NASA has sent two new satellites into space over the past six months to monitor many of the ways global warming is affecting the planet.
Just don’t call them climate satellites.
The launches of the NISAR satellite in July and the Sentinel-6B satellite last week have earned applause from climate scientists worldwide, but the missions have gone largely unheralded by the Trump administration.
NASA officials have touted the satellites’ ability to provide life-saving information for search-and-rescue teams and commercial applications for real estate and energy — but they’ve said almost nothing about their potential for climate science.
The lack of attention is hardly a surprise. Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, his administration has sought to purge climate research throughout the federal government.
In just 10 months, the White House has fired or overseen the resignations of at least 4,000 NASA employees and more than 1,500 staffers at NOAA — losses that represent cuts of about 20 percent apiece at two of America’s premier science agencies. The administration has proposed slashing in half NASA’s science budget. It has sought to offload orbiting spacecraft that collect climate data.
And NASA is still operating without a permanent leader after Trump nominated, dismissed, then renominated a close ally of Elon Musk for the agency’s top job.
So, do the launches of NISAR and Sentinel-6B suggest the Trump administration is softening its stance toward climate science?
Hardly, says Rep. George Whitesides (D-Calif.), who previously served as NASA’s chief of staff.
“While I’m glad that we launched those satellites,” he said. “That should not distract us from the incredible damage that is being done to the world’s best space agency.”
For now, it appears as if the two missions will proceed as planned, though the broader fate of climate science at NASA remains unclear.
When asked about the two satellites, NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens insisted the missions would remain priorities for the agency, even if the probes’ contributions to global warming research were being downplayed by the administration.
“I wouldn’t necessarily use the term climate,” she said. “But that research and those missions and everything that had fallen under that bucket in the last administration, it may be messaged differently, but it’s not deprioritized.”
Sentinel-6B, launched from California last week, will track sea-level rise to the inch across the globe with cloud-penetrating radar that also detects wave height and wind speeds. NASA is partnering with the European Space Agency on the $1 billion mission, with each contributing about $500 million to the Sentinel program, which includes another satellite launched in 2020. The mission will continue the collection of a data stream that started about 30 years ago.
Though rising sea levels are a key metric tracking the effects of climate change, NASA officials left that detail out of their public statements. Instead, the agency emphasized its value to fisheries and coastal safety.
The newest satellite provides data that “underpins navigation, search and rescue and industries like commercial fishing and shipping,” Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, told reporters in a press briefing before the launch. “These measurements form the basis for U.S. flood predictions for coastal infrastructure, real estate, energy storage sites and other assets along our shoreline.”
The other satellite, the $1.5 billion NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, or NISAR, is even more sophisticated than the Sentinel-6B probe. It can measure to the centimeter changes to glaciers, ice sheets, permafrost, wetlands and other planetary features directly related to climate change.
The satellite is a partnership with the Indian Space Research Organization. NASA is funding most of the cost, with India contributing about $100 million.
Like the Sentinel-6B mission, NASA did not frame NISAR’s launch as being related to climate change but said it will “measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses providing information about biomass, natural hazards, sea level rise, and groundwater.”
The NISAR mission is supposed to last at least three years.
Even though NASA has instituted the same federal hiring freeze that is in place across much of the federal government, both satellite missions are fully staffed and that won’t change, said Stevens, the NASA spokesperson. She said the analysis of data collected by the satellites will be shared by NASA, NOAA and the foreign space agencies.
A big reason these two missions were cleared to launch was because they had been in the works for years and that pulling out now would have further eroded America’s relationships with Europe and India.
But it remains to be seen if similar satellites in the pipeline will be launched within the next three years, before Trump’s term is finished.
Whitesides, the former NASA chief of staff, said he is concerned the administration will sacrifice future Earth-monitoring satellites for political reasons.
“This administration does not think that Earth science is important, and they’re trying to decimate our capabilities at NASA in as many different ways as they can,” he said.
An upcoming hearing on the nominee for NASA administrator could provide some clues.
Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and Musk ally, is set to appear Dec. 3 before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee to speak with lawmakers about his nomination to lead NASA.
A leaked draft of a memo written by Isaacman to outline his vision for the agency — and obtained by POLITICO — shows he wants to cut federal climate science and shift more of the burden for funding Earth science missions to universities.
In that memo, Isaacman said he would prioritize taking “NASA out of the taxpayer-funded climate science business and [leaving] it for academia to determine.”
