#polluters

Aug. 19, 2025 3 AM PT

NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 is shown aloft in an artist’s rendering. Trump wants NASA to destroy the crucial spacecraft by incinerating it in the Earth’s atmosphere — but why?

(NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

By any reasonable metric, NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory has been a spectacular success. Originally designed to support a two-year pilot project, it has been operating continuously in space for more than 10 years and could continue doing so for three decades more.

The data it produces “are of exceptionally high quality,” NASA stated in a 2023 review, when it labeled the project “the flagship mission for space-borne measurements” of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Trump administration plans to shut the program down. It gets worse: The White House has given NASA instructions to destroy the spacecraft by plunging it to a fiery demise in the atmosphere. 

These are national assets....They are what made this country great. Tearing things down doesn’t make it great again. It just tears things down.

— David Crisp, former NASA team leader

Knowledgeable scientists and engineers say that Trump could choose to temporarily mothball the orbiting observatory, leaving a skeleton staff in place at NASA to monitor its hibernation until cooler heads prevail at the White House. Destroying the spacecraft, however, will hamstring climate research for decades. 

The zeroing out of climate research budgets by the Trump White House, of which the cancellation of the OCO program is a part, is taking place just as the value of space-borne climate research has been rising sharply.

“The bottom line is that the societal and scientific benefit of this research increases almost exponentially with sustained and long-lasting measurements,” says Ben Poulter, an expert in greenhouse gas measurements formerly at NASA and now a senior scientist at the nonprofit Spark Climate Solutions. “We’re starting to see the positive impact of OCO-2 at helping to detect trends in greenhouse gas emissions and removals in natural ecosystems as the Earth undergoes the impacts of climate change.”

Under the most recent Republican administrations, NASA’s involvement in Earth science — that is, research into global warming and other climate change — has consistently come under fire. 

As I reported recently, these programs were specifically targeted by Russell Vought, currently Trump’s budget director and an architect of Project 2025, in a 2023 unofficial budget proposal. There, Vought groused about NASA’s “misguided Carbon Reduction System spending and Global Climate Change programs.” He called for a 50% reduction in the budget for NASA Earth science research — a cut that made it into Trump’s current proposed budget.

The vastly reduced Earth science budget for NASA was passed by the House earlier this year, but it isn’t part of the Senate version, which hasn’t been passed.

What isn’t understood by Vought, Trump or the current acting director of NASA, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, is that Earth science was specifically made part of NASA’s portfolio in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which created the agency. Among the agency’s directives, the act stated, would be “the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere.” That’s where climate change occurs.

The effort to zero out Earth science alarmed more than 60 Democratic House members, who wrote Duffy on July 18 to warn that “the scale of reductions to NASA Earth science would ... severely impair the use of Earth science data and research to improve our ability to forecast, manage, and respond to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and wildfires, leaving the nation less prepared for the challenges of the future and impacting local communities’ abilities to adapt and respond to severe weather and natural disaster events.”

Trump’s budgetary cheeseparing at NASA means the waste of billions of dollars already spent by taxpayers. As I reported before, the bulk of the cost of space missions is in the development of spacecraft and their launch; once that’s done, the cost of maintaining a satellite in orbit is nominal. According to David Crisp, who led the OCO development team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena from the outset and is now a private consultant, the OCO program development and launch cost was about $750 million, but since the launch it costs only about $15 million a year to operate. 

That doesn’t count the value of the lost data. Crisp reckons that Duffy and the administration “decided that NASA should not do Earth science, and the fact that we have billions and billions of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars invested in that enterprise right now and really valuable hardware in place, providing critical information to organizations across the world is irrelevant. I think what’s going on here is that they’ve made a strategic move without taking into account tactical realities.” 

The average layperson — and that includes some White House officials making policy decisions about scientific endeavors — has no idea about the effort required to put a satellite into space and keep it there. 

The OCO project was typical. As described by Crisp, the process began in the mid-1990s as an inquiry into how carbon dioxide produced on Earth got absorbed by natural “sinks” such as forests. The project won approval in 2001 from the George W. Bush administration. Environmental science wasn’t the partisan football it later became. “You could be a good Republican and still think this was a good thing to do,” Crisp told me.

The first Orbiting Carbon Observatory was readied for launch in February 2009. “It was a tremendous challenge, an instrument designed to make a measurement three or four times more difficult than anything ever attempted at JPL,” Crisp says. The launch was successful — for just over three minutes, at which point it failed, plunging rocket and satellite to a watery grave in the Indian Ocean.

“We’d spent eight years and $270 million and engaged more than 1,000 work-years of heroic effort,” Crisp recalls. NASA wanted to keep the project alive. For 10 months, Crisp and others beat down the doors of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and commercial enterprise to find the money to preserve it, but this was in the teeth of the Great Recession, and no one signed on. But ultimately the Obama administration appropriated $50 million in December 2009 to restart the mission.

Crisp’s team built a carbon copy of the original satellite, and it was launched successfully on July 2, 2014. The original vision was to operate OCO-2 for two years as a proof-of-concept, showing that carbon dioxide could be accurately measured from space. Because of the peculiarities of the launch, however, it carried enough fuel to last 40 years. The reconstruction left enough spare parts in hand to build a twin instrument dubbed OCO-3, which was launched in May 2019 and installed on the International Space Station, where it is still operating.

When I asked NASA for a response to widespread criticism of its actions by the scientific community, I got the same standardized reponse that others have received. It labeled OCO-2 and -3 “two climate missions beyond their prime mission,” and added that as the proposed budget has “not yet been enacted, it would be inappropriate for us to comment further at this time.”

What NASA believes the OCO “prime mission” is, if not studying atmospheric conditions on Earth, is a mystery. 

Within weeks of its own launch, OCO-2 began producing data that would revolutionize climate science. Its applications went well beyond measuring carbon dioxide. OCO-2 was able to detect “solar-induced fluorescence” in plants, an artifact of photosynthesis, which could be used as a “reliable early warning indicator of flash drought with enough lead time to take action,” JPL reported last year. 

Those measurements, Crisp says, “have been a bigger hit with the science community than the CO2 measurements.” And they’re the product not of planning, but serendipity, a crucial feature of scientific progress. 

At this moment, OCO-2 seems destined for oblivion. Crisp says NASA staffers have been instructed to make a plan to move the spacecraft into a “disposal orbit” that would incinerate it in the Earth’s atmosphere within a few months. But that’s expensive, requiring a detailed plan to ensure that its deteriorating orbit doesn’t threaten other orbiting craft. The quick and dirty alternative would be to “point the thing down and fire the thruster, which would basically produce an instantaneous reentry.” Which option will be chosen isn’t clear. 

A third alternative is to place the craft in a sort of suspended sleep, so it could be started up again after Trump and his minions leave office. But that would require 24-hour monitoring to adjust the OCO orbit to avoid space junk — not an infrequent occurrence. (With OCO-3 attached to the International Space Station, it will remain in place, though nonfunctional, as long as the ISS stays aloft.)

The plan to destroy OCO-2 is beyond shameful. Crisp says of the OCO hardware, “these are national assets.... They are what made this country great. Tearing things down doesn’t make it great again. It just tears things down.”

Space Karen’s company, Gapped Bass LLC, applied for this controversial permit and it went to public meeting this week

Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals.

Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide were among the 371m lb of pollutants released into waterways by just 41 Tyson slaughterhouses and mega processing plants between 2018 and 2022.

You already know he’s the childish dad XD

But he’s really overprotective when he wants to and MC thinks it’s cute but Pollux kept denying it

The kind of dad that would go along with your mom scolding you but spoiling you rotten after (ofc w/o Mc’s knowing- hehe)

The type that would embarrass you in front of the school/friends

And he will enjoy every single bit of it until MC steps in (No fun-)

“come here buddy! It’s ok Papa’s got you”

Teaches C/n magic from time to time

Loves to play catch

Jealous of Arkcy because he’s C/n’s favorite uncle (go figure XD)

Always tries to one up’s C/n’s uncles and Mc is laughing the whole while 

“Pollux c/n’s only a kid!”

And I’m not talking to those of us who are dirt poor and just trying to get a new toaster because the old one died last winter or get x a new pair of shoes because he feet are aching, etc.

I’m talking to all those people who have money and extra money and just want to buy into consumerism or are giving lots of gifts this year because that’s the aesthetic and they want more things for clout.

The US only has less than 5% of the worlds population, yet we are the SECOND highest polluter in the WORLD. Because of consumerism (buying excess and buying new often for changing fads or trends). Countries like Pakistan and island nations are suffering at extreme rates for our lifestyles (and yes, it is a lifestyle. Think about how much we buy in excess like from Shien. No one is ever talking about food for your household.)

If you do have to buy today and this weekend, buy from small businesses, Black businesses, and Native-owned shops. They need the money more than large corporations and also, small-scale slows down the means of production and is often made to order.