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 that Congress is currently considering 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 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 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 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, 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. And damage to crops and livestock from extreme weather in Northern Africa 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 as 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.
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.
"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, 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," as well as a Peabody award and an Edward R. Murrow award for coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Her 2019 coverage 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. She was a finalist for the 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.
She can be reached at rhersher.01 on the free encrypted communication app Signal.