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WHY A NASA SATELLITE THAT SCIENTISTS AND FARMERS RELY ON MAY BE
DESTROYED ON PURPOSE  
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Rebecca Hersher
August 4, 2025
NPR
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_ The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans
to end at least two major satellite missions. They are the only two
federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically
to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases. _

A robotic arm attached to the International Space Station brings in
the spacecraft carrying one of two Orbiting Carbon Observatory
instruments, known as OCO-3, in 2019. NASA has put out a call for
private groups to potentially take over the cost of mainta, NASA
TV/NASA

 

The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to
end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and
former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the
missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would
burn up in the atmosphere.

The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by
scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed
information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only
two federal satellite missions that were designed and built
specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.

It is unclear why the Trump administration seeks to end the missions.
The equipment in space is state of the art and is expected to function
for many more years, according to scientists who worked on the
missions. An official review
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by NASA in 2023 found that "the data are of exceptionally high
quality" and recommended continuing the mission for at least three
years.

Both missions, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, measure
carbon dioxide and plant growth around the globe. They use identical
measurement devices, but one device is attached to a stand-alone
satellite while the other is attached to the International Space
Station. The standalone satellite would burn up in the atmosphere if
NASA pursued plans to terminate the mission.

NASA employees who work on the two missions 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 somebody told them to come up with a termination plan."

Three other academic scientists who use data from the missions
confirmed that they, too, have been contacted with questions related
to mission termination. All three asked for anonymity because they are
concerned that speaking about the mission termination plans publicly
could endanger the jobs of the NASA employees who contacted them.

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
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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.

A rocket launches carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2)
satellite on July 2, 2014, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The satellite is providing crucial data about carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere and plant growth on Earth's surface. NASA employees are
making plans to potentially deorbit the satellite, burning it up in
Earth's atmosphere and ending the mission, at the request of the Trump
administration. Bill Ingalls/NASA/Getty Images North America

CONGRESS FUNDED THE MISSIONS AND MAY FUND THEM AGAIN

Presidential budget proposals are wish lists that often bear little
resemblance to final congressional budgets. The Orbiting Carbon
Observatory missions have already received funding from Congress
through the end of the 2025 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Draft
budgets
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that Congress is currently considering
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for next year keep NASA funding basically flat. But it's not clear
whether these specific missions will receive funding again, or if
Congress will pass a budget before current funding expires on Sept.
30.

Last week, NASA announced it will consider proposals
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from private companies and universities that are willing to take on
the cost of maintaining the device that is attached to the
International Space Station, as well as another device that measures
ozone in the atmosphere.

NASA did not respond to questions from NPR about whether other
missions will also be privatized, or about why the agency is making
plans to potentially terminate projects that may receive funding in
Congress' next budget.

In July, congressional Democrats sent a letter
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to acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy warning his agency not to
terminate missions that Congress has funded, and arguing that the
White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and its director,
Russ Vought, are overstepping by directing NASA and other agencies to
stop spending money that Congress has already appropriated.

"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."

A spokesperson for OMB told NPR via email that "OMB had nothing to do
with NASA Earth Science leadership's request for termination plans."
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy did not
respond to questions from NPR.

In the past, Vought has been vocal about cutting what he sees as
inappropriate spending on projects related to climate change. Before
he joined the Trump administration, Vought authored sections of the
Heritage Foundation's Project 2025
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roadmap for remaking the federal government. In that document, Vought
wrote that "the Biden Administration's climate fanaticism will need a
whole-of-government unwinding" and argued that federal regulators
should make it easier for commercial satellites to be launched.

The data from these missions is even more valuable than intended

The missions are called Orbiting Carbon Observatories because they
were originally designed to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
But soon after they launched, scientists realized that they were also
accidentally measuring plant growth on Earth.

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. "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."

For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and many private
agricultural consulting companies use the data to forecast and track
crop yield
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drought conditions and more.

The information can also help predict future political instability,
since crop failures are a major driver of mass migration all over the
world. For example, persistent drought in Honduras is one factor that
has led many farmers there to migrate north, NPR reporting found
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And damage to crops and livestock from extreme weather in Northern
Africa
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has contributed to migration from that region. "This is a national
security issue, for sure," Crisp says.

Carbon-monitoring satellites have revolutionized climate science

The carbon dioxide data that the instruments were originally designed
to collect has revolutionized scientists' understanding of how quickly
carbon dioxide is collecting in the atmosphere.

That's because measuring carbon dioxide with instruments in various
locations on the Earth's surface, as scientists have been doing since
the 1950s, doesn't provide information about the whole planet.
Satellite data, on the other hand, covers the entire Earth.

And that data showed some surprising things. "Fifty years ago we
thought the tropical forests were like a huge vacuum cleaner, sucking
up carbon dioxide," Denning explains. "Now we know they're not."

Instead, boreal forests in the northern latitudes suck up a
significant amount of carbon dioxide, the satellite data shows. And
the patterns of which areas absorb the planet-warming gas, and how
much they absorb, are continuously changing
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the climate changes.

"The value of these observations is just increasing over time,"
explains Anna Michalak, a climate researcher at Carnegie Science and
Stanford University who has worked extensively on greenhouse gas
monitoring from space. "These are missions that are still providing
critical information."

It is expensive to end satellite missions

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
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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
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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.

"On the one hand the private sector is really starting to have a
role," Michalak says. In recent years, multiple private groups in the
U.S. have launched satellites that measure methane
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a potent planet-warming gas that is poorly monitored compared to
carbon dioxide.

"Looking at it from the outside, it can look like the private sector
is really picking up some of what the federal agencies were doing in
terms of Earth observations," she explains. "And it's true that
they're contributing." But, she says, "Those efforts would not be
possible without this underlying investment from public funding."

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REBECCA HERSHER (she/her) is a reporter on NPR's Climate Desk, where
she reports on climate science, weather disasters, infrastructure and
how humans are adapting to a hotter world.

Since coming to NPR in 2011, she has covered the Ebola outbreak in
West Africa, embedded with the Afghan army after the American combat
mission ended and reported on floods, heat waves and hurricanes in the
U.S. and around the world.

Hersher was part of the NPR team that won the Kavli Science Journalism
Award for the series "Beyond the Poles: The far-reaching dangers of
melting ice
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well as a Peabody award and an Edward R. Murrow award for coverage of
the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Her 2019 coverage
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of climate-driven flash floods also won an Edward R. Murrow award, and
she was part of a team that was honored with a 2020 Society of News
Design award for multimedia storytelling
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Daniel Schorr prize, a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting fellow and
an NPR Above the Fray fellow, investigating the causes of the suicide
epidemic in Greenland
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She can be reached at rhersher.01 on the free encrypted communication
app Signal.

* Satellite Carbon Observatories; Greenhouse Gas; Agriculture; Trump
Administration Cuts;
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