The White House has taken a sledgehammer to NASA‘s 2026 budget, announcing deep cuts to research funding and allocating one billion dollars toward Elon Musk‘s dream of sending humans to Mars. 

The cuts include scrapping the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, which has already cost NASA billions and aims to bring samples collected from the Martian surface back to Earth to be studied. 

The budget proposal, released today, states that NASA will ‘terminate unaffordable missions’ such as MSR, adding that is is ‘grossly overbudget’ and that its goals can be achieved through human missions to Mars. 

In 2020, the maximum total cost for MSR was estimated to be around $3 billion. But since then, it has risen to up to $11 billion.

This is a developing story, more updates to come.  

The White House has taken a sledgehammer to NASA’s 2026 budget, announcing deep cuts to research funding and allocating one billion dollars to fund Elon Musk’s dream of sending humans to Mars