We’re talking about cuts to Earth and space science missions here, not defense. How is cutting fundamental scientific research “major progress for humanity”?

I understand you are not defending this, but you are uninformed on the implications (largely the fault of MSM’s coverage, not your own). The majority of what is getting cut in this budget is basic research. It’s planetary exploration with the goal of improving our understanding of the solar system and Earth. Unfortunately it is very expensive to do this basic research and it is not profitable, which is why I’m pushing back on your privatization spin. This is work that is not and will never be profitable. There are aspects of space exploration that can be profitable, a la SpaceX launching comm satellites to orbit, but this is not that and it’s a very important distinction to make because there are very few places in industry for these workers to move to. We will lose this knowledge and be forced to rediscover it in a more intelligent, wealthy, and Science minded era. And it’s a global issue because most other countries rely on the US’s investment in this sector, so it’s a global setback of several decades. That’s all I’m trying to communicate.

It’s not just about privatization and you’re naive if you buy that explanation. It is about knee capping science because they do not value it. You can’t privatize basic scientific research because it is not, on its own, profitable. Privatizing is also not a formula for success when it comes to planetary exploration, as we’ve seen with the many failures private space companies have experienced trying to land on the moon (which is much much easier than interplantary mission development by orders of magnitude). This is largely because this expertise is solely located at NASA and only some of it has transferred to the private industry. Like I said earlier, nuking the NASA budget will not lead to the same missions getting developed privately, it will just kill the space science industry. Some of the expertise will go work on adjacent things, but most of it will just be lost. And that’s the goal - to kill science. If they can privatize a bit of it and win favor with some corpos that’s just a side benefit.

The US has enjoyed a commanding lead in the aerospace industry with few countries having kept or caught up over the years. What this means in practice is that we have an enormous base of knowledge here and people that are experts in very specific subject matter. Other countries (with maybe the exception of China) coordinate and consult the US to accomplish pretty much any non-US space mission you’ve heard of. If you blow that all into the wind as a result of these budget cuts, you are setting back global progress in space and earth science by decades. Sure, many of these people will continue their work in some other facility or country, but a large percentage will opt to leave the industry and those skills will be diminished or lost. It might not be an extinction level event, but it is the kind of setback that you do not recover from in a reasonable period of time.