Former NASA Boss Says We May Be Destroying America’s Only Shot at Space

One of the driving personalities behind the Hubble Space Telescope is sounding the alarm on president Donald Trump's disastrous space policy.

That former NASA associate administrator for spaceflight is Joe Rothenberg, who warns that the agency's current predicament — mass layoffs and deferred resignations resulting in a loss of 20 percent of its workforce and a complete overhaul of agency culture — may already be too bad to fix.

"What is happening at NASA has long term and potentially unrecoverable consequences to US scientific and technology leadership in not only space but in technology that impacts our quality of life on Earth," Rothenberg said on a LinkedIn post from former NASA astrobiologist and current policy watcher Keith Cowing.

This second Trump Administration and the brass it's put in charge of NASA have, as the former Hubble operations manager put it, "mortgaged America’s space and scientific research capabilities." According to Rothenberg, NASA may now be "well beyond the point of being able to be recovered by any potential restoration of funding by Congress."

A longtime veteran of both the private and public spaceflight worlds, Rothenberg, who began his career at Grumman Aerospace six decades ago and who now sits on the boards of multiple private aerospace companies, recalled that NASA "in its early days inspired career pursuits in science and engineering."

As a result, the United States became a leader not only in space exploration, but in "developing technology that has significantly improved medical, communications, and numerous quality of life applications."

With Trump's increasingly successful gutting of the agency and "indiscriminate cuts in our nation’s scientific research program budgets," Rothenberg warns that the United States "now faces the strong possibility of the reverse happening," with would-be engineers and scientists being discouraged from entering the industry in the first place, creating cascading decades of lost opportunity for America's space efforts.

Indeed, we've already seen a trend of both fledgling and established scientists considering fleeing the US over Trump's disastrous policies — and to Rothenberg's mind, that ripple effect may continue well into the future.

In his "America First" quest, Rothenberg argues, Trump has weakened "our economic and military leadership" — and hurt the country's status in the global space race, too.

More on Trump's space policy: NASA Employees Submit "Formal Dissent" Saying Trump's Cuts Are So Brutal That Astronauts Could Die