Elon, Meet The Monster You Made— No Space Explorations For Fascist And Their Enablers

First They Came For The Scientists, And Elon Laughed— Now They’re Coming For His Rocket

As we noted yesterday, the MAGA cuts to science research are extremely damaging to the country. What we didn’t mention is that he’s proposing science cutbacks to NASA. Musk is likely to make him turn that around, but it does demonstrate where Trump’s head is. Joel Achenbach and Christian Davenport reported that “NASA’s science budget could be cut nearly in half under an early version of Trump’s budget proposal to Congress, a move that would terminate billions of dollars’ worth of ongoing and future missions... The budget plan, sent to NASA by the Office of Management and Budget, would give NASA’s Science Mission Directorate $3.9 billion, down from its current budget of about $7.3 billion... The budget proposal, though not yet formally submitted to Congress, would eviscerate a long list of planetary and astronomical missions, including the next major NASA space telescope and the agency’s goal of bringing samples of Mars back to Earth to search for signs of ancient life. NASA’s astrophysics budget would take a huge hit, dropping from about $1.5 billion to $487 million. Planetary science would see a drop from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion. Earth Science would drop from about $2.2 billion to $1.033 billion.”

“This is an extinction-level event for NASA science,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, a space advocacy group. “It needlessly terminates functional, productive science missions and cancels new missions currently being built, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. This is neither efficient nor smart budgeting.”

The Hubble and Webb space telescopes— celebrated for their long list of discoveries as well as stunning images of the universe— would remain supported under the proposal. However, no other telescope would be funded.

That includes the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,  which has been designed to study distant galaxies and faraway planets from an orbital outpost about a million miles from Earth. The hardware of the Roman is in place and being integrated and tested at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Roman is scheduled to launch as early as September 2026.

Massive science cuts would put NASA Goddard in a perilous position.

“It’d be a huge loss to our country, because what the men and women at Goddard do is the foundation for everything else that we do in space,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told the Washington Post. He said the Maryland delegation will fight back.

“I think there’ll be very strong bipartisan resistance in Congress to cutting missions that are the foundation of our space program,” he said. “This is like eating your seed corn, and it will have very damaging impacts on our space program, on national security programs, and it will undermine our leadership in the area of technical innovation and scientific research.”

Happy to shred the social safety net and slash Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare, Musk is flipping out over this one. Yesterday he said the proposed cuts to NASA are “troubling.” As you’ve prrobably guessed, “Musk’s SpaceX is one of the agency’s largest contractors.”

Musk, America’s most hated public figure, may find it difficult to find allies in his battle against Russell Vought’s decision that his pet department is as riddled with waste, fraud and abuse as every other part of government.

Of course, Musk— our petty techno-caesar with a God complex and a meme addiction— will almost certainly try to whine his way into an exemption. He’s not used to being told no, especially by the monsters he helped unleash. But let’s be honest: this is delicious. The man-child who spent years amplifying fascists, laundering hate speech under the guise of “free speech,” and bootlicking every right-wing demagogue he could find, now watching his precious Mars fantasies get curb-stomped by the very regime he cheered on. It’s not just irony— it’s karmic annihilation.

Because MAGA doesn’t want science. MAGAts don’t care about discovery, or truth or the future. They demand ignorance. They want obedience. They wants to replace telescopes with pulpits and planetary missions with QAnon prophecies. And now Musk, who thought he could play dictator kingmaker while still getting his taxpayer-funded rocket cash, is finding out that when you roll around with fascists, eventually they eat your toys. Maybe next time the tech aristocracy will think twice before betting the farm on the strongman du jour. But let’s be real: they won’t. They'll light the match again, then act shocked when everything burns— including them.