The Trump administration is exploring the idea of selling or leasing NASA satellites — including probes already in space.
NASA officials revealed few details when asked last week about the proposal, which scientists described as highly unusual. But the proposition is in line with other efforts by the Trump administration to slash federal spending on science.
“There’s no proposal, there’s no plan,” said NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens. “As it stands right now, this is just an internal discussion.”
Trump officials did not disclose which satellites they might sell or lease, nor did they answer questions about who they see as potential customers. NASA has more than 50 spacecraft in orbit, according to the Planetary Society, an advocacy group that promotes space science and exploration.
But even the possibility of a sale is turning heads, as there’s little precedent for the U.S. government to sell or lease satellites that typically cost billions of dollars to build and launch into space.
Richard Eckman, who retired in January as a program manager for NASA’s Earth Science Division after nearly 40 years at the agency, said he could not recall a single incident in his career where an orbiting satellite was offered for sale.
Eckman questioned too whether they would be much of a market for satellites and equipment whose primary purpose is collecting scientific data. That includes climate-focused assets such as OCO-2 and OCO-3, which measure carbon dioxide levels. OCO stands for Orbiting Carbon Observatory.
“It’s also hard to see how any private company would necessarily have an interest in something like OCO 2 or 3,” Eckman said. “There’s not data that’s commercial there.”
But the idea of offloading U.S. space assets that contribute to scientific research is consistent with other moves by the Trump administration.
The Defense Department made plans recently to stop publicly sharing data from its Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. The Trump administration also has dragged its feet on dozens of NOAA contracts, such as the upkeep of two polar weather satellites.
And more broadly, President Donald Trump and his team have sought to cut, freeze or eliminate spending on a wide range of scientific endeavors — including research on climate change, vaccines and children’s health.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Trump administration has defended its cost-cutting efforts as necessary to protect U.S. taxpayers from waste, fraud and abuse.
Trump budget officials, led by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, have taken special aim at federal efforts to research and respond to global warming.
“The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” Vought wrote in the Project 2025 policy playbook organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
A budget proposal released last month by the White House would cut $6 billion from NASA’s current $25 billion budget. Much of that money would come from NASA’s science division, which would see its budget slashed nearly in half: from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion.
The steepest cuts would fall on programs that monitor and process the ways that human-caused global warming is transforming the planet.
The White House budget proposal also calls for the elimination of more than a dozen spacecraft now in orbit, particularly those that take measurements of climate change.
Congress still must approve the federal budget, however — and there are signs that lawmakers are less willing than the White House to scale back NASA’s ambitions.
A bill that passed a House subcommittee last week held NASA’s budget flat, though it would steer money away from the agency’s science division. And House Democrats recently warned the Trump administration against trying to circumvent congressional authority and hold back NASA funding that federal lawmakers already have approved.
Advocates for space research say the Trump administration’s proposal to cut funding for satellites already in orbit makes little sense — both scientifically and financially.
Maintaining satellites in space costs a small fraction of what it takes to get them there. And the probes collect a wide range of information that’s useful for scientists, farmers and emergency officials.
“What we get out of that are publicly available data sets that inform weather monitoring and climate studies and our understanding of agriculture and growing patterns and wildfires,” said Jack Kiraly, director of government relations at the Planetary Society.
And “if you’re looking at astrophysics, you’ve got asteroid detectors and looking into the deepest questions humanity has ever asked,” he added.
Many of the satellites that the White House targeted for cuts in its budget proposal appear to be focused on measuring climate change, though all have multiple other uses.
For example, data from the OCO satellites recently has been used to track the response of vegetation to drought, food security monitoring and crop yields among other uses. The satellite data can be used too to determine the effectiveness of climate policy, urban emissions and the carbon dioxide output of individual coal plants.
The Trump administration aims to eliminate the surface geology and biology mission, which keeps tabs on methane and carbon pollution but also uses sophisticated instruments to hunt for critical minerals.
The White House also wants to cut the next generation of the Landsat satellite program, which tracks global warming but also provides data on global water levels and distribution.
If the cuts to the satellites go through, it will be harder to track the devastation of human-caused climate change. But it’s also likely to affect weather predictions and efforts to protect U.S. residents from extreme weather, opponents say.
Americans need to understand that such cuts will “make them less safe,” said Democratic Rep. George Whitesides of California, a former NASA chief of staff in the Obama administration.
“Disasters that we’ve seen in Texas, North Carolina and Southern California; they have a common thread, which is that they are all exacerbated by climate change,” he said. “And if we stop studying how our weather is changing, then we are fundamentally going to be less able to protect American families from natural disasters.”
