peer-reviewed publications that used mission data and analyzed the number of times they were cited by other scientists — a commonly accepted metric to determine scientific impact. Publications with more than 100 citations are considered to be “high impact”, in other words, they are highly relevant to the scientific community.
Historically, missions costing <$100 million do not result in many high-impact publications. Results vary by scientific discipline, too. For planetary science, 0% of high-impact publications have come from ultra-low-cost missions, because every single one of these missions have failed (perhaps indicative of a cost floor due to the complexities of interplanetary travel). Heliophysics had 8% of its high-impact publications due to these missions, however, and a much higher number and success rate.
It takes time to produce good science. The shortest duration from start of mission development to the first high-impact publication was three years (for the Clementine lunar mission). Ultra-low-cost projects, though faster to produce, tend to accumulate citations more slowly.
Flagships aren’t the answer, though. The sweet spot of high impact science and cost are mid-sized missions in the $500 million to $1 billion range (again, it depends on which scientific discipline). These are also missions that produce high-impact science fast.
We should be cautious about a pivot to ultra-low cost science missions. There is no reason not to experiment with low cost missions, but they are not going to be a replacement for more complicated and expensive efforts. I believe there are notable opportunities for more mid-cost missions that host novel payloads or gather data from under-explored locales.
I’ll be publishing more on this research in the coming months.
Until next month,
Casey Dreier
Chief of Space Policy
The Planetary Society