If True, Trump Administration Ordering De-Orbiting and Burning Up of NASA Atmospheric Carbon Monitoring Satellite Seems to Be an Egregious Waste of Investment and An Unnecessary Retribution Against Science Itself

  

     Apparently, the Trump administration is planning to decommission NASA satellites involved in important science missions. This may or may not be true. The story was leaked to NPR by a retired NASA scientist who noted:

“NASA employees who work on the two missions {the second is another CO2 monitoring system attached to the International Space Station} are making what the agency calls Phase F plans for both carbon-monitoring missions, according to David Crisp, a longtime NASA scientist who designed the instruments and managed the missions until he retired in 2022. Phase F plans lay out options for terminating NASA missions.”

“Crisp says NASA employees making those termination plans have reached out to him for his technical expertise. "What I have heard is direct communications from people who were making those plans, who weren't allowed to tell me that that's what they were told to do. But they were allowed to ask me questions," Crisp says. "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."

     This is concerning. The data is used by scientists, farmers, and oil & gas companies.

      According to IFL Science:

“In 2009, NASA launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), an orbiting satellite designed to take precise measurements of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere and help guide our response to climate change. Unfortunately, after launch, the satellite failed to detach from its fairing and did not make it into its planned orbit. A few years later, in 2014, NASA launched OCO-2, which has been providing useful data to scientists since.”

     According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology:

“Since launching in 2014, OCO-2 has become widely regarded as the “gold standard” in CO2 measurements from space. OCO-2 measurements have been used to quantify how CO2 emissions are offset by natural carbon sinks like forests and oceans and how those carbon sinks can be transformed to carbon emitters due to drought, deforestation, or wildfires. As extreme events intensify with global warming, tracking changes to our carbon sinks will be increasingly important. The mission has also uncovered insights into CO2 emissions from cities, and contributes data supporting the Paris Agreement. As an unexpected bonus, OCO-2 has even been able to track growing seasons and crops by measuring the “glow” plants emit when they photosynthesize.”

“The original science objectives of the OCO-2 mission were to collect the space-based measurements needed to quantify variations in the column averaged atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) dry air mole fraction, XCO2, with the precision, resolution, and coverage needed to improve our understanding of surface CO2 sources and sinks (fluxes) on regional scales (≥1000km) and the processes controlling their variability over the seasonal cycle. The OCO-2 mission has met these original objectives and is enabling new insights into Earth’s carbon cycle. OCO-2 continues to serve as a pathfinder mission that validates a space-based measurement approach and analysis concept that can be used for future systematic CO2 monitoring missions.”

     There is no doubt that this is an important source of vital scientific information about CO2 sources and sinks. OCO-2 ended up being more useful and more successful than originally planned. Data from the satellite can be used to create photosynthesis maps that can be useful to farmers in monitoring farmland, crop yield, and drought. The measurements on photosynthesis were an unexpected bonus of the mission. NPR reports:

"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. "And that's useful to farmers, useful to rangeland and grazing and drought monitoring and forest mapping and all kinds of things, in addition to the CO2 measurements."

     Data from OCO-2 is also used by other government agencies to track plant growth, such as the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.

     NASA recently announced that it will consider proposals from private companies and universities to pay for maintaining the device that is attached to the ISS, as well as another device that measures ozone in the atmosphere. Congress authorized and funded these missions and should be the ones to terminate them, if they see fit to do so. It has been suggested that Russel Voight, head of the White House’s OMB, who has expressed a desire to eliminate spending related to climate science, was involved in the decision, but an OMB spokesperson said OMB was not involved. According to NPR:

“The cost of maintaining the two OCO satellite missions up in space is a small fraction of the amount of money taxpayers already spent to design and launch the instruments. The two missions cost about $750 million to design, build and launch, according to David Crisp, the retired NASA scientist, and that number is even higher if you include the cost of an initial failed rocket launch that sent an identical carbon dioxide measuring instrument into the ocean in 2009.”

“By comparison, maintaining both OCO missions in orbit costs about $15 million per year, Crisp says. That money covers the cost of downloading the data, maintaining a network of calibration sensors on the ground and making sure the stand-alone satellite isn't hit by space debris, according to Crisp.”

"Just from an economic standpoint, it makes no economic sense to terminate NASA missions that are returning incredibly valuable data," Crisp says.

“NASA's recent call for universities and companies to potentially take over the cost of maintaining the OCO instrument attached to the International Space Station suggests the agency is also considering privatizing NASA science missions. Such partnerships raise a host of thorny questions, says Michalak, who has worked with private companies, nonprofit groups, universities and the federal government on greenhouse gas monitoring satellite projects.”

     Privately-funded satellites are measuring global methane emissions, so I do think they can be used for these missions as well, but the government should really be funding these valuable scientific missions, or at least sharing the cost. These satellites have clearly improved our scientific understanding and should be continued. It would be tragic for them to be terminated while they are still quite useful for many, especially if the reasons for the termination are political retribution against climate change mitigation. While the Trump administration has put out an executive order restoring the gold standard in science, which suggests that science needs to be fixed, presumably to weed out what they term “woke-ism” in science. Means to determine that have been embarrassing as they search for keywords that might indicate wokeness, that end up meaning something else entirely. IFL Science notes:

“Among the examples of “woke” science, there was a study on the spread of the mint plant (due to the use of the term "diversify"), work to create biosensors to better treat infectious disease (the woke keyword appearing to be "POC" but not meaning "person of color", rather "point of care"), and a device that could stop severe bleeding (woke keywords appearing to be "victims" and "trauma").”

     Below are a bunch of video simulations and visualizations utilizing data from these important orbiting carbon observatories.  

  

 

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The following link takes you to NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, which has ten visualizations/animations/simulations that include the work of OCO-2

NASA SVS | Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Tagged by Source

References:

 

"This Is Illegal": NASA Reportedly Ordered To Destroy Important OCO Satellite, James Felton. IFL Science. August 7, 2025. "This Is Illegal": NASA Reportedly Ordered To Destroy Important OCO Satellite

See Where The Planet's Carbon Dioxide Comes From In Incredible NASA Visualization. IFL Science. June 20, 2023. See Where The Planet's Carbon Dioxide Comes From In Incredible NASA Visualization | IFLScience

OCO-2. Mission. Jet Propulsion Laboratory. California Institute of Technology. Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2: Mission

OCO-2. Science. Jet Propulsion Laboratory. California Institute of Technology. Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2: Science

What Is Trump’s “Gold Standard Science” Actually About? The latest executive order aims to place political appointees as arbiters of scientific knowledge. Dr. Alfredo Carpineti. IFL Science. June 4, 2025. What Is Trump’s “Gold Standard Science” Actually About? | IFLScience

Why a NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose. Rebecca Hersher. NPR. Morning Edition. August 4, 2025. Trump administration takes aim at satellite that measures carbon dioxide and crops : NPR

Global Change and Photosynthesis Research: Urbana, IL. USDA. Agricultural Research Service. Publication : USDA ARS

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Tagged by Source. AJ Christensen and Mark Subba Rao.Scientific consulting by Lesley Ott. NASA. Scientific Visualization Studio. NASA SVS | Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Tagged by Source