Trump Orders NASA To Crash Perfectly Good CO2 Satellite For No Reason At All

In yet another example of how the Trump administration is working to make sure his fossil-fuel donors can eke out a decade or two more of profits at the expense of human health and welfare, the White House has told NASA to make plans to end America’s only two space missions that focus on measuring carbon dioxide emissions on Earth. The target this time is the Orbiting Carbon Observatories mission (OCO, get it?), which uses two nearly identical instruments, one mounted on the International Space Station (OCO-3), and the other on its own satellite (OCO-2, launched in 2014).

If NASA terminates the mission as it’s been told to, the satellite, which was designed to operate well into coming decades, would be deliberately crashed, burning up in the atmosphere, so that no sneaky future Democratic administration could start it up again and collect CO2 emissions data that might make oil companies sad. No word on whether US astronauts on the ISS would be ordered to do a spacewalk to pry its OCO instrument off the station and fling it earthward.

As NPR points out, the data from the two orbiting carbon observatories isn’t solely used by climate scientists; its detailed measurements are also used by farmers, since CO2 levels impact crop health, and by the oil and gas industry worldwide, to help them comply with limits on CO2 emissions in countries that haven’t outlawed science.

Perhaps out of an old-fashioned reflexive refusal to state anything not directly from a source, NPR says, “It is unclear why the Trump administration seeks to end the missions,” although it’s perfectly in keeping with the administration’s efforts to eradicate virtually all data collection on climate and weather, even when that data is also vital for predicting hurricanes. The rest of us know that Trump declared climate science illegal on the first day of his presidency, so that’s just how it goes.

In the case of the OCO mission, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab openly admitted back in 2014 that OCO-2 was all about better understanding how carbon emissions make it into the atmosphere and how it’s absorbed by plants and by the ocean. OCO-2 was launched during the illegal term of Unperson Barack HUSSEIN Obama, so they openly talked about climate change being a real thing, and about how the mission might help humanity “change its behavior” to reduce the threat. That would mean ending fossil fuels, so obviously the satellite must come down.

Trivia fact: OCO-2 was a nearly identical replacement of a satellite that was lost in 2009 when its launch vehicle blew up. So Trump would be throwing away a completely operational replacement whose instruments are still state-of-the art. Then again, it costs $15 million a year for the twin observatories to gather and analyze data, and we need that for a big new White House ballroom and tax giveaways to billionaires.

A 2023 NASA assessment found that OCO-2’s “data are of exceptionally high quality,” and that no other current or planned mission will provide similarly granular CO2 measurements. The report also found that the “instrument is in excellent condition. There is enough propellant to allow for operations until 2040.” There has been very slow degradation of the satellite’s detectors, but that’s “well monitored, understood, and quantitatively accounted for in production of the data products.” The nearly identical OCO-3 instrument on the ISS went up in 2019 (yes, during Trump 1, not that he knew or cared), built literally from “spare materials from OCO-2,” and basically still has that new space probe smell (ozone and BO, though the latter is only inside the ISS).

Here’s some good news, at least: Thanks to the OCO missions so far, we have a far better understanding of how CO2 moves around the atmosphere and how it impacts plants on the earth and the oceans’ absorption of CO2. And as NPR notes, OCO even collects data nobody really expected to have immediate, real-world applications:

Basically, when plants are growing, photosynthesis is happening in their cells. And that photosynthesis gives off a very specific wavelength of light. The OCO instruments in space measure that light all over the planet.

“NASA and others have turned this happy accident into an incredibly valuable set of maps of plant photosynthesis around the world,” explains Scott Denning, a longtime climate scientist at Colorado State University who worked on the OCO missions and is now retired. “Lo and behold, we also get these lovely, high resolution maps of plant growth,” he says.

But we’re constantly getting new data, and big new discoveries keep being made, including a major study published just last month into how CO2 uptake works in Africa, solving one previously unclear puzzle: Some years, the African continent emits about 2 billion tons more CO2 than it absorbs. Other years, its plant life absorbs about 2 billion tons more than the continent emits. Scientists had thought the deciding factor in those variations was temperature, but the study, using data from OCO-2, tracked CO2 emissions from various ecosystems in Africa and found that the real determining factor was rainfall:

In shrublands and grasslands, plants take full advantage of water when it becomes available by increasing their mass with little energy expenditure. That reaction means that in wet years, shrublands and grasslands take up a lot of carbon and expel very little, substantially shifting the continent’s carbon flux. In contrast, forests and savannas emit and take up about the same amount of carbon in wet conditions; their overall impact on the continent’s carbon flux is therefore smaller.

These findings suggest an explanation for the long-standing question of why Africa was such a weak carbon sink during the El Niño event of 2015–2016. The continent was unusually dry during that time, leading to stalled plant growth and carbon uptake.

Yes, that has huge implications for planetary estimates of future warming and natural carbon uptake by plant life, too. If you’re not an oil company executive, it’s the kind of thing you’d want to keep monitoring instead of steering the satellite into the atmosphere and burning it up.

NPR reports that David Crisp, a veteran NASA engineer who designed the systems and headed the OCO missions until he retired in 2022, has been hearing from NASA employees who have been ordered to start winding down the missions, although they “weren’t allowed to tell me that that’s what they were told to do.” Instead, since they were allowed to ask him questions, he figured out what was up: “They were asking me very sharp questions. The only thing that would have motivated those questions was [that] somebody told them to come up with a termination plan.”

Other academic scientists confirmed to NPR that they too have been hearing from NASA staffers whose questions are very clearly related to terminating the missions, although the scientists asked not to be identified lest they put the NASA people’s jobs at more risk than they already are in this burn-all-the-science administration.

The threats are entirely upfront, too:

Two current NASA employees also confirmed that NASA mission leaders were told to make termination plans for projects that would lose funding under President Trump’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, or FY 2026, which begins Oct. 1. The employees asked to remain anonymous, because they were told they would be fired if they revealed the request.

Yes, you read the timeline right: NASA people are being ordered now to shut down missions that have been funded through the end of September, on the basis of Trump’s FY 2026 budget request, which like any other administration’s budget plan is only a wish list, not law. Not that that matters to Russ Vought, Trump’s Project 2025 budget director, who considers Congress’s constitutional power of the purse merely a suggestion that can be ignored.

Last month, congressional Democrats sent (acting) NASA chief Sean Duffy a letter reminding him that in the real world of constitutional authority, NASA cannot cancel any programs that have been funded by Congress, and that’s not just a good idea, it’s the Law.

“Congress has the power of the purse, not Trump or Vought,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the authors of the letter and the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in an email to NPR. “Eliminating funds or scaling down the operations of Earth-observing satellites would be catastrophic and would severely impair our ability to forecast, manage, and respond to severe weather and climate disasters. The Trump administration is forcing the proposed cuts in its FY26 budget request on already appropriated FY25 funds. This is illegal.”

What’s not clear yet is whether enough pushback can be organized to keep the OCO-2 satellite operating. As we noted last week, the last-minute rescue of the hurricane-prediction data may have come because the instruments are on Navy satellites, and it’s just possible that steely-eyed missile people in the military were more amenable to an outcry from scientists than NASA “leadership” might be. And when it comes to raising a ruckus about blowing up science, “This will hurt hurricane forecasting” probably has more media appeal than “we fucking need this climate data,” even if both are a matter of survival. Maybe Rs in agricultural and forestry-dependent states will make a stink about losing all that plant-growth data, too.

NASA has also invited proposals from universities and corporations to take over the cost of collecting and analyzing the data from OCO-3, aboard the ISS, so there’s that, too. No such outreach appears to have been sought for the OCO-2 satellite, however.

But hell, we need to make noise anyway. Write and call your congresscritters, and if you’re not sure about the stakes, this NASA video, also from 2014, makes clear exactly why we need the CO2 data provided by the OCO missions. It even has a nice ‘splainer of how CO2 causes global warming, for folks who need a refresher, like everyone in Trump’s White House.

In conclusion, this is really not good, and we need to fight. And if you hear of any astronauts being ordered to take a space walk with only a crowbar, scream bloody murder.

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Should We Talk About The Weather? Should We Talk About The Government?

[NPR / JPL / NASA (OCO discussed on page 14 of the PDF) / EOS]

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